Chiptune Sequencer vs Gliss

C.H.I.P. is a Chiptune Handheld Instrument Player: sequence and build four channel chiptune, the sound of a 1989 handheld console. Arrange is your song. Sections stack top to bottom and play in order. Drag one to move it, or drag its right edge to loop it. Pattern is where notes go. Four lanes down, time across. Tap a cell, then play a key or a drum pad to fill it. Effects come from a menu you can read, so you pick Arpeggio, major instead of memorising a code. Sound is the synth. Every control has a plain name, a sentence saying what it does, and a button to hear the result. There is a preset library if you would rather start from something that already works. Song is everything else. Tempo, tuning, the mixer, saving, and export. The whole interface is drawn a pixel at a time, in the style of an early nineties desktop. Have it in grey, or behind a green LCD. Every sound is made as you play. Nothing streams, and there is no sample pack hiding in the background. Two pulse channels, a wave channel you can shape, and a noise channel, emulated at the register level so the controls mean what they meant on the original chip. Plug in a MIDI keyboard to play the instrument you are editing, and write notes straight into the grid. Export a mix as a WAV, or the song as a MIDI file to carry into whatever studio you use. There is a compare screen for the curious. Load a recording of real hardware and it lines the two up to the sample, matches their levels, and tells you how far apart they are and where. You can listen to just the difference. Songs and save files read and write in their original layouts, byte for byte, so something you write here can go back to the device it came from. Whether you want a quick lofi beat or a finished song, it is a music maker for sitting down and actually writing. Made for people who like retro sound and do not want a manual to get going.

Gliss is a touch instrument that sings. Two lines of light run across the screen. Slide a finger along one and the pitch follows continuously, like a voice or a bow, never stepping from key to key. Press lower on the line and the note swells; lift toward it and it fades to a breath. GRAVITY Each note of the scale is a well. Turn gravity down and the lines are fretless: every pitch in between is yours. Turn it up and your finger is gently pulled into tune: slide freely, land exactly. All the way up, it locks. FLEX The pitch follows your finger on an elastic. Loose, and it lags behind with a slow, singing portamento. Tight, and it snaps. SOUNDS 24 sounds built around a singing core: strings, voices, winds, leads, basses, pads, plucks and a few oddities, like a cello that sings, a choir, a horn in the fog. A slow orbital vibrato settles in once the note has been held, the way a singer's does. Shape any sound with tone, texture, subharmonic mixture, formant, filter and envelope. 28 TUNINGS Western modes, blues, Arabic maqam with true quarter tones, Turkish makam, Persian dastgah, klezmer, Southeast Asian scales, just intonation, 19 and 31 equal temperaments. Neutral intervals can be shaded from Egypt to Syria. MORE THAN TWO FINGERS • Chords: one finger can play a fifth, a triad, a seventh or an octave, always inside the scale • Arpeggiator: up, down, up and back, random, locked to tempo • Looper: record, overdub, loop, clear • Lanes: give each line its own sound, chord and octave • Tilt the device to bend and open the filter • Flick a note and it slides away, bounces and fades. Touch it to catch it IN YOUR HOST (AUv3) Gliss is also an AUv3 instrument for AUM, Loopy Pro, GarageBand, Logic and every host that loads Audio Units. Play its two lines with your fingers inside the host, or from a keyboard, an MPE controller or a MIDI track: every note lands on a line and gravity pulls it into your tuning. Ten parameters to automate, factory presets, and the whole instrument saved with your project. FREE, THEN PRO AND STUDIO Gliss is free to play: the whole gesture, three sounds (VOIX, PLUIE NOIRE, KOTO LUNE) and three tunings (major, minor and maqam Rast), in the app and in your host. Two one-time purchases, each on its own: GLISS PRO for the app unlocks all 24 sounds and their settings, all 28 tunings, chords, the arpeggiator, the looper, lanes, tilt and effects. GLISS STUDIO for your host unlocks every sound and tuning in the AUv3 plugin, with MIDI and MPE in and automation. No subscription. Designed for iPhone, iPad and iPhone Duo: landscape on a phone, any way you hold a large screen, the bars on the flat half and the settings on the raised half when it is folded. Dark, with nothing on screen that is not sound. No account. No ads. No tracking. Gliss collects nothing; your settings stay on your device.