Sonuscore has introduced The Sculpture, a sample-based sound design instrument for Mac and Windows, created from a unique metal sculpture by German sculptor Klaus Gündchen.
The instrument contains recordings of the sculpture being struck, bowed, scraped and played using different techniques, including mallets, rolls and rubber balls. Four microphone perspectives capture the instrument from close, far, contact and internal positions.
The Sculpture includes two instruments: a Single instrument focused on direct playback of the recorded material, and an Engine instrument with five voices consisting of two playable voices, two arpeggiators and one granular voice, along with slot and master effects. It runs in the free Kontakt Player.
Features:
One-of-a-Kind Sound Source – Every sound sampled from a single handmade metal sculpture.
Four Microphone Perspectives – Close, far, contact, and an internal Blumlein pair for resonance from inside the metal.
Full Articulation Set – Mallets, rolls, bowed tones, rubberball techniques, and extended FX textures across plates and rods.
Two Instruments in One – A direct, playable Single instrument plus a five-layer Engine instrument with arpeggiators, granular voice, and effects.
Free Kontakt Player Ready – 5–6 GB of sample content, no full Kontakt license required.
The Sculpture is available from Sonuscore with an intro price of US $79 (normally $99).
Am I Audio has introduced I Am Choir, a new vocal processing plugin that transforms a monophonic vocal recording into choir-style performances, using AI voice models trained on recordings of real singers.
Rather than functioning as a traditional harmonizer or chorus effect, the plugin generates ensemble vocal performances that follow the source vocal’s lyrics, melody, and timing. The initial release includes Gospel Choir, Children’s Choir, and ‘Gang Vocals’ models, with additional voice models planned.
The company states that the voice models were developed in collaboration with participating singers, who were compensated for their recordings and receive royalties from sales of the product.
Features:
Generates choir performances from a single vocal recording
Preserves the original lyrics, melody, and timing of the source performance
Three AI voice models trained on recordings of real singers
Gospel Choir
Children’s Choir
Gang Vocals
Designed to produce full ensemble vocal performances rather than conventional chorus or harmonizer effects
Supports macOS and Windows
I Am Choir is available now for macOS and Windows. The regular price is US$199, with an introductory launch price of US$169.
MIDIpad turns gamepads into musical instruments, both as a MIDI controller compatible with modern DAWs and as a standalone synthesizer and drum machine.
Developer Steve Mitchell has released MIDIpad, a genius app for macOS that turns a PlayStation controller into a musical instrument, working as both an MPE-compatible MIDI controller and a standalone synth and drum machine, and there’s also a free version.
MIDIpad is built around two distinct instruments: Chords is described as a “guitar-like chord machine” and Drums is a “gestural drum machine”. In the Chords mode, the controller’s left stick can be pointed towards one of six chords on a wheel in the centre of its interface, and that chord can be strummed using either the right stick or the touchpad, with the chosen chord laid out vertically across six “strings” in a guitar-style voicing.
The speed of the strum controls the velocity of the notes played, and notes can be sustained by shaking the controller or palm-muted using the left trigger, while dragging horizontally across the touchpad’s X axis shapes the sound’s timbre and dynamics.
By default, the wheel is segmented into six chords – all the diatonic triads from your chosen key except the diminished chord. If you want some harmonic colour, holding the bumper controls opens up a new chord wheel: the right bumper gives you the dominant seventh of each chord from the main wheel, the left bumper flips the quality of the chords from major to minor (or vice versa) and you can access suspensions and extended chords by holding down the left stick.
MIDIpad’s Drums mode turns the controller into a drum machine with a twist. It’s possible to use the right-hand buttons on the face of the controller to trigger four drum hits like a traditional pad controller, but it’s the joysticks that open up a more complex and unusual method of crafting a groove.
Pushing the left stick in any direction triggers a rhythmic sequence, or “stream”, of closed hi-hats, pushing the right stick does the same with a kick drum, and the direction of the push controls the sub-division of your rhythm, from quarter-notes through to thirty-second notes. Push the stick further out to the rim and a snare will sound on the 2 and 4, giving you a backbeat.
There’s a velocity contour applied to each rhythm to stop beats sounding metronomic, and drum patterns can be tweaked even further using the rest of the available controls: you can throw in off-beat hits and snare rolls, drop the whole pattern into half-time, or adjust the velocity shaping.
MIDIpad can be used standalone, and its internal synth engines are based on the open-source code for Mutable Instruments’ Plaits and Braids modules – it’s equipped with twelve preset “voices”, each of which gets three macro controls for timbral shaping, and a selection of drum sounds.
In addition, you can route MIDIpad out to your DAW to control other instruments via MIDI, and the paid version offers MPE support: each string gets its own MIDI channel, with per-note pressure and timbre, and shaking the controller feeds pressure back into notes that are still ringing to create volume swells. (In the free Demo Mode, Chords is routed over a single MIDI channel.)
Mitchell says he created MIDIpad in response to challenges he faced as a self-taught electronic musician. “I’ve picked up a bunch of music theory concepts over the years via osmosis; I started as a bassist, then picked up guitar, taught myself rudimentary keyboard skills, I can generally noodle around pretty competently but the muscle memory has never quite clicked for me,” reads a post on Mitchell’s blog.
“A lot of the time I’d find myself thinking ‘I want this sound, but I don’t know what it’s called’, so I’d just be blindly putting my fingers on the frets or on the keys until something I liked fell out of the instrument.
“I wanted to make music without having to lug something bigger than my laptop around with me. MPE also looks super cool! But I can’t afford the very expensive hardware controllers that actually make use of it.”
He continues: “Then one day I found my old PS4 controller collecting dust in a drawer and I had an idea: what if playing music could work more like playing a video game? The word ‘play’ is right there in both of them, after all.”
Turning a gamepad into a MIDI controller isn’t a novel concept, but most previous examples we’ve seen have essentially just mapped a controller’s buttons and joysticks to notes and MIDI CC, which is fun but limited.
MIDIpad is a free download and most of its functionality is available in the Demo Mode, but a paid license gives you complete control over routing for audio and MIDI, all twelve voices (the demo has three) and access to more advanced settings. The paid version is currently priced at $19/£16 and also gets you free lifetime updates.
MIDIpad is available now for macOS and is designed to work with Sony DualShock 4 and DualSense PlayStation controllers over USB or Bluetooth. It can be used with controllers for other consoles, but this limits what you can do with it – check out the manual for more details.
Find out more on MIDIpad website.
