Strange Loop vs OttavaBassa

Strange Loop writes its own music. Three coupled Lorenz attractors drive the piece — one proposes pitch, one shapes rhythm, one wanders the emotional plane. A Markov policy then decides what actually plays, learning from its own output and rewarding intervals that sound consonant. Chaos proposes, the policy disposes. Slide BLEND to choose who wins. Nothing is pre-recorded and nothing loops. Every run is new. PAINT ON THE MATHS Both scopes are paintable. Draw on the attractor and the trajectory bends toward what you drew and lingers there, pulling the melody into those pitches. Draw on the mood pad and the feeling follows your strokes — brightening the harmony, lifting the register, pushing the tempo. Set how hard the ink leans, how big the brush is, and how long it lasts before it fades. WHAT YOU GET • 26 scales — major and minor modes, pentatonics, blues, whole tone, harmonic and melodic minor, altered, both octatonics, and folk scales from Japan, China, Egypt, Spain, Arabia and Hungary • 7 accompaniment styles — chaos grooves, jazz comping with walking bass, stride piano, Alberti bass, classical, arpeggios, ambient rolls • A sampled grand piano plus synthesised voices: soft piano, glass, strings, FM bell, AM organ, pluck, fat saw and more • 6 moods on a valence/arousal plane, from serene to tense, driving chord quality, register, tempo and note length • Live scopes — the attractors, the note-probability distribution the engine is sampling from, and the mood point, all drawn in real time • Deep control: key, scale, tempo, chaos rho, rhythm spread, grace notes, chord-tone pull, softmax temperature, per-track mixer • Record a take and export it as a standard MIDI file to the Files app — melody, chords and bass on separate tracks TWO AUDIO UNITS Strange Loop ships as an instrument AUv3 and as a MIDI processor AUv3, so it can either play its own sounds or sequence any other instrument in your host. Melody, chords and bass each send on their own MIDI channel, so one instance can drive three different instruments. Both Audio Units follow your host's transport and tempo — hit play in AUM, GarageBand, Logic, Cubasis or Zenbeats and it locks to the grid. One install registers both. CREDITS Sampled piano: Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm (CC BY 3.0).

OttavaBassa has been designed for guitarists looking for a simple all-in-one plugin solution for making their guitar sound like a bass. This means you could use your standard guitar to play bass lines on recordings and during live performances. OttavaBassa is an “Octaver” effect that takes your incoming note and transposes it down by one octave putting your instrument into the range of a bass guitar. In addition to the octave-down effect itself, OttavaBassa also includes a simple EQ voiced for controlling the important low and high bass guitar frequencies, as well as built-in effects for drive, compression, stereo chorus and a simple speaker cab filter. “Ottava bassa” is a music theory direction that literally translates as “low octave” or “octave below”. It is commonly abbreviated as “8vb”, hence the icon. OttavaBassa is an AUv3 effects plugin that can run standalone, or in any AUv3 compatible host such as Logic Pro, GarageBand or AUM. OttavaBassa currently runs on iPadOS / iOS (iPad & iPhone) and macOS (Intel & Silicon) and is available as a Universal Purchase from the Apple App Store. If you’re planning on using OttavaBassa on Mac / desktop, please ensure that your favourite DAW / host supports AUv3 (not just AU). PLEASE READ THIS SECTION CAREFULLY! OttavaBassa has been designed specifically for use with guitar. This means that pitches below the low E string (82.4Hz) will not be handled well. Sorry bass players! OttavaBassa will perform at its best when it is given single notes played reasonably cleanly and accurately. It is not a monophonic pitch generator in the true sense, but multiple input notes (aka chords) might result in “warbles” in the processed signal. OttavaBassa uses a pitch detection method that will introduce audio latency, i.e. a delay between input and output. Please note this is not to be confused with audio interface latency, so you cannot “fix” this by changing buffer sizes or sample rates in your host app. Currently OttavaBassa has a latency of around 25ms. So whether OttavaBassa will work for you, depends largely on your playing style and whether you can live with the inherent latency. My personal perspective: I would never make a plugin I wouldn’t use myself. In fact I made OttavaBassa because I needed an Octaver for my own iPad-based live guitar setup, and I couldn’t quite find what I was looking for. I find that OttavaBassa sounds good to me, and feels responsive enough in the context of a live performance, adding bass lines to guitar loops for example. I wouldn’t do a gig without it! I thought hard about making OttavaBassa publicly available because I’ve seen many Octaver plugins get terrible reviews from folks who don’t really understand that the latency and tracking limitations can’t really be magicked away with clever coding! While I am aware of more sophisticated pitch shifting DSP advances that significantly reduce latency especially, I believe this comes at a CPU cost. So while OttavaBassa does use a less sophisticated pitch detection method than “state of the art”, this does mean it’s pretty light on CPU (i.e. around 6% running on an M1 iPad in AUM). And of course, just because it was designed for guitar, doesn’t mean OttavaBassa won’t work on other audio sources - it can sound pretty scary on vocals for example! Just be mindful of the limitations mentioned above regarding pitch range and tracking, e.g., maybe don’t put an entire mix through it and expect amazing results! Thanks for reading to the end :-) -Rob