A small group of people will remember our first MIDI video about 10 months ago that needed a jailbroken iPhone. Well here is the real thing. Excuse the totally amateurish nature of this footage, but dammit it's exciting. Cinéma vérité and all that.
Filmed with an iPod Touch in one hand, our intrepid cameraman's free hand attempts to show some of the features of the Ella MIDI implementation. We have 3 voices at once (upper, lower and pads), and all can be played concurrently if you have enough hands or somebody else around/on stage who can hit the pads. Programmable keyboard split for upper and lower, programmable chord pads if your keyboard supports it (and the Axiom 49 has 8 of them - mighty useful). Ella can be seen responding to controllers on the keyboard with on-screen information keeping you up to date, and controllers are used to change voices, volume, pitch, tone, reverb parameters, and level/pan for each of the upper, lower and pad instruments. Ellatron and the Lite Trons now all feature the same rich reverb unit first seen in M3000, and the MIDI Ellatron is going to hit the shops with a handful of the real Tron voices from M3000, albeit with the usual limitations - shorter loop times, major third sampling intervals etc. Mellotron purists will want M3000, people who just want a handful of Tron sounds for occasionally spicing up a song will love the new Ella.
Plus the MIDI implementation is ultra-responsive, despite this being a debug build and having a dozen printfs per played note - printfs going over WiFi to the Mac, because you can't really printf with an attached dock accessory...
A bit more work to do on the user interface to de-stupid it - for example, I still am amused by 'What's this for?' at the left of the screen - cannot for the life of me remember what those user interface elements were supposed to do ... and it needs an upgrade to the saved/restored preferences file, and we will be ready to roll out for testing. If all goes well we should be good to go by early December.
And a final word - all apps universal. So M3000 for the iPhone for the first time. Jordantron universal on launch date. And having pretty much all your controls exposed to the MIDI keyboard makes the iPhone / iPod Touch so usable as a performance instrument - no squinting in the dark and carefully positioning fingers to make changes, just move a slider or change a rotary control and you can select different voices, tweak reverb, change chordbanks - suddenly makes the iPhone a genuinely amazing performance or practice instrument.
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
Monday, 13 September 2010
a) Don't Panic!
and b) Sincerest apologies to anyone wanting to use our online user guide or in any other way look at the omenie.com website - we have a minor and temporary web hosting problem, and don't have a live website right now. Now we are *VERY* annoyed as I'm sure are any new customers, this will get sorted within the next 24 hours.
But once again - sorry folks.
But once again - sorry folks.
Monday, 30 August 2010
What's been going on in the land of Ellatron
OK, it's all been a bit quiet round here lately, so let's update you all on what's been going on.
First we have been cleaning out the codebase. It had got messy. It's now in much better shape and as a result is running faster and more smoothly than before, which is nice.
Secondly, we've been going universal. Our build system is now in shape and set up to get Ellatron and Ellatron HD merged into the same product. Now it's not clear how we can do this with Apple, we may just have to continue with the 2 separate SKUs and upload the same binary to them - but going forward, Ellatron for iPhone will be the same program as Ellatron HD. For those of you who purchased both we do apologize, but in the early days of iPad development without hardware it was just impossible and we had to get the iPad version out. But going forward, everything we do will be universal from day one.
So Mellotronics M3000 will go universal at the next refresh. This will open up the amazing semitone-sampled ABC-blended tones of M3000 to iPhone and iPod Touch owners. And of course the long-awaited Jordantron will also be universal when it is launched - one binary, all devices, it will be really cool.
And coolest of all - all these apps are going MIDI. We have early access to an advanced prototype of a quite fantastic low-cost MIDI interface for iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad. Latency is insanely low, quality is insanely good. Price - well, all we know is 'low-cost', this should get more clear over the next few weeks. We can't commit right now to when the device will ship - we hope during Q4 this year, so before the holidays - but it will be immense. As soon as we can tell you more about this new MIDI interface we will, but if the design pans out it will be the nicest one we have seen yet. Having 8 of the chord pads available on the programmable pads of our in-house Axiom 49 is *brilliant*!! And continuous controllers for M3000 ABC blend, pitch and volume - it is just so fantastic to have a MIDI keyboard plugged into an iPhone!
Once it's clear we are not breaking any NDAs we will post video ... stay tuned.
First we have been cleaning out the codebase. It had got messy. It's now in much better shape and as a result is running faster and more smoothly than before, which is nice.
Secondly, we've been going universal. Our build system is now in shape and set up to get Ellatron and Ellatron HD merged into the same product. Now it's not clear how we can do this with Apple, we may just have to continue with the 2 separate SKUs and upload the same binary to them - but going forward, Ellatron for iPhone will be the same program as Ellatron HD. For those of you who purchased both we do apologize, but in the early days of iPad development without hardware it was just impossible and we had to get the iPad version out. But going forward, everything we do will be universal from day one.
So Mellotronics M3000 will go universal at the next refresh. This will open up the amazing semitone-sampled ABC-blended tones of M3000 to iPhone and iPod Touch owners. And of course the long-awaited Jordantron will also be universal when it is launched - one binary, all devices, it will be really cool.
And coolest of all - all these apps are going MIDI. We have early access to an advanced prototype of a quite fantastic low-cost MIDI interface for iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad. Latency is insanely low, quality is insanely good. Price - well, all we know is 'low-cost', this should get more clear over the next few weeks. We can't commit right now to when the device will ship - we hope during Q4 this year, so before the holidays - but it will be immense. As soon as we can tell you more about this new MIDI interface we will, but if the design pans out it will be the nicest one we have seen yet. Having 8 of the chord pads available on the programmable pads of our in-house Axiom 49 is *brilliant*!! And continuous controllers for M3000 ABC blend, pitch and volume - it is just so fantastic to have a MIDI keyboard plugged into an iPhone!
Once it's clear we are not breaking any NDAs we will post video ... stay tuned.
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
iPad King Crimson!
Another totally brilliant M3000 performance I just found online - it is great to see our product being enjoyed and used by talented people - I have to say, I totally love this one!
Sunday, 15 August 2010
Check out Tandog on MySpace ...
... who is using some warped Ellatron tones for movie soundtracks. Brilliant stuff!
Rocking the M3000 with Miss Vortex!
Her flying fingers make great use of the M3000 chord pads to apply some gorgeous beds under the beats here - this is actually my favourite fan video of M3000 to date, I really, REALLY enjoyed this one!
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