First, make sure that your headphones are plugged in and assure that the volume level is appropriate. The speaker on the iPhone is tailored to human voices and lacks bass. You may not be able to hear all of the sounds without headphones or ear buds.
The first page you’ll see is the Play page. You should be able to touch anywhere on the grid to hear some synthy action. bleep!Synth uses a grid based approach instead of the traditional Keyboard since it works better on touchscreen. bleep!Synth also helps you always sound good by restricting your notes to a specific scale. This way, no matter what notes you hold down, it’ll always sound sweet. You can still switch the scale to ‘chromatic’ if you want to have access to all the notes. More on this later.
In the upper Left corner is the Page button. This will allow you switch through the different pages in the application, which are:
The first place you’ll probably want to go is the Data page so you can try loading up some more presets.
The play page is where you can play notes. Touch anywhere on the grid to enter notes. The layout of the grid (how many rows and columns) can be set on the GLOBAL page and is specific for each Patch. The actual notes that get played will depend on what scale you are using and the key(s) set on the SEQ page. The scale can also be set on the GLOBAL page. Note offsets notwithstanding, the root note should be the grid square in the top left position. Notes increase going to the right and down. The note offset for each Row can be modified on the GLOBAL page as well. Also on the play page is a Tie button so you can toggle ‘Tie’ on the fly. For more on what Tie actually is, see the SEQ page. bleep!Synth also takes advantage of the iPhone/Touch’s accelerometer. You can tilt the phone to control various parameters. These parameters are set up on the Mod tab of the EDIT page. You can set which axis is used for Tilting on the GLOBAL page. The Tilt modifier ability can also act like an LFO, by setting an LFO waveform on the EDIT/Mod tab.
At the top you will see 6 buttons. These are different parameters specific to each step in the sequence. Okay, we lied. Swing and BPM are not specific to each step in the sequence, but they are here for convenience. In the middle you will see 16 buttons denoting each step. If you click one of these buttons, you will notice that it gets a gray outline, showing which step is currently being edited. You can click it again to toggle the Trigger level to 100. This is a quick way to turn on and off steps in the Sequence. You can also click the ‘Trigger’ button and use the slider and buttons at the bottom to modify the Trigger level. Pressing the ‘Note’ button at the top will allow you to change the note for that step. The ‘Oct’ button controls the octave. Use ‘Tie’ to link notes together into longer notes.
The SEQ page also features a ‘tap’ button for tapping the tempo. Tap 4 times along with the beat (once on each bar) to attempt to set the BPM. If you mess up, wait 5 seconds then try again.
The edit page is where you can edit all the parameters for the synthesizer. The four buttons at the top serve as tabs into different groups of parameters.
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‘OSC’ parameters have to deal with the tone or timbre of the sound |
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‘ENV’ controls parameters related to the various Envelopes or curves. Specifically, the amplitude and filter curves. |
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‘FILT’ contains filter and drive settings. |
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Finally ‘MOD’ deals with modifiers. You can control volume level and pan here, and also you can control how much the ‘Trigger’ affects volume, amp decay, and the filter envelope with the ‘Trigger To xxxx’ parameters. You can also specify ’tilt’ related parameters here. |
Double clicking on any parameter allows you to assign a Motion to that parameter. That means that the slider no longer controls the value of the parameter – it is controlled by the graph on the Motion page. A motion’d parameter will have a blue background. Double clicking it a second time will remove the Motion.
Here you can draw the motion envelope. Just touch and drag. Each block corresponds to one step in the Sequencer (there are 16). . Text at the bottom indicates what parameter is selected.
The data page is where you can save, load and delete synthesizer settings (called Patches). When saving, you will also be given the option to submit your preset. If your preset is good enough, we’ll include it in the next version of the application. Lame presets will be rejected. If you want people to know who made your patch, I’d recommend putting some kind of nickname in the beginning of the patch name. Such as ‘Joey-AwesomeBass’.
There are two ‘special’ patterns. Those are ‘init’ and ‘LastSettings’. Neither of these can be deleted, however you can save over ‘init’. ‘init’ is a blank pattern that you can use as a base for new sounds, if you like a clean start.
The Data Page also allows you to copy and paste. The button labeled ‘copy’ will copy all Parts in the current Pattern Step. The button labelled ‘copy current part’ will copy only the current Part in the current Pattern Step. Paste, pastes. Note that no actual copy is made until you hit Paste. So, if you hit Copy and make some changes on the current part, those changes will get copied (not the settings that were there when you first pressed ‘Copy’).
The Record button lets you save your performances to a .WAV file. When you press record, it starts creating a new file on the iPhone’s file system. Pressing record again stops recording. To get the file off the iPhone you have to connect to your iPhone with your web browser (press the Transfer button.. ). The file is in the folder labelled ‘audio’. Of course you can always just plug a cable into your iPhone’s headphone jack and record that way too. As a cautionary note: audio files get big fast, so make sure that you don’t try to record for too long. You could end up filling all your iPhone’s free space!
The Transfer button not only lets you get Audio off your iPhone onto your computer, but also your patches (and lets you load new patches you may have gotten elsewhere). Pressing it will bring up a popup letting you know that the iPhone is ready for a connection from your desktop computer. It will also give you 3 possible addresses for you to type in your web browser. The recommended one is the second one (the local network address). Note: you will probably need to have a Wifi network handy for this to work.
The Global Page is where you can adjust properties that affect the entire Patch. Some important settings are on this page. You can control how the Arpeggiator works here.
Mono – Cycles through the notes that you have held down one at a time
Chord – Plays all the notes you have held down at each step
Solo – Disables the Sequence and allows you to play one note. The key will be whatever you set the first note in the sequence.
You can also change the scale on this page.
List of scales:
Major
Minor
Maj. Penta
Min. Penta
Aeolian
Locrian
Ionian
Dorian
Phrygian
Lydian
Locrian
Mixolydian
Harmonic Minor
Whole Tone
Blues
Middle Eastern
Min. M. Eastern
Diminished
Funky
Evil
Chromatic
This concludes the overview. Email us or drop us a comment if we glossed over anything. Next you should check out the Parameters for a short description of all the parameters on the EDIT page.
