Chiptunes Pro vs TETSUO

Winner of the "Most technically impressive" award in the Ray Wenderlich Readers' App Awards 2014! “I never knew how Chiptunes actually worked before playing around with this app. Very cool and definitely got me in a retro vibe!” – Ray Wenderlich “A crazy mashup of circuit design and music making: Wire together circuits to lay down some cool jams.” – Nick Lockwood “SPICE meets garage band.” – Erik Kerber Chiptunes Pro lets you make retro music the way it should be made - with chips! Build your circuit to lay down drum beats, basslines, and tunes. No knowledge of electronics needed! Chiptunes Pro includes all the components that are available in the free Chiptunes app, including those that are only available as in-app purchases. Chiptunes Pro also includes Audiobus support: stream live audio directly to other Audiobus-compatible apps. See http://audiob.us for more information.

TETSUO is a chaotic percussion machine. No samples, no library. One voice built out of a pitched body with noise dragged through it, a resonant filter that saturates the harder you lean on it, a bitcrusher, and a waveshaper that runs from a bit of weight to total structural failure. The sequencer is sixteen unseen slots and STEPS knob decides how many of them fire, adding and taking away hits one at a time in a fixed order, so you can strip a pattern to the bone and build it back and the same beats come home. The SKIP control works against you on purpose, stealing hits at random while it plays, so it never quite settles. MUTATE modulates the pitch at random, setting fire to voices on every turn. You do not program TETSUO so much as negotiate with it. The strip along the top is how you attempt to hold onto anything. Sixty four steps, four turns of pattern, carved into as many as eight sections. Select a section. Find a sound. Hit RECORD, and that section keeps every knob position. Change it, record the next, then hit PLAY and it walks left to right dropping each snapshot in as it reaches it, looping. Drag the dividers to give a section longer or cut it short. It keeps settings, not audio, so the engine is playing live the entire way through. Sections save with your presets and your session. AUv3 and standalone.