Scouter Synth vs 43 Electro Swing

ScouterSynth is a music tracker built like a handheld console. Eight tracks, a D-pad, two buttons, and no menus — every operation is a chord you can play with your thumbs. WRITE Phrases of sixteen rows, chains of phrases, and a song made of chains. Write a bassline once and place it four times with different transposes; change it later and every one of those places changes with it. Phrases can be shorter than sixteen rows, so six-eight is as easy as four-four. SOUND A synth voice per track — saw, pulse with PWM, triangle and sine, through a resonant filter and an envelope — or a sample, played whole or sliced. Wavetables for the sounds a plain oscillator cannot make. Per-tick tables for automation that runs faster than a row. SAMPLE Import from anywhere on your phone, or record straight into a slot from the microphone. MP3, AAC, M4A, AIFF and WAV are all converted on the way in. Whatever you choose is copied into your project, so a saved song carries its audio with it. MIX Ten lanes on one screen — eight tracks and two send buses — with level, pan, mute and solo, and three effect slots on each: filter, bitcrush and a tempo-synced delay. Watch the desk as a set of numbers or as ten live traces. PLAY A performance pad wires any two parameters to an X and a Y axis and moves every track at once. A grid of twelve pads holds six punch-in effects — an octave down, tape slow, a stutter, a bitcrush, a high pass and a low pass — held rather than latched, so nothing can be left on by accident, and six one-shot samples to fire over the top. SEE A radar sweep that reads the mix by frequency, a scope on the output, and six palettes to put it all in. INTEGRATE MIDI in and out with clock. A Bluetooth game controller, mapped button by button to whatever pad you own. Export the whole arrangement to a WAV. Songs, samples and exports all sit in the Files app where you can reach them. No accounts. No subscriptions. No network. The manual is inside the app — press SELECT and B on any screen.

43 Electro Swing writes complete electro swing songs and plays them with a band. Press write and you get a whole record: old verses heard through a gramophone, builds that open the sound up, and club drops with a four-on-the-floor kick under the band and the whole band pumping around it — then a solo, a break or a big-band shout, and an ending: a turntable brake, a big-band button, or the record fading back to 1937. The band is two gypsy-jazz rhythm guitars playing la pompe, a lead on clarinet, trumpet, muted trumpet, alto sax or guitar, a three-piece horn section, upright and sub bass, keys, a swing kit and a producer's house beat. The guitar and the kit are real recordings; the horns, clarinet and bass come from an FM engine that blows and scoops and slurs like players do. All of it ships inside the app, so it works with no network at all. The songs come from chaos maths. A Lorenz attractor draws the melody and a logistic map shades the drummer and the comping, so no two bars need be alike. Chaos on its own is noise, so a small model filters it: it is rewarded for swinging intervals and learns as it writes. The CHAOS / TASTE slider decides how much say each one gets. Eleven styles, and each one is a whole band: its changes, its drummer, its tempo range and how hard it swings. Electro Swing, Hot Club House, Big Band Boogie, Jump Blues, Noir Swing, Swing Hop, Balkan Beats, Charleston, Cabaret Lounge, Electro Dixie and Swing Step. Tick STYLE LOADS RIG and each style brings its own sound. The sound is half the record. Four channels — bass, rhythm guitar, horns and lead guitar — each with a voicing, a tone stack and a resonator: a gypsy-jazz guitar body, a speaker, a gramophone horn or a straight ribbon microphone. Seven one-click rigs, from Hot Club to Warehouse. Effects for the record and the club: sidechain pump, vinyl crackle, gramophone, tape wow, chorus, tremolo and spring reverb. Every song is built from its seed. Write the seed down and you can have that exact song again, note for note. A seed from the browser version rebuilds the same song here. 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 swings with the song and follows your host. Both play any of ten instruments through its own channel and out on its MIDI channel. Turn on RADIO and it keeps playing, picking a new style, key, scale and tempo for every song. You also get: • 11 styles, 14 scales, 12 keys, tempo and density • 15 voicings, 6 resonators, 7 rigs and 7 effects • 8 keyboard voices, from upright piano and vibraphone to accordion and bandoneon • Sampled or synthesised drum kit, switchable; brushes always synthesised • Seven-part mixer with a meter on every part • MIDI in, so your keyboard plays whichever instrument you have selected • Export a MIDI file, a WAV mix, or stems — one WAV per part (in the app; in a host you record the audio there) • A note and a MIDI channel for every drum and every house-beat hit • UI scale, so the panel is not tiny on a big iPad • Live spectrum and waveform, and the chaos engine drawn as it runs Two Audio Units, an instrument and a MIDI processor. Each part sends on its own MIDI channel and every drum has a note and a channel of its own, so one instance can drive a rack of them. The MIDI version passes your keyboard through. Both follow your host's tempo and transport, and 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. Samples: Karoryfer Emilyguitar and Big Rusty Drums, and two voices from the Versilian Community Sample Library, all CC0.