Blockhead daw - seriously impressive

[gentleclockdivider]

Found this on moddwigler forum, a daw with a twist and primarly focussed on sound design out of the box thinking .
I am seriously impressed
https://youtu.be/P5fWPBOdrY8
Still in beta but you can already support the developer
https://www.patreon.com/colugomusic

[Scotty]

Really interesting concept. You can turn off the grid on some DAWs and work freehand without a tempo map and then apply a grid to it after the fact. Cubase will do this and likely others. The interaction between the effect dlls and audio events is innovative. It would be good to see someone who doesn't "suck at sound design" (his words not mine) give this a go as this seems to be well suited to the task. I could see generating unique samples and loops with this tool. Cool stuff.

[spoontechnique]

I've been using Blockhead on Linux for months and it's a ton of fun. Obviously it suggests a very particular workflow: no MIDI, no piano roll, no VSTs or external effects, no traditional recording or comping. And it's still definitely an alpha, although I don't even have that many crashes. No VSTs greatly reduces crashing.

My favorite feature is the way the recording works. Great for improvising, finding an idea, and slapping it on to the timeline. The flexible tempo/meter system is great, but combined with macros it gets wild. You can have a song at one tempo/meter with sections in another, and then macros within those sections that have another tempo. So fun.

And while the effects are very limited, the effects system lets you use them to their full potential. Momentary effects, effortless automation, quick resampling. You can also make Macro for effects, which acts like a serial or parallel FX rack. Nuts!

If you use a sample or hardware-recording based setup, I would highly recommend it. Patreon's lowest tier is $3/month, which is great value for a whole DAW. I don't think it'll ever be a big time DAW cause it's too unique, but if you click with it you'll love it and it'll lead you into interesting places.

[gentleclockdivider]

Yep, I am also now funding it .
Having lots of un , great workflow .
A minimum amount of included effects so that’s an area that could def be improved , still verry promising and will keep backing him up for at least a year .

[bmanic]

Same here, have been part of the Patreon for a while now. Looking forward to the major overhaul of the codebase for possibly a bit more stability. But yeah, the concept is absolutely great for live tinkering with hardware synths on a non-rigid timeline. It's a really nice way to compose and experiment with ideas.

[DrGonzo]

Looks fantastic for sound design.

[gentleclockdivider]

I would love to see a dedicated volume control on the lanes ( not tracks since these already have on )
It's pretty easy to go into the red with just 1 track + few sub lanes (containing audio )

[spoontechnique]

A possible workaround is to use the Gainer effect to lower the volume of certain lanes. But I think splitting those lanes into different tracks might work better. Macros can also help.

A quirk I've noticed is that bounced Blocks are affected by the track volume. So if the track volume is positive, blocks often end up too loud.

[mutagen]

Interview about Blockhead

https://musichackspace.org/blockhead-in ... s-penrose/

I have a suspicion that people think about audio and sound in quite different ways. For many the way that digital audio software currently works is very close to the way that they think about sound, and that’s why it works so well for them. They would look at Blockhead and think, well, what’s the point? But I have a suspicion that there’s a whole other group of people who think about audio in a slightly different way and maybe don’t even realise as there has never been a piece of software that represents things this way.

I'm hoping it will spark my own creativity to work with audio and music in a different way.

[spoontechnique]

Blockhead handles resampling better than any DAW I've tried. Both in terms of rendering blocks, and the loopback buffer. Anything you can hear you can grab. I end up 10 renders deep with a completely transformed sound. Lots of fun!