Blocs, based in Tileyard, Kings Cross, London, was born from the talented crew of one of the most well-known electronic music brands, Novation (a part of Focusrite). Novation recently unveiled the Peak, a highly anticipated analog/digital synth– the future looks bright for the growing tech companies. The team previously innovated the original Launchpad hardware and the hugely successful Launchpad for iOS app.
Their newest product, Blocs Wave, is a powerful electronic music-making sketchbook. It’s an arrangement tool, and an excellent idea-vomiter. You can record something or start with someone else’s ideas, 300 of them across six sound packs, for hip hop, house, indie, dark trap and more, and you arrange whichever ones you fancy into eight ‘blocks’ to come up with your own tunes.
Blocs Wave looks great on your iOS device of choice! (cred: Novation/Blocs/Musitech.net)
It recently has seen some updates that elevated it to the top of the list of great iOS music apps. The latest optimizes Blocs Wave for iOS with Launchpad to Blocs Wave Soundpack Sharing. You now see your purchased Launchpad soundpacks in Blocs Wave automatically.
Exporting music from Blocs Wave is as easy as pressing a button, which loads the music from each of the pads straight into Launchpad. If you want to change anything, it’s easy to go back to Blocs Wave, rearrange and re-export. Blocs’ export feature lets you create music using the app and later export it to Launchpad for iOS, allowing you to make your own custom soundpacks for remixing on the fly. As well as offering Launchpad users the chance to be more creative, it will save you money on new soundpacks, most of which cost $1.99 each.
As we eagerly await Live, Blocs Wave might be the closest we get to that reality for a long while. While it’s no DAW, it does have elements of Ableton that make it quite beautiful and usable in its own right.
It reminds us a lot of Propellerhead’s music-making app Figure, but with loops and audio-editing capabilities, instead of having to sequence individual notes.
Blocs is free and available to download from the app store today. Pick it up today and try it out- let DMNW know what you think about it!
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