Building a Basic iPhone Drum Machine

Since Apple launched the App Store, there has been a deluge of apps that turn the iPhone and iPod Touch into musical instruments. In true electronic music style, drum machines were among the first instruments to appear and are still among the most popular. This post will show you how easy it is to create a rudimentary, sample-based drum trigger using the iPhone SDK.

Update: In hindsight, there are much more effective ways to accomplish this task. In the future, I’ll post a new tutorial dealing with on-demand sample playback using OpenAL for lower latency.
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iPhone OpenSoundControl App Roundup

This post was originally published by Tony Wallace at Heuristic Music on May 10, 2009.

While experimenting with synthesizers controlled by my iPhone via OpenSoundControl (OSC), I have had the opportunity to test several OSC apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. None of the apps are perfect (although a few come really close), but none of them are bad, either. Rather, each has a particular set of strengths and weaknesses that will make them suitable for different situations.

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iPhone Controlled Synthesizer

This post was originally published by Tony Wallace at Heuristic Music on May 6, 2009.

Here is video of a synthesizer I designed in Native Instruments Reaktor that is controlled by Open Sound Control (OSC) data sent from an iPhone or iPod Touch. The iPhone in this video is running TouchOSC to convert accelerometer and touch screen movements into OSC data.

I would be happy to post more information about the design of this synthesizer. If you have any questions, please contact me or leave your comments below.

Download the Reaktor ensemble.

Click here to watch this video on YouTube.

License Information:

Creative Commons License
Both the video and Reaktor ensemble are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.

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