If you crave more, MIDI files can be imported.
The concept of "commonly occurring” patterns is essential to Liquid Rhythm, although the web site's claim that it provides the building blocks of 10 quadrillion of them suggests a toke too many on the old Jamaican Woodbines. Then, by selecting my kick's first bar and choosing a pattern from the Barform list, Liquid Rhythm rewarded me with a four-on-the-floor thump. The arrangement was instantly populated with tracks, one for each drum. To make a groove from scratch, I selected a kit from the 10 initially available, picking Trance at random. Fortunately, the GUI lets you park a lot of it and let your mouse do the talking. In the interests of simplicity, that's probably enough terminology for now. This relates to the Lerdahl and Jackendoff stuff I mentioned at the beginning, but don't panic, it only takes a short time before the colours and pattern types make a kind of sense.Ī Barform contains Beatforms and is a rhythm pattern spread across a single bar, while the whole structure is known as a Music Molecule. Different shadings are allocated to denote importance within the group, with the darkest indicating the 'strong' beat position. Blue represents groups of two events, red is used for groups of three, while purple Beatforms contain single eighth-note events. First, a Beatform is a group of notes and rests, linked by colour.
Here's an abbreviated overview of the key terms as a flavour. Compared to the work-in-progress manual, they're invaluable for establishing exactly what's going on and explaining the significance of the colours and note groups. I found these were best assimilated after viewing the many short video tutorials embedded into the program, or found on the WaveDNA web site.
#Liquid notes. music intelligence windows#
Various other windows are opened as required, their names introducing us to the some of the exotic terms used throughout, including Molecule Tools, Barform Map, Beatform Map, Beat Builder and Beat Seeker. Happily, there's a little more to it than reassembling pre-made patterns. All of which is fair enough, but if it marked the extent of Liquid Rhythm's charms, I doubt our interest would be massively piqued. However, you're not tied exclusively to WaveDNA's samples: user samples can be imported, and up to 10 of them layered in velocity windows for each voice. As the drums are mapped to the layout of General MIDI, it's very likely you'll export finished patterns as '.MID' files to be applied to more polished drum voices. It yields a few hundred megabytes of additional samples, forming a quite conservative selection. Liquid Rhythm comes with its own fairly basic drum library, and as you'll quickly exhaust the sonic possibilities, taking the 'get more kits' option is a no-brainer. Each track represents a single drum, so it's an ideal layout for speedy pattern visualisation. A hit is represented as a diamond shape, its velocity stem hovering above. No traditional note editor is needed, because all the action takes place directly on the arrange page. You've the choice of either stand-alone operation or running as a plug-in, where you can drag and drop patterns directly onto your DAW's arrange window.Īt the centre of operations is Liquid Rhythm's own arrange page, where all rhythm parts are hammered together, whether they be single-bar loops or complex symphonies of percussion. Speaking as a Logic user pining for Cubase, I couldn't fail to admire the superior drum grid. If you're a Live user, you'll appreciate the integration with the MIDI contents of Liquid Rhythm's clips. This is surely no accident, because Liquid Rhythm has a closer affinity with Ableton Live 9 Suite (and Max For Live 5) than with other DAWs. There are a couple of skins available, both in rather tasteful pastel colours and with a clean, flat look resembling Ableton Live.
#Liquid notes. music intelligence mac#
Installation on the Mac requires the user to manually drag Liquid Rhythm into the application folder, and once you've followed the graphical directions, there's a fairly standard call-and-response authorisation process before you can get started. I guess the question is: does it? Liquid Launch Fortunately, for when it all becomes rather mind-bendingly intimidating, there's a button labelled 'Surprise Me!'. Designed to generate drum patterns or complete rhythm tracks in MIDI format, Liquid Rhythm is a dense package of unfamiliar terminology, colour-coding and hierarchical beat grouping inspired by Jackendoff and Lerdahl's Generative Theory of Tonal Music, the aim of which is to help you come up with fresh grooves for your music. For those stuck in a rhythmic rut, WaveDNA's pattern sequencer plug-in offers some exotic creative tools with even more exotic names.įounded in 2010, WaveDNA are a Canadian company whose first product is Liquid Rhythm.
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