My experience with Drambo so far
Hello everyone 😃
Before getting to the subject, I thought a bit of context could be relevant for curious people:
As some of you already know I'm new to the iPad music making scene. While I had been making music on portable devices (iPod touch/iPhone/Nintendo DS) as far back as 2008 (with Korg DS-10 and mainly Nanostudio) and despite my immense love for Nanostudio 2 I never really got into it after its release because I completely let go of portable music making ever since working from home became a thing, as that implied having access to my home studio equipment.
Fast forward to November 10 2023. Through an extensive music hardware market research process I just found out 2-3 days ago that iOS/iPadOS music making technology/software has dramatically evolved, and my mind gets blown as I become aware of the concept of AUv3 plugins and host apps on iPad/iPhone. I start considering getting into the rabbit hole of iPad music making, and my in-depth research process begins.
Fast forward to January 5 2024, 55 days later, my whole virtual/hardware studio setup is fully operational and I start winding down my research process so that I can finally experience the integration of a new iPad (Pro 11" M2 silicon) with an RME Fireface UCX, a PC and a Digitakt + Digitone combo. By now I've already created many test projects in AUM involving Drambo as a sequencer.
Now, onto my actual experience with Drambo:
THE GOOD:
At this point from a "music making meta" standpoint I've become aware of KEY aspects of Drambo's design that make it invaluable for my creative process, I'm thinking specifically:
1. Despite my Digitakt + Digitone giving me access to 12 tracks of polyphonic step sequencing (4 notes per step with shared micro-timing), the resolution of these hardware sequencers is relatively coarse and these machines are not meant to be used to accurately playback unquantized live recordings. Drambo offers a solution to bridge that gap with its high resolution sequencer and accurate MIDI recording playback.
2. Drambo is the ONLY app I know of that offers adequate keyboard controller dimensions AND that ALSO effectively gives the user access to a convenient 8 midi channels "one tap" selector. This in turn allows me during a sound design session to load 8 synth AUv3 as I'm in the process of building/programming cohesive sounds and quickly trigger any of these 8 synths CONVENIENTLY.
3. As it rests comfortably right against the bottom edges of my AUM projects, and while occupying no more than 35-40% of the total height of my iPad (in landscape mode), Drambo is the ONLY app that gives the user access visually to a variable step count sequencer that displays complex but condensed MIDI data that can then conveniently be manipulated (in theory!) without the need to make the app window much bigger than the size of the keyboard controller... AND obviously simultaneously gives access to a MIDI keyboard (AND PADS TO TOP IT OFF!), which is flat out INCREDIBLE.
4. Drambo plays a KEY role in enabling practical MIDI muting control over 8 tracks per instance.
5. Drambo offers the most innovative and efficient interface to program conditional step trigger rules (CYCLES sub-menu) that I have ever seen.
6. Drambo's MIDI keyboard is fully playable RELIABLY on an ipad 11" and gives me access to exactly 28 notes that I could tap on accurately. While it's not the pinnacle of comfort it's DEFINITELY what I'm looking for in terms of balance between efficiency and usability.
7. Drambo is the ONLY app I know of that offers a hybrid step sequencer/piano roll approach.
8. The control/visualizer strip visible right above the keyboard controller is flat out BRILLIANT, and offers the users unbelievable UI efficiency.
I've finally taken a breather to let things settle in my mind a little now that my research process and the assembly of my iPad virtual studio is more or less complete. With a "no pressure" mindset and considering all that I had worked on so far, I finally allowed myself to just have fun, explore and play (at last!). So I started a "moderately" complex AUM project yesterday evening and spent a few hours playing around with the intention of just exploring and piecing a little groove together, with no expectations of "gaining grounds" on anything technical.
As I used Drambo during these few hours, here's what jumped to my attention...
[See Part 2 in comments]
Comments
[Part 2]
THE PROBLEMATIC THINGS (and I say this with love!):
1. I found myself developing a fear of accidentally tapping on steps in the sequencer strip when trying to switch Drambo's focus from one MIDI track to another or when trying to mute/unmute tracks, due to the fact that the dimension of the track buttons visible above the step sequencer had shrunk too much vertically compared to the height maintained by step buttons. One way I found to work around that "risk" is to enable the "select" mode. (This situation could be easily improved by forcing a "width to height" ratio to be maintained as the UI window is shrunk, similar to the ratio used for steps)
2. While in theory the design ideas used to control the piano roll editor are awesome, I also found myself developing a fear of accidentally moving/losing intricate MIDI data while editing notes as I frequently encountered bugs selecting and moving grouped MIDI notes (SNAP mode OFF). This fear was compounded by the fact that the UNDO functionality in Drambo is extremely limited and in many cases unreliable (and therefore unusable in general), except for undoing a live recording pass (which is a relief!).
3. While in theory the gesture of tapping+holding a step and simultaneously tapping on another step to effectively perform a step duplication is awesome, in my experience because the UNDO function has proven to be highly unreliable and limited, I end up having to resort to the "select" mode to be safe, which is a lot less efficient and enjoyable to use unfortunately. All this to avoid the risk of accidentally deleting a step.
4. Unfortunately, despite the fact that I love the CYCLES sub-menu UI design, as my project expanded interacting with that interface proved to be very buggy. While in the beginning I was adding trigger conditions without issue over 2 to 4 cycles, I eventually wanted to add conditions over 3 cycles and something happened that caused the entire interface to malfunction (I could no longer fluidly delete/modify the conditions without trying to get in troubleshooting mode by fiddling with the interface).
5. Editing gate length in the COMP sub-menu is currently not viable from a tactile standpoint. The reason for this is simply a matter of scale: I mostly expect to be able to adjust notes length accurately between a range of 1/64th and 1 bar. However because of the way gate value editing is implemented in the COMP sub-menu, it's extremely inconvenient to adjust gate length for short notes. When considering the Drambo use case that I have described so far, for me this is a big showstopper when compounded with the issues related to the UNDO function being unreliable. What happens in practice is that when faced with the de-facto difficulty of adjusting note length in the step sequencer's UI, I'll switch to the Piano Roll to do the edit, but then because sometimes entire note selections can be deleted accidentally (whether it's due to a bug or user error), since the UNDO function is unreliable, I can find myself just having lost an entire section of my MIDI recording over this, which is obviously a major problem.
6. In the spirit of the use case of unquantized recording/sequencing of external AUv3 with Drambo in AUM, I can't help but to think that having easy access to a quantize function ("destructive" at least) with a strength slider would be awesome to experiment with to make workflow more seamless.
7. Last but not least, as people who read this forum frequently probably already saw in my post titled "BIPOLAR step OFFSET adjustments to dramatically improve the step sequencer in unquantized use cases", Drambo's amazing UI design idea of implementing the step sequencer right above the KEYS/PADS controller gets deeply and seriously diminished by the fact that the step sequencer doesn't use a bipolar OFFSET design. The current unipolar step offset implementation causes the process of "decoding"/understanding the timing logic of steps MIDI data at a first glance (so that users can then manipulate that data in a musical/logically comprehensible way) to become a total headache in situations where unquantized MIDI data is involved, which happens 100% of the time (at least partially), for the music that I make.
Drambo is the ONLY app I know of that offers that . This in turn allows me during a sound design session to load 8 synth AUv3 as I'm in the process of building/programming cohesive sounds and quickly trigger any of these 8 synths CONVENIENTLY.
You can add more than that - up to 12 without scrolling, and many more if you don’t mind scrolling.
7. Last but not least, as people who read this forum frequently probably already saw in my post titled "BIPOLAR step OFFSET adjustments to dramatically improve the step sequencer in unquantized use cases", Drambo's amazing UI design idea of implementing the step sequencer right above the KEYS/PADS controller gets deeply and seriously diminished by the fact that the step sequencer doesn't use a bipolar OFFSET design. The current unipolar step offset implementation causes the process of "decoding"/understanding the timing logic of steps MIDI data at a first glance (so that users can then manipulate that data in a musical/logically comprehensible way) to become a total headache in situations where unquantized MIDI data is involved, which happens 100% of the time (at least partially), for the music that I make.
I know it’s not what you’re after, but it’s actually fairly simple to move a step or range of steps back a step so that positive offset can be used instead. Engage select, select from the step before the start to the end of what you want to shift, tap right in the resulting popup, then the left arrow to shift the steps back. Just be sure to select a range that includes the step you want to shift things to. That threw me at first.
I just thought I’d mention it in case you hadn’t noticed that.
@number37 Hey! 😊
Thank you very much for pointing out that 8 tracks is not the limit! While I had a suspicion back then that I actually hadn't tested explicitly if 8 was a hard limit, that idea completely slipped out of my mind and I never ended up actually checking.
12 tracks with no scrolling is just... yeah. SO GOOD LOL
If I ever offloaded percussion duty from my Digitakt or other AUv3s entirely onto Drambo, I can definitely see myself making use of 12 tracks and being comfortable with that soft limit.
On what you said about moving steps as a useful tool for unipolar offset step editing, you definitely bring up a valid point as using the move function diminishes the amount of actions required to get the desired outcome (in some cases) compared to copy/pasting. I was definitely familiar with these functions though as I currently use the "select" mode way more than I would like for "safe" copy/pasting and moving steps around. I'm definitely grateful for that mode and its features especially but I find that actually operating the menu is not super efficient.
I'll be super honest, other than offering Elektron-like solutions for this, I can't really think of an idea to improve this at the moment, especially considering the very limited remaining UI real estate available to add new buttons. Maybe adding a "Cut" function could be nice?
For anyone who cares I just wanted to rectify the incomplete info implied in the discussion earlier:
When using Drambo as a MIDI Fx within AUM with the intention of strictly sequencing external AUv3, the implication is actually that the 2 "Send" and "Master" tracks are completely unnecessary and can be removed since no audio is processed by Drambo.
This implies that since the "Main" track (not sure exactly how to call it) is the only structure needed to host MIDI Tracks, that leaves 15 other free slots to control 15 AUv3 without any need for side scrolling, and not 12 like I previously referred to.