ThunderBeast vs 1981 FM

Rain, wind and thunder, all synthesized in real time. No samples, no loops. Every storm ThunderBeast makes is a storm happening for the first time. EIGHT CITIES, EIGHT SKIES A New York night storm. London drizzle. A Miami squall. Seattle mist. The Bangkok monsoon. A Reykjavik gale. An evening shower in Kyoto. A Cape Town storm front. Choose a preset and the scenery, the weather and the colour of the panel change together, so the city you are listening to is the city in front of you. TEN WEATHER CONTROLS Precipitation and drop size shape the rain; wind speed, gust and turbulence move the air. Storm rate decides how often lightning happens and storm energy decides how heavy each strike lands, while cell distance walks the storm from directly overhead out to the horizon. Humidity and pressure change the whole feel of the sky, and width and gain finish it. FOUR KINDS OF LIGHTNING A crack at close range, thunder that rolls, strikes that repeat, a sheet of light across the whole sky - each one carrying the swell that comes back off the landscape. The bolt is drawn on screen as it happens and changes colour as the storm moves away. No two strikes are ever the same. PLAYABLE WEATHER Play from C2 up and the rain rings at that pitch. Chords and melodies come out of the falling rain. Play below C2 and lightning strikes instead: pitch sets the distance, velocity sets the weight. Twelve hardware controller presets are built in; the mod wheel is storm energy and the sustain pedal is lightning. STANDALONE AND AUv3 Use it on its own, or as an AUv3 plug-in in GarageBand, Logic Pro and others. START FREE Three cities are free from the first launch. ThunderBeast Pro is a one-time purchase, not a subscription: it opens the remaining cities (eight in all) and adds recording and export to WAV, AIFF and FLAC.

1981 FM writes complete tracks. Press generate and you get 64 bars with an intro, verses, choruses, a break and an outro, played by a four-operator FM synth. Lead, bass, arp, pad and a drum machine, through chorus, delay and reverb. Nothing is sampled. Every note is made on the fly and no two tracks come out the same. The music comes from chaos maths. A Lorenz attractor shapes the melody, rhythm and mood. A Hénon map keeps the arpeggio moving. A logistic map handles the drum fills: turn it down and they repeat every bar, turn it up and they never do. Chaos on its own is noise, so a small model filters it. It gets rewarded for consonant intervals and practises over the chord changes before it writes anything. The CHAOS / POLICY slider decides how much say each one gets. Ten styles, and they are properly different. Funk plays a 16th-note slap line with ghost notes between the backbeats. Bebop walks the bass and puts the ride in charge of the time. Bossa runs a clave. Space strips the kit back to a pulse. Every track is built from its seed. Write the seed down and you can have that exact track again, note for note, whenever you want it. You can play over it, too. The pads are the notes of the song's key rather than a piano keyboard, so nothing you touch is wrong, and the sixteen-step lane runs in time with the song and follows your host. Both play any part you like: lead, bass, arp or pad, through that part's sound and out on its MIDI channel. Choose which sections the lane plays in - just the choruses, say - and preview it on its own without starting the song. Turn on RADIO and it keeps playing, picking a new key, mode, style and tempo for each track. You also get: • 10 styles, 6 modes, 12 keys, tempo and density • Four-operator FM engine, 6 algorithms, 11 presets, random patch • Five-part mixer, chorus, delay, plate reverb and filter • A PLAY panel: pads in the song's own key, and a 16-step lane running in time with the song and only in the sections you pick • MIDI in, so your keyboard plays whichever part you have selected • MIDI export: five tracks, one per part • Live spectrum, waveform and a view of the chaos engine at work Two Audio Units, an instrument and a MIDI processor. Each part sends on its own MIDI channel, drums on 10, so one instance can drive five instruments. The MIDI version passes your keyboard through instead of swallowing it. Both follow your host's tempo and transport. One install registers both. The app is free and nothing in it is held back. Using the Audio Units inside other apps is a one-time purchase, and each AUv3 session plays for two minutes first so you can try them properly. No account, no ads, no subscription. Works offline.