Patterning 2

A drum machine that’s hard to beat

$19.99 From Olympia Noise Co., olympianoiseco.com Made for iPad Needs iOS 10.3 or later If you’re looking for a drum machine that takes full advantage of your iPad’s touch screen, you should buy Patterning 2. And if you’re looking for something that’s incredibly powerful and creatively exciting, you should also buy Patterning 2.

Patterning 2 is a circular drum machine. You can also use traditional trigger pads, but they’re a lot less fun. To create a pattern, simply use your finger to swipe the appropriate segment of the circle — so, as an example, for a 4/4 kick drum you might swipe every fourth slice. You can then adjust the velocity with a swipe for each instance. Once you’ve done that you can move onto another ring for the next sound, and you can chain different patterns together to create a song. You can adjust time signature, tempo, mix your unique sounds, and match them to other drum beats.

If that was all Patterning 2 could do, that’d be quite impressive — but it can do so much more than that.

Take steps, for example. By default each sound gets 16 steps in a 4/4 signature. But you can change that per sound, so you might give a percussion sound 17 steps and a handclap 21. That means with each repetition they’ll move out of sync with the original 16 steps, creating some wonderfully unusual rhythms. You can also auto–rotate the entire pattern by a set number of steps, by rotating it two steps with each repetition — so a beat that falls on the first bar the first time around falls on the third, then the fifth, and so on. This feature is an absolute blast.

Patterning 2 works with Ableton DAW via Ableton Link, and you can also control it via an external MIDI controller. It also supports other apps via Inter–App Audio, so you can use it with Audiobus and can record live performances as well as your preset patterns.

There are many drums in the App Store, but Patterning 2 is unique: it’s a fun and flexible way to create catchy patterns, then mess around with them in all kinds of creative ways. It’s, ahem, hard to beat.

the bottom line. A very powerful beat–maker that’s a joy to use when creating patterns.

The circle isn’t a gimmick: it makes it easy to see and edit your beats.

You can change the color scheme: we like the multicolor ones, which work really well in the mixer screen as is shown here.