This flexible but friendly iPad drum sequencer and kit builder lets you access classic drum machine sounds and import your own.
There are a lot of throw-away music-making apps on Apple's App Store, but Diode-108 may be a keeper. Featuring all the main elements of drum programming - sequencing beats, selecting and editing samples, and mixing the whole lot together - this one could give beatsmiths more than enough bang for their six bucks, and that's before mentioning the onboard sequenced effects!
Developer Vibrant Digital Engineering have licensed Diode's inbuilt samples from a clutch of pro sample creators, promising to bring to your beats the flavours of retro machines such as the Roland TR-808, acoustic kits, special effects, low-bit-rate kits and loads more types. Diode's online manual lists over 40 kits. And if those polished offerings aren't enough, you can import your own WAVs to use in place of any kit piece.
The step sequencer consists of a 16x16 grid, giving you easy access to a wide range of voices from the kit you've got chosen. But notes and beats aren't the only things you can sequence with this one.
Diode-108's coolest feature might actually be the effects sequencer. Drag and drop different FX onto the grid, and you've got cool, stutter edit-style effects, applicable on a beat-by-beat basis. The arsenal includes bitcrushing, stutter and roll effects, sample reverse, pitch controls and flams.
Vibrant Digital Engineering have also catered for more traditional drum sound design in the form of the Drum Machine editor. Here, you can apply processing and sculpting to individual kit pieces. These include simple things such as Volume and Panning, and then you've got Reverb, Compression, Distortion and an in-built Gate.
Diode-108 is out on the App Store for $5.99, which is silly money for this kind of fully featured product. Just get it now before they realise you'd pay five times more. Go see Diode-108 on the App Store for even more features
