Different Drummer

Kudos to this developer...this app is a major experimental tour de force. I kid you not. This is crazy versatile when you get a grip on what you can achieve with this. The big cornucopia of sounds is awesome, but you can also import your own soundbites! No probs when I brought in the 24/48’s. Access to Audioshare is in there. You can set up a bunch of short soundbites in AS, go into the wave section of DD, click the plus sign and choose/import/choose/import... ad infinitum. Clean sounding, no detected glitch. Variable-pass for each track right up in the front interface is so cool. You can push the sound in each of the tracks through filter and distortion. Randomization! Highly configurable. I haven’t checked on midi configurations yet, but it’s probably going to be a friggin blast. Granted, the interface is slightly difficult to navigate, but there’s so much capability jam-packed in this, that imho there’s no easy way to arrange the visual elements. Read the manual while groking what’s going on, because it will definitely guide you well. Keep experimenting with DD...you’ll be glad you expended a few brain cells getting there.

This is one of the most unique apps I have, and it is proving to be one that prompts lots of creative ideas. The concept of using waves to manipulate pitch, timing, panning, volume, etc. tends to pull my music in many unexpected (but good) directions. I would love to give this five stars, but feel that it does have a weakness in that the interface is cluttered, over-engineered, dated, and not particularly intuitive. It doesn’t lend itself to live performance, and uses some very non-standard graphics not seen in most apps. A good example would be the graphic used in place of the standard X that other apps use to close windows; considering the cluttered interface, it would be more user friendly to just use the smaller and more recognizable X. Really great app by the developers, but badly in need of some UI and UX design updates.

Different Drummer is now a magic bullet in my music composition arsenal. I have been looking for an app that will put out algorithmic but very controllable and interesting MIDI material to record into my sequencer. I enjoy “collaborating” with algorithmic sources, and because of the depth of features, I can already tell that Different Drummer will produce satisfying MIDI material for me to manipulate for a long time to come. The internal sound engine is decent as well, and I have recorded some great stuff using Inter-App Audio. There is one issue (v4.6.1) that I hope will be resolved soon: Ableton Link integration is not functioning properly.