A software Tenori-On? My first thought was “meh”, but since I didn’t find any fun news to update with (which was what I was supposed to do) I figured I’d put blogging aside for this morning and instead try this version of the Tenori-On called Weepr… And also speculate a little about what we can use from this.

I’ve never used a Tenori-On, I would love to however, I think it could be a very cool creative tool for me. When it first came out I wasn’t really interested in it because it seemed to play sounds that wasn’t intended for me at all at the time, but times change, and styles of music and sounds I enjoy comes and goes in waves, and now the time is right for me and the Tenori-On.

So what’s Weepr? As I said, a virtual Tenori-On which I suppose lacks some of it’s features. Weepr has five ‘layers’, each layer is one of these gargantuan matrixes and each of the buttons in this matrix is loaded with a sound which you enable by clicking on it. Furthermore each layer has a different sound. While in play mode Weepr loops, and the only tricks you can really do is disable rows in the layers (both horizontally and diagonally). To me it seemed like it also had some pretty bad timing issues causing it to slow down every now and then.

What can we learn from this?

Obviously this is not a flexible thing and a toy, but by using it I realized a kind of dream application that I’d like to see:

• This application would feature a similar interface, but instead of copying the Tenori-On it would be built around the computer keyboard. This would give four rows at your disposal with the possibility of moving a bank up or down with the arrows, and perhaps nudging a row up or down with the other two arrows. Tons of functions could be assigned to the numeric keypad or possibly to the 1-0 key row (giving us only three rows to work with but helping laptop users) making it a completely mouseless tool which would be lightning fast to work with.
• It would need to be a standalone application with Rewire capabilities. It probably wouldn’t work as a plug-in because the host (such as Pro Tools) would override the keys functionality. If I may just be so bold as give Digidesign a little kick in the butt while am at it, I strongly feel that on Mac Rewire would now be redundant if it wasn’t for Pro Tools. Soundflower is in my experience superior, but because of how Pro Tools works the two are not compatible, making it the only sound application I’ve ever seen that doesn’t work with Soundflower.
• No bloody CPU hogging and not tons of features for the sake of it! It seems like today every audio app wants to be like every other audio app instead of focusing what they’re good at. This could be a cool creative launching pad to start creating sounds and beats on, when it’s time for mixing or adding real instruments it could be streamed into Pro Tools or whatever your favorite DAW is.
• Preloaded with samples (from the Digidesign AIR team of course - you rock guys!) but with the ability to load any sample to any of the slots.
• Hitting tab would ‘flip it’ (you know, like Reason and Live) but not to a virtual studio, but to a tracker (seriously, that would create so much possibilities).

Man, I wish I was a programmer, I would do it myself… Couldn’t be too much work, I’m sure a lot of it is already available in some sort of open source.

You also want to weep?

Let me say this before you go out downloading Weepr: it’s a toy. I mean, it’s fun, and I came up with a cool pattern, but it’s a toy. There’s as far as I can see no functionality for saving or recording, no mixing capabilities and so on. For being a toy you need to do a lot of things to get it running.