An Addictive Alternative To DAWs 

"Anyone lying about what Mark Twain says is a person worth listening to." - Mark Twain

You are about to absolutely exPLOde this steam game that has 26 reviews

It's so nice when GAS hits an entirely new itch I didn't even know existed AND sets me back $20 instead of like 2 grand. What a delightful program, the "gaming brain plus music brain" is an underutilized crossover. I'm a data analyst in my 9-5 and this feels like programming a solution for manipulating or rolling up and analyzing data. This is going to be a deep enjoyable dive. Thanks again for all the content and Mark Twain lies

I'm incredibly impressed that this software was developed by someone who just learned coding as their first project?! I'm a programmer myself and this is insane

This was kind of like the thing where you think you dislike an ingredient and then go to a good restaurant and realize that you just had a bad version of it previously. The only generative stuff I've seen thus far has been purely mathematical curios with little if any musical value, or modular guys going ham and ending up with a naive salad of noise and random notes. This was really eye-opening, thank you

The "not enough alternative ways" thing struck me real hard. I do field service inspection and when I'm taking a break in my car I'll be zoning off on nanoloop doing live techno and FX-free dnb

The fact this was created by someone with no previous coding experience is absolutely amazing. Excellent work.

"You can make anything sound good with enough reverb" -Mark Twain

Fascinating. The 'basics' demonstration of this non-DAW felt like playing minesweeper whilst conjuring Future Sound of London vibes at the same time.

From the Steam page, it looks a bit like a (much) more-approachable implementation of some of the ideas in Orca. Neat!

I bought Midinous _aggggges_ ago, played with it a bit, thoroughly enjoyed it, put it down and haven't picked it up again since. Not because it's not great, but because I got distracted and... you know how it goes. It looks like a bunch of features have been added since then and I've now got all of my hardware synths hooked up for midi to my PC, so I'm definitely going to check it out again! Thanks for reminding me of its existence!

This is right up my alley. I already get stuck in generative music creation software like it's Factorio.

Jesus how the hell have I never heard of this? I am a hobbyist computer scientist, an IT guy, electronic musician and I am all about the non-random, generative midi. (That was regarding nodal, but also other interesting stuff after..)

no joke this just makes more sense in my brain than a conventional DAW. This just gave me so many ideas of a new software I could make that is inspired by this idea!!!! Midinous is so cool!

That song at the end was great. Also loved the patch that was shaped like a tree, very organic! Cool demonstration.

Awesome video! I can't help but mentioning I made software for Ableton (Max for Live) called New Path some time ago, heavily inspired by Electroplankton as well! 🙂 It has a similar grid of arrows, but it adds many features like teleports and crossroads, etc. And it's a midi device so you can control anything you want with it, synths, samplers, drums, parameters, etc.

Been looking for something like this without knowing it since i got into musicmaking! Thank you for consistently being a motivational force in my life wonderful human!

Thank you for making this video Benn! I've been looking for something like this for a long time.

I'm so glad I saw this! Thanks to this video I got Midinous on the weekend and I've been having so much fun making a song with branching paths :D Inserting a new section in the middle of a song feels very natural, because you don't have to move anything around, you can just stick a new path wherever. And I like that I can either make the hubs random, or tell them exactly what order to do the paths and exactly how many times. I can stick strictly to verse-chorus-verse if I want to, or not!

I say this on most videos I think but your demos are always so on point and inspiring and holy fricken shizzle 21:36 is so amazing. I just got home from work to finish the video and it transported me to another space entirely. amazing stuff

As someone without classical training, but an interest in music and having the background of a gamer the is such a beautiful thing. Being able turn timing notes into a logic puzzle is awesome. SIDE NOTE: I stumbled across your video but listen to you work on Spotify all the time and love it! didn't know until the end of the video!

And it's in these moments where it's a bit depressing to find a video that is so relaxing, cool, exciting and brilliant. And a pity not being able to share it with someone who is not even interested and may be surprised as I have done.

incredible ui visualisation. to me this is a new standard i could see this being incorporated into daws as a toggle view. amazing job

This is seriously an amazing video. Thank you for making this. Ive always wanted to make music but for aome reason i havent been able to commit. This feels like something id accidently apend whole days working with

This totally blew my mind. I know it's not the same thing but when using Punk-o-Matic 2 to make music, the benefit of having a band perform the piece takes it to another level of enjoyment. So this is like performance & creation in one too. I love watching this play through something you make.

I absolutely love this! ORCA was one I enjoyed playing around with, but I really appreciate the visual layout of this - it feels both in-depth while also surprisingly intuitive. I'm definitely gonna demo this, and for $20 (currently on sale), it's almost certainly something I'd be interested in picking up!

WOW. this is INCREDIBLE, I'm absolutely buying this!! From a graphic designer's perspective, I always wanted to experiment with music making but struggled to understand the interfaces of any DAW I tried. for the uninitiated, it feels like being in the pilot's chair in an airplane where there are a million tiny levers and buttons and switches and it's not immediately clear what any of them do. But THIS makes use of grouping similar things together, which is like, one of the main tenants of graphic design, it makes something so much easier to understand. Having little closed circuits in different areas for baseline, main melody, percussion, etc. makes this SO much easier to understand for me. I hope there's some settings where we could make circuit lines bolder or thinner as well, having something like that would help immensely with visual hierarchy and make things even more readable. Your loudest main melody could be bold lines and quieter backround circuits could be thinner. I'm so excited about this, thank you for making a video about it!!!

Awesome! Very very useful for what I'm working on atm. Love it, thanks!

Fascinating concept! Love it!!! Thanks for sharing.

That last song with the pads and the sunset was incredible

you get some wonderful results with this stuff. now, I'm inspired to try my hand at it. yaaaay!! thanks bunches.

I've had this wishlisted for over a year, thanks for the reminder to pick this up! Excited to get this connected to some hardware.

Great run thru, and really great software for visual compositions. This gets close to a goal I have of feeding generative midi data from one system to other generative systems and then back again… creating generative loops with human modulation somewhere in the mix. PEACE

I just discovered your channel with this video. I have always had an interest in music creation and have dinked around with DAWs here and there, but I've also always had a deep interest in circuit design and electronic logic- this program immediately makes music 'click' for me in my head. Thank you so much for this video and the community that facilitated the creation of this tool- I'll be picking this up immediately and messing with it endlessly I'm sure!

One time I actually started burning out on music a long time ago. Was only classically trained at that time playing only prewritten compositions. But then I discovered improv, and it was like just discovering music all over again from the very beginning. Tried to node based playing, particularly on iPad, but improv always gets me excited for music again.

I saw this video randomly suggested to me and I gotta say, really glad I gave it a watch, and you're right on the money with the thumbnail tbh - kinda felt close to an "ad" for a friend's app/game at first, but being 100% fair it's a VERY cool product; I may have immediately gone and bought it because dang… really interesting and fun piece of software. Thanks for sharing and for the demo! 😄👍

Just bought it, thanks for the recommendation! Love gaming and making music so I'm excited to experiment with it.

Mind blown! Thank you, Benn. Fire for sure.

Great video. Thanks for bringing this cool stuff to my attention. Now, hopefully I can get some time to try this stuff out.

I loved playing around in Electroplankton and these look like a ton of fun. Thanks for spreading the word!

I've been looking for something like this for years, cheers Ben...

This is so cool! Gonna add to my steam wishlist to check out when i get home. It's a completely different workflow but this really reminds me of a playstation 2 "game" i used to spend hours screwing around in many years ago called magix music maker. It was like a sample/loop based thing you could "play" just sitting on the couch or whatever.

Wow that ambient stuff

I saw the Tenori-On as a kid when it got released and was fascinated, but never got one. This software may spark this fascination and joy again, so thanks for showing it! I'll give it a try.

That was fun, thanks. A good trip down memory land and learned a few things along the way too... cheers!

Subscribed. Right when the cord was triggered at 19:37. Something about that routing follow into the chord, and the duration of the cord timing out, I dunno... just got me. Also... bought it, too.

Really cool!! Great demo! Thanks for sharing!

i can't wait to see someone make an entire operative system out of those music circuits

Can’t wait to see what I do with this! I’ve been considering a ROG Ally specifically for music production stuff when it comes out and could see this being used with great results there. Very neat little program! It’s almost like a non-linear tracker, and my brain is SUPER into that idea.

This is amazing! I can play simple bass, I can play guitar like a bass, I can fat-finger piano - but because of that, my creative expression for music is mostly in my DAW FL Studio's piano roll, which is tough when you need to let your creativity flow. Connecting this to FL Studio has given me a new way to doodle and find what I'm looking for in terms of inspiration. Thank you!!

Just took it for a quick spin and _Ooof!_ This is fantastic! Just alone for the incredible ease of making one note, wherever it is in the sequence, trigger something else. Weee!

I started with "the hum", and now this. Thanks! Great channel.

I've been following and using Midinous for a while and it's great. I haven't used it for a while, but maybe I should!

This is why I love Renoise, and I came from oldschool DOS tracking Fasttracker II. This is very cool, and helps to break us out of the monotony of piano roll.

So cool! Thank you for sharing 👏🏼

This might be something for me. I'm really into modular and procedural stuff, my music theory isn't really up to game and I need good alternative ways to make music for my projects eventually. Thank you a lot for this! My mind has been blown.

My clogged up brain Thanks you & midinous. Stay safe J.

Honestly this is such a cool idea. I'm a software engineer and I am also often thinking about alternative, more programmatic ways of making music. But all my ideas so far would've been text/code based, which is hard to use for "normal" people. If this starts to support plugins and mixer channels I'm definitely going to use it!

This looks amazing for pattern based progressive metal. Stuff like meshuggah for example! It looks much more intuitive to make polymeters and repeating patterns. At the same time i really like beat scholar which does that thing but even better, this is much better for making melodies though

Lovely stuff again. This looks sooo interesting.

I've always been interested in things like these because I have a lot of interest in music and sound design, but I find myself very weak at composition and struggle to do much beyond making ambience. This approach to music really tickles my programmer side and fits into a view of making music that feels better suited for the way I think. Maybe some day I'll have the time and money to invest into it because it looks really cool.

I was just recently thinking about a program like this! Im glad i saw this. Ive been wanting a program where i can make polyrhythmic songs. I started in VCV rack using very limited pieces. I wanted the ability to define my own markov chains, probabilities, loops, etc. This is exactly what ive been looking for!

I found this tool fresh, exciting, and affordable. I went ahead and, after doing some successful tests, purchased it! Nice review, Benn!

I would like to thank the algorythm for taking me to a video from a RU-vidr I didn't follow about a software I didn't know about. Good job! Also, this seems much more approachable than Wotja, which I had fun with for generative music, but whoose learning curve seems much more steep when you want to get more complex stuff going.

What a neat way to come up with inspiration and experiment. Often when you're playing and freestyling an instrument, it can sometimes feel difficult to really create something "new", because your muscle memory is always going to tend towards some rough parameters of sound. That can get better, but also worse, depending on the degree of your "writers block", or "composers block" I should say.

So neat. Thanks for making this.

this is for me the most inspirational video from you thus far

Fantastic tour of this tool and I respect the commitment to Papyrus here

DUDE!! I just saw your ATMOS video, good breakdown of the system, but didn't recognize you. Then at the end of this video, you show one of your albums... and it's The f*cking FLASHBULB!! One of my friends back in the day showed me Arboreal, and I was blown away! You, sir, are an absolute genius, and seeing how you can use a program like this in an actual composition proves that. In the meantime, it looks like I need to catch up on your discography. Been diving into a lot of metal and classic rock, so I think it's time to mix things up with some electro-jazz...

I gotta say virtualizing the expensive option is amazing. VR synth is amazing. It has a long way to go before we're building custom electronics and really cracking the ceiling, but it's well on its way.

I need this kind of incrental node based music system as a sound controller for a game. This is going to my bucket list. Just imagine the granularity you can achieve for stuff like threat music in dynamic enviroments.

This is incredible. Being a software developer, and music producer I would be lying If I haven't though of doing one application similar to this. MIDINOUS is incredible, and I feel that this, or any other software in this line, can be enough to open creation to new grounds. Think like the game of life, where new patterns, or music "factories", can be discovered, shared, and people might generate their own music styles, within a template or pattern. Add some voice generation, and some effects gimmics, and it's a full one man music producing studio.

1:47 that's the reason why I started to learn how to use modular synths on vcv rack, this is so inspiring

Wow this is awesome! Can't wait to try it.

Most interesting stuff in my feed as always

Wow this is incredible, thanks for sharing.

2 decades ago I came up with almost the same idea. I had visions about a nonlinear music sequencer that works like a cross between a model train table and a tape echo - the trains are like tape pieces and the player can build his rail layout and place record and playback heads everywhere, those make sounds when the "trains" pass is. Trains can have different tempo or run through a crossover (that may split it to exit at both ends) etc. etc.

20:00 This almost sounds like the music you hear in the character creation screen in Dark Souls 1. Beautiful!

I was desperately hoping Nodal would get an upgrade. Maybe I've found out it is named Midinous. I'll check it out. Thank you so much for the always inspiring content, Benn.

love it. I've been waiting decades for something like Dr.T's Fingers for the Atari ST but with today's tech. I believe I found it here!

i was really curious awhile ago about midinous and couldn't find anything detailed about how it works. it was a nice surprise to hear that it's what the video is about after watching for almost 5 minutes.

Oh damn! Been watching a while and only just realised you're one of my favourite musicians (The Flashbulb)!

Thank for the inspiration and discovery!

One of the many reasons I loved bhajis loops for palm pilot and even now my old as hell rs7000 is that they had interesting inspirational tools to play with when there were no ideas kicking around your head. For instance a tool I like to use o. The rs7000 is one that most people ignore: the huge selection of midi clips that are assigned to styles and instrumentation but you don't have to stick with that...combine that with the midi remixes function and the midifx knobs that time stretch and shift notes around....you can make a completely original tune and play absolutely no notes. It's all pushing around preset midi data and it can go into extremely cool places quickly and its just a lot of fun.

As a programmer.... I felt chills watching this application at work... It covers the basics of Node based programming in an almost artistic fashion that I could never seek to comprehend... It's like marveling at math, the complex computations of infinity, watching as it can go on and on with infinite possibilities. With undisputed potential. I aspire to write a program, app, or game as complex and complete as this.

Looks awesome ! Nice showcase! :)

Great overview @Benn Jordan

This looks sick! Though clicking around to make music is the thing that makes me want to get out of a DAW in the first place 😅 Probabilistic plugins and programs are always great ways to generate ideas you wouldn't have otherwise thought of

what a crazy cool piece of software; can't believe i'd never heard of Midinous before!

great video Benn :)

Cool software! Haven't heard of this one yet. I've really gotten into node-based music lately. Another super cool node-based program that I've been using a lot lately is Bespoke Synth. It's different from this in that it's a modular synthesizer and it's free and open-source! I think this would work very well if combined with bespoke.

I was pretty skeptical until about half way through the video. Nice work! Very different and looks like a lot of fun.

Lovely, reminds me of the days with the atari st and amiga back in the 80s. I love it.

Master Tracks Pro had piano roll before 1989. Had it on my Mac Plus in 1988, so it existed within MTP at least since then.

o shit i didnt know u were The Flashbulb until the end of the video. love your stuff and great video!

Octamed on Amiga = 7 years of my life, back in the 90s. Nostalgia!

I've not finished watching yet, but this video is REALLY timely for me. I've recently done a lot of my own coding in the service of making both MIDI output and audio (also wavetables). One of the MIDI things I made was an algorithm to make chaotic sequences - i.e. not actually random, but unpredictable - and they actually sound great! I really look forward to watching this one :)

It'd be pretty interesting to see someone make music like this but the nodes are set up in a way that just makes a big tree or something!

You got me with that Twain quote, Benn. You reaaaally Twained me up good.

Only in the first min of the vid, but I have to throw in Gene Wolfe's advice on writers block, which is to ask yourself, "What's the next cool thing that happens?"- the important word here being cool... a very subjective word, but one in which your own tastes and those of your readers (or listeners, I guess) are strongly likely to align. "Happens" is of course another key word for this to work lol.