Phrasebox really gives you an easy way to create complex phrases/arps/sequences. It has been updated often, with each updating adding great new functionality. This latest update (1.2.0) really adds a lot of extra features. It is the best arp/seqencer currently available on the market, in my opinion. Venomode have really created something special here.
Fantastic - by far my favored method of arpeggiating / sequencing is via a piano-roll interface, When NORA fell out of the market I waited patiently for someone to fill that role again. The ability to sculpt highly musical phrases with this much freedom cannot be matched by the standard grid approach.
As for responsive? I asked for live/trigger mode - I got live/trigger mode. This developer is fully engaged with the customer, and took the time to toss ideas back and forth with me via email - greatly appreciated! THAT'S how you do it :).
If anybody out there, like me, is a MIDI Modifier gourmand (trust me I've messed with a lot of them!), don't hesitate. Buy and enjoy this great product.
Phrasebox is a very "clever" plug-in. It seems to have really hit the "sweet spot" between flexibility and usability. The frequent updates are logical, well thought out and the developer is super responsive. Thanks so much for this awesome tool.
Phrasebox from Venomode (https://venomode.com/phrasebox) is a fascinating and powerful MIDI utility designed to help you compose music more easily. As the name suggests, the focus of the tool is on building musical phrases, which is a much needed fresh perspective on traditional arpeggiator or chord progression tools. After all, musical phrases are how musicians think. As a composer, you often want to try out your musical ideas in different keys, different locations in the score, or with different arrangements. Phrasebox makes this exploration so much easier, especially for a very reasonable price. This review will hit some of the highlights I've found in my first week of using it.
Phrasebox works within your DAW. (This reviewer uses Cubase). In Cubase, it seems to work best when using one instance of Phrasebox to play one instrument, and you can of course add as many instances as you need for your tracks. The basic concept is that you will feed into Phrasebox chord progressions either by playing on your keyboard live or by routing a MIDI track with chord notes on it - and those notes will be transformed by Phrasebox into the musical idea you've laid out in the grid. Ostinatos, driving bass lines, wild arpeggios are all possible. Want to build a four-part fugue? Go right ahead. This tool ensures your melodies, harmonies, and counterpoints are all right on key. Phrasebox could be used powerfully with a wide variety of VST instruments - piano, guitar, synths, orchestral instruments, and sound design instruments. Setting up Phrasebox is relatively straightforward, somewhere between easy to intermediate in complexity. It's not going to read your mind, yet with just a bit of practice you're going to be doing some great creative work a lot faster than you did before and having a lot more fun doing it. After just a week's use, I can see I'll be using this for most if not nearly all my composition projects from here on out.
Phrasebox also succeeds by not trying to do too much. You couldn't, for example, sequence the entire first movement of Beethoven's Fifth with it, but you definitely could create some great variations on that opening. Feeling a little Zimmerish? Build those lower string ostinatos on one track and layer some high string and brass melodies on top of it. Those tracks will all blend beautifully, even when you switch from D minor to G major or later change your mind to hear it in B-flat lydian. Because the tracks are following your chord progression, you don't have to make substantial changes to a bunch of MIDI just to experiment with different keys or scales. You can also constrain your patterns to a specific scale mode in each key - you get twelve modes per key from which to choose (major, harmonic minor, natural minor, dorian, phrygian, lydian, lydian flat 7, mixolydian, locrian, jazz melodic minor, pentatonic major, and pentatonic minor).
Many of the features are what you'd expect in this kind of tool, but a few features really stand out. First, each instance can include up to seven different CC automation lane assignments of your choice, in addition to velocity, transpose, octave, chance, and pitch bend. This means if you want to add some increasing vibrato to your phrase (for example), and your instrument supports vibrato through a CC channel (e.g. CC 11), you can include that expression as part of the phrase. Use CC 64 to apply the sustain pedal to all or part of your phrase. If your instrument uses a CC value to switch articulations, you can accommodate that too (although, from what I can tell, keyswitches are not supported directly). Overall, you can be as precise as you need to be to fit your target instrument or more generic to suite a wider variety of VST instruments. Phrases can be copied and pasted as you'd expect, and an entire Phrasebox setup can be saved as a user preset. What all these features ultimately give you is the ability to compose freely and still get the playback quality you want, to the degree of preciseness you want.
Then to make your phrases a permanent part of your project, you would record the MIDI output from Phrasebox in you DAW, and the output includes your CC and automation data too.
Another hugely important capability is being able to make fine adjustments to the length of notes whether for more realistic performances or to trigger legato transitions that require overlapping notes.
(Cubase users, if you've ever tried to use the Cubase Chord Track to modify individual MIDI tracks based on scale or chord, you'll find that Phrasebox makes that process so much simpler and in many ways better because you get more predictable results.).
For future versions, I'd like to see a keyswitch lane added to the grid similar to the "Fixed" note lane with different fixed notes per step. For longer compositions, I could also use more than twelve phrases per instance and at least twice as many steps per phrase (you get 32 right now, which is a lot already). Lastly, more scale modes like exotic scales, or perhaps user-defined scales, would be really fun. I'd love to see a future version where you could record a phrase live from keyboard or import MIDI from the DAW into Phrasebox for that nth degree of humanization.
That said, this is a very well designed and user-friendly compositional aid that has been made with a composer's perspective front and center. For version 1, it's incredibly deep and powerful. I would pick this utility over any of the other scale, chord, and pattern MIDI tools that I've purchased in the last couple of years.
Edit 1: In my review that praised Phrasebox, I mentioned some improvements to the piano roll editor. In the next release, the developer added those improvements. Super impressed with the responsiveness of the developer. Thanks again for the great tool.
Simplest harmony based sketching and composing.
I've tried many products on the in this realm of audio plugins and out of all of them PhraseBox was the easiest to setup, play with and understand. I was able to get going with most of its features in under 10 minutes:
Its easy: PhraseBox doesn't require you to learn a new mental model for abstracting musical notes and harmony. You put your chords in your daw, and you add or remove notes in Phrasebox, much like you would in your DAW's piano roll. If you know how to write chords and use a piano roll, you know how to use PhraseBox.
Contrast this with a product like Cognitone's Harmony Navigator and Synfire. In order to be productive, you're going to have to install multiple pieces of software, route your audio and then learn an entirely new mental modal for music composition.
Its not a limited or a toy: PhraseBox doesn't try to replace your own creativity, it assists in getting you "in the zone" faster so you can start creating. PhraseBox isn't a "Black Box", its more like simple way of using a piano roll for sketching melodies / phrases.
Contrast this with some products which say they will compose your the music for you but end up generating cliche garbage.
Couple of things I would like to see in future releases:
Ability to select a group of notes and copy / move them inside the piano roll.
