Making music should be fun. Oftentimes, there’s such a steep learning curve to learning that people forget to enjoy the process. Thankfully, there's more technology than ever making music production more accessible.
However, many producers new and old feel liberated by the abundance of features and nuances an advanced DAW can provide. It can take years to truly understand your DAW, but removing a digital audio workstation's key features in the name of simplification leaves producers with less flexibility and power over their sound.
That's where Controlla comes in: We believe that the solution isn’t necessarily simplification, it's finding a balance between approachable tools and taking the time to understand your DAW. It’s visual abstraction and physical expansion. It's using your phone to create music efficiently and effectively and learning along the way. By using a device everyone already owns, we can enable artists to experience and create music through a new lens.
The Power of Controlla: Turn Your Phone Into An Ultra-Live Instrument
Similar to hardware devices, Controlla offers real-time feedback and effortless expression except we aren’t tied to the limitations of a 2D screen, or even the real 3D world. We can play electronic instruments that are more real than acoustic ones, both in sound and feel. We can visualize sounds in new ways. You're probably thinking, how would that even work? Allow me to elaborate.
The Melody/Chord Progression Maker
Isomorphic keyboards are an excellent tool for producing music that sounds good without having to sit down and think about theory. They arrange notes of a scale in a 2D pattern such that anything you play sounds good and has predictable intervals from key to key.
See an isomorphic keyboard in action here:
Similarly, we can construct a 3D map of “spaces” or shapes in a way that when you swing your arm around, you create melodies that always sound good while still being controllable. Instead of calculating, you get to focus on creating, all with the power of Controlla.
The MPE Stack Strummer
Guitars have strings. A string is essentially a 1D line with a limited amount of expression possibilities. What if the string was a 2D plane? A single string could be broken down into multiple 1D planes, opening up the door to new iterations of sound.
Controlla can let you visualize this concept through your phone, simply by waving your phone around you can strike through the planes to “strum“.
Each stack plays a chord based on the notes in that stack. The XY position of your strike through each plane can modulate MPE parameters creating an organic and expressive electronic sound without any hardware. Who new the most expressive guitar in the world was right at your fingertips?
The possibilities of AR music creation are too vast for any one person or group of people to explore. We want to enable that exploration with a platform that lets creators build and monetize their own AR instruments. Yeah, you read that correctly. We’re building the Roblox of AR Music Production tools.
Stay tuned to partake in the future of music.