Dear audiosexy, iPad-lovin' fellas,

when I first saw Wolfram Franke's Stroke Machine for iPad, I was suspicious about it, maybe because of the looks, the rather uninspiring youtube vids and mixed reviews. Also, I wasn't really willing to pay - was it $19.99? - for an app like this, so I put it onto my watchlist in case it evolved somewhat and its price dropped below $10.

Well, both happened, it has just got its V2.0 update *and* is currently labeled down to $9.99.
I've only been playing around with it for a day, but I am surprised about how deep and powerful it is.

Since every iPad app has its own strengths and weaknesses, I'll list my first impressions here:


Of course I first checked MIDI sync, because it's not even described in the manual, but for me it's an essential feature if you want more than just a toy in audio production.
And *yes*, it works as a MIDI slave so as soon as you connect it to your gear (be it a drum machine, a Korg Electribe, a Synth Workstation or just any DAW of your choice), it will happily start, stop and run automatically in sync with it. Slave sync, to be more precise, so your gear has to be the sync master.
It's like having a second groovebox next to your current equipment.

It has 12 percussive and 12 melodic synth parts, so in fact the synth engine shown in the screenshot is available 24 times.
Melodic parts can be polyphonic too, and there is even a tiny keyboard that reacts to tap position (hit the top for lower, the bottom for higher velocity) and velocity can be edited while playing: Percussive steps can directly be dragged up- and downwards while melodic parts can be edited in a piano roll style "step" editor by tapping the right half of a note and dragging it up and down for velocity changes, right/left for length changes.

As 24 engines (12 of them polyphonic) are a lot, I've seen some forum comments complaining that an iPad 2 would not be fast enough for larger arrangements. I can't comment about this, I can only say that it runs smoothly on my iPad 4, although I haven't filled all the polyphonic parts yet.

What is unique with this app is a very sophisticated synth engine. No, not just another 2-osc synth like 1000 others.
While it shares well-established components, it's the combination that makes the engine worth a second look:
- Each of the 2 oscillators can, apart from the vintage sine/tri/pulse/saw waveforms, load a sample and select (or modulate) the sample start point.
- Samples behave like the other OSC waveforms except they don't loop.
- OSC1 can be frequency-modulated by OSC2 or by noise, to introduce some dirt, for example
- OSC2 has adjustable Ring Modulation and Noise FM too
- The pitch of both OSCs can be individually adjusted and fine-tuned, or modulated by a +/- adjustable amount
- Additional Noise generator with LP/HP/BP/BR as 6 or 12dB with resonance
- Classic 6/12/24dB LP/HP/BP/BR Filter
- 2-band fully parametric EQ *for each engine*!
- Transient shaper with adjustable characteristic (well, not a Voxengo TransGainer but better than nothing)
- Overdrive/Distortion
- Bitdepth and SampleRate reduction
- 2 Envelopes that can be routed to any parameter!
- Clock-syncable LFO, routable to any destination as well
- I have found to be able to modulate anything that makes sense, also you can use MIDI Velocity, MIDI Note Number, PitchBend, ModWheel and 4 random generators as modulation sources woth adjustable positive/negative amount for each parameter.

I knew this much love, great UI usability and great sound only from the Clavia Nord Lead 3 by now.

You can select up to 128 different patterns realtime while playing, I can't see a song mode, so it's built for real-time use and experimentation.

It would be very nice to be able to use samples as multisamples with key and velocity split like in BeatMaker 2, but I'll try to get in touch with the developer and see how he responds to some more issues I've found.

I can definitely recommend this app for sound tweakers and people who know how to use a synth.

If any Apple iOS audio developer reads this:
Don't rely on Korg WIST! It won't work with anything else but a second iDevice and even then, BPM usually drifts away after a while!
A full implementation of MIDI Clock including proper handling of MIDI START/STOP/CONTINUE/RESTART (=START again) Status messages and adjustable positive/negative offset (like in Stroke Machine or BeatMaker 2) is the way to go. It will even work with other apps running on the same device.
Need details or help?
Feel free to contact me here.

 

What generation iPad did you test it on? I have an iPad 2 which I find is starting to be a bit slow for some of the newer audio apps. Thanks for the thorough review in any event.

 

An ipad 4 like i wrote, but i just had the chance to test it on an iPad 2 and i must say that while you can run a few monophonic and percussive tracks, as soon as you add a polyphonic chords track you'll likely start getting cut notes. Cannot really recommend it on ipad 2, maybe ipad 3 is a bit better but the real fun seems to start with an ipad 4. Of course you can optimize performance by not using any FX et cetera but as synthesis and FX are the strength of Stroke machine, it looks like no fun on an iPad 2.
If you cannot afford a faster ipad, you'd be better off with a sample-based app like Beatmaker 2 and a good standalone synth app (like thor, nave, PPG, Sunrizer) from which you copy/paste sounds, fx, melodies into Beatmaker as audio clips (or record using Audiobus). You'll get at least as good results but it's not exactly the same convenient workflow ;-)
BM2 runs perfectly on iPad 2 even with many tracks.

 

That's what I feared. I do have Sunrizer and I like it a lot, but this looks like quite a lot - synthesis and processing - within one app, which is always good for workflow. It may be time to relegate my iPad 2 to just V-Control duties. Thanks again fiction.

 

I have to admit, when I first read "stroke machine" an audio application was not the first thing that crossed my mind, lol

 

Same here!