The folks at Olympia Noise Co recently came out with a new circular drum machine for iOS called Patterning, and it’s pretty fabulous.
The app’s futuristic look jumps right out at you: flat-colored geometric shapes with zero adornment, in the spirit of Propellerhead Figure. There’s nothing on the screen that doesn’t function in some way. It’s a little dense at first glance, but a complex tool is bound to have a complex interface, and Patterning reveals itself easily through exploration.
The sequencer is a series of concentric rhythm necklaces, one for each sound: kick, snare, hi-hat, and so on. The circles down the left side select each sound in the drum kit. Tapping a sound expands its ring, giving you nice, wide target areas. Non-active rings are compressed down to colored arcs. The effect looks cool, like a targeting computer in Star Wars, and it functions well too.
Patterning has an exceptionally clever way of handling drum hit velocity. Each cell in the grid is actually a volume bar radiating out from the center. (The radial sliders can also be set to control any number of different parameters: filter settings, pitch, etc.) It’s easy to give nuanced velocities to your beats. Unfortunately, you have to set velocities one beat at a time whether you want to or not. It would be nice if single-tapping a cell would automatically insert a drum hit at some moderate volume. Still, it’s very nice to have velocity (and those other parameters) right there within the sequencer grid.
Patterning handles polyrhythms in a similar manner to the equally futuristic Rhythm Necklace app. If you switch to Euclidean mode, then you can divide each ring into any number of equally-sized pieces. It was effortless for me to get Bembé going over a standard 4/4 hip-hop beat. I’m sure that you could create wildly impenetrable Morton Subotnick rhythms without too much trouble. The Rhythm Necklace app lets you program four rhythm necklaces independently, but Patterning gives you eight, and the concentric arrangement makes it easier to see the relationships between them.
There are some features in Patterning that I haven’t seen in any other drum programming interface. The coolest one is the fact that all of the rings can play back independently of each other. Patterning also has some unique playback modes. You can set each individual ring to play forwards, backwards, or alternating forwards and backwards. You can also set the rings to auto-rotate some number of slots on each pass. This last feature is such a novel idea that I can barely imagine the musical applications. I’m sure they’ll reveal themselves once I put in the time.
My two complaints about Patterning are minor, but significant. The big one is the lack of numbering of the cells in the sequencer. For such a sophisticated and powerful drum machine, this is a glaring omission. You can have up to 64 cells in each ring, but without numbering, how are you supposed to figure out where to put your drum hits except by trial and error? The minimized rings don’t even have gridlines, much less numbers. I’m hoping that this gets corrected in future versions.
My other main complaint is the lack of good preset beats. Patterning does have a bunch of presets, but they’re designed more to show off the app’s diverse functionality than for cultural relevance. I’d love to have a set of classic breakbeats, Afro-Cuban patterns, dance music genre templates, and the like.
Like any good iOS music app, Patterning integrates easily with other apps, and with desktop DAWs. It’s an advanced tool, not a beginner one. If you want to break out of the cliches, and Rhythm Necklace isn’t weird enough for you, Patterning is probably the tool you want.
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