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MIDIpad
Your gamepad is a musical instrument
19 followers
Your gamepad is a musical instrument
19 followers
MIDIpad is a macOS application that transforms game controllers into musical instruments compatible with any modern digital audio workstation. More than simply mapping gamepad buttons to MIDI notes or CCs, MIDIpad turns your gamepad into two powerful, accessible, MPE-capable MIDI controllers: Chords, an expressive, scale-aware plucked-string engine, and Drums, a real-time, gesture-driven drum sequencer.
MIDIpad
Greetings earthlings!
I'm building this weird little mutant app to solve a couple of common challenges that I find myself encountering when making music on my laptop. MIDI controller hardware tends to be bulky, MPE-enabled controllers are prohibitively expensive, and I find myself quickly confused by music theory concepts that I've half-picked up over the years but haven't quite stuck. Controllers like Push from Ableton are fantastic, and they can make life easier by making it impossible to play out of key, but that also began to feel restrictive; what if I want borrowed chords?
I wanted to play the synths and samplers in my DAW the same way I play my guitar: recklessly, on raw muscle memory, following feel over "correctness", quick iteration through exploration, but most importantly it had to be fun. It couldn't feel like a chore, or like I was having to do maths in my head to figure out what to do next, I wanted it to just flow. I had this image in my mind of shaping music by feel and response rather than painstakingly composing it, and I couldn't find anything that aligned to that image.
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. Point stick at chord, play, point at different chord, play again? Could that work?
So after a bunch of trial end error experimenting to figure out the core mechanisms, I settled on Chords and Drums; melody and harmony on one side, percussion and rhythm on the other, and worked towards sharpening the interaction models based on what I could feel my hands wanting the pad to make happen, and now it's easily my favourite way to make music.
MusicRadar wrote a nice piece on it shortly after the first release, and I've had incredible feedback from users all over the world since that first version went out.