iPHone Synth



I recently downloaded the Noise.IO Pro synth for the Apple iPhone. It’s a single voice synth with a surprisingly deep feature set. It offers a modulation matrix with which you can do all sorts of sound tweaking. However, though it’s easy to get some nice sounds out of it when you first turn it on (a lot of cool sequenced sounds are programmed in), the user interface is way cryptic. It will definitely take you some time to get the hang of it. It offers two main ways to trigger sounds, either from a little two-octave keyboard or matrix of buttons that trigger notes. Within the latter there are three different modes, offering a range of possibilities. It even takes advantage of the iPhone’s motion sensor, allowing you to literally shake your phone to modulate a sound. You also get a soft ribbon controller for further control. In addition, there are built in effects such as delay, chorus/flanger, distortion, and a bitcrusher.



Considering that it costs only $10 ($9.99 to be precise), it’s pretty cool, and a lot of fun to play around with. It has an online manual, but I didn’t find it to be as informative about basic operations as I would have liked. Be prepared to be frustrated by the Noise.io Pro until you spend a lot of time learning itse ins and outs. It’s not exactly what I would call user friendly.

Although some of the presets are a little on the cheesy side, it sounds pretty darn good overall, especially if you’re listening on headphones or plugged into your computer. I plugged it into my audio interface using the iPhone’s headphone out, and recorded this example, which features four parts (two sequenced sounds, a bass, and percussion) into Ableton Live. I did a little bit of editing to tighten some of the parts up (the keyboard has a very slight delay when you hit a note, so it’s not so easy to nail rhythms spot on.) I did not add any effects in Live; these sounds are all from the Noise.io Pro.