FRAGILE: Industrial Drums

Eight tracks of metal, springs, motors and radio, and a sample of your own. Nothing is recorded: every hit is computed as it sounds. Offline, with MIDI and WAV recording.

FRAGILE is an eight-track drum and texture machine for what is not a drum kit: sheet metal struck and bowed, oil drums, a spring, a motor, a radio between stations and a sample of your own. Nothing is recorded except the sample: every hit is computed as it sounds, and no two are alike.

THE EIGHT TRACKS • BOMBO: the low hit. From dry and short to one that drags a hum. • CAJA: the middle hit. Skins, noise, a blowtorch. • CHAPA: thin metal, struck or bowed. • BIDÓN: big hollow metal; it can also be dragged across the floor. • MUELLE: a reverb spring that takes a hit. • MOTOR: a machine that spins while the note is held. • RADIO: shortwave. Stations, interference and code. • MUESTRA: a sound of your own, recorded or opened from a file. Each track has several sounds, and each one is a different object, not the same thing pitched up. TONE, DECAY and MATERIAL change it.

DAÑO, ESPACIO AND ROTURA DAÑO breaks things: saturation, folding, bit reduction and a loop that whistles and howls. ESPACIO puts them in a hall: from a small room to a hangar, with tape echo. ROTURA is a single knob that wrecks the pattern: it swallows hits, doubles others, detunes. And it cracks the screen.

THE GRID Sixteen steps per track, each track with its own length, accent, repeats and probability. Per-step knobs: every hit can sound different. Each set holds four patterns and a chain of up to sixteen bars. There are twenty-two factory sets; yours are saved and exported to a file.

YOUR SAMPLE Recorded with the microphone or opened from a file. Trim it, draw its volume, play it once or looped, or slice it in 2, 4, 8 or 16 so each step plays its slice.

MIX A mixer for the eight tracks with level, mute, solo, PAN and DEPTH. On headphones, surround sound places each track around you.

MIDI Notes to trigger the tracks or play one of them by pitch, MIDI LEARN with regular and endless knobs, Program Change to load sets, and clock: it follows the tempo of whatever sends it. On iPad, Bluetooth MIDI.

ABLETON LINK In the app, tempo, bar and play shared with Ableton Live and other apps on the same network.

IN YOUR DAW It’s also an Audio Unit (AUv3) instrument, on Mac and iPad: it runs at the tempo and with the transport of the program that loads it, its controls can be automated, and the set is saved with the project.

RECORD 24-bit WAV: the mix or the eight tracks on their own.

AND ALSO Fourteen textures, photographs of fragile things going to ruin, that move with every hit. On the Mac you can also play from the computer keyboard. Undo and redo. In Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese, with the manual in all seven.

For Mac and iPad. It works offline, asks for no account and collects no data.