With Daft Punk gone, we're losing valuable institutional knowledge in Giant Helmet Audio Production. Deadmau5 has been placed in protective confinement.
I'm surprised no one has made an orchestral conducting app. You could have different difficult levels where an increasing number of sections of the orchestra stop paying attention to you and start rebelling.
Paradiddle does support foot controllers for both kick drum & hi hat (usb or midi). Virtuoso also supports a lot more sounds with the SteamVR app but obvously you lose the standalone option. I just felt that it's worth highlighting both those options exist as they were mentioned as negatives in the vid. Looking up some drum solos on RU-vid and music people have created with Virtuoso shows how versatile they both are and that the lack of feedback in Paraddidle can be overcome!
@@BennJordan it's held in vrchat! i don't want to be the one posting links in the comment section but modular monday has an easy to find twitter to lead you further :)
I'm also emetophobic. Thanks for talking about it openly, it's something people often just laugh at. Made watching this video more comfy as people often get motionsickness and do the thang with vr headsets.
It’s not production, but there’s a thriving community of musicians in the VR social game VRChat. I have over 7,300 hours in the game and I regularly play live guitar blindfolded by the headset. It’s a great time! There are music festivals, contests, organized and spontaneous open mics, busking, etc. I’d love to introduce you to the scene if you’d be interested!
I worked in VR for three years. I grew to hate putting the headset on after a month. I don't think we'll see wide adoption of VR until it's small enough to fit in a pair of glasses or contact lenses. Nobody wants to strap a headset on every day, there's no tactility, and the hand tracking does not (yet) enable the use of fine motor skills. It's coming, but it's not ready yet. And sadly, once it is fully integrated with our daily lives and actually practically usable for fiddly things like music making, it will become a platform for pushing more ads into our field of view and collecting yet more personal data to sell to third parties. If a big corporation is pushing something hard, you can be sure there's an ulterior motive.
Oh this looks interesting! You’ve spoken in less then glowing terms about spatialized audio.. I mean mostly Atmos.. but for me, inspired by the sorta electroacoustic tradition.. I’m excited about spatialized audio as a canvas to work on.. and immersive art and design.. and what are the possibilities here… yeah… so I’m excited to see what you do here. You have a mind that, in part, reminds me of folks I’d hang with in the culture around MIT.. in how you relate to technology.. err.. yeah, so one way or another I’m excited to see what you do
you don't need Atmos for that. 5.1 has been a thing for ages. Beastie boys had a quadraphonic concert in the 90s, Santana, Aerosmith, Black Sabath and a ton of others had quadraphonic singles in the 70s. Atmos is just reinventing the wheel and putting a proprietary seal on top
Great overview. Thanks Benn As someone with chronic motion sickness triggered visually I'd guessed the VR was not for me. I have a shedload of complex audio kit that I barely know how to power up and no time for more assimilation. You clips and concision have shortcut my path away from the tempting graphical adventures I've seen in the advertising.
Same thing happened to me with Djay, I had paid for it a while back and now it's subscription based. I had to get a subscription just to use my controller with it! The ironic thing is I would've 100% paid 50 bucks for the new version, I haven't given them my money for at least 5 years and definitely owed them for what I've made with it since then, but being forced into a subscription just to use my controller was a dirty move and left an awful taste in my mouth.
Every time a company goes “please :( we need the money :( so we got rid of our one time paid option” it turns me right off. I had a journalling app I used which did something similar, I had a lifetime paid thing but when I moved phones they didn’t want to transfer it. So I just stopped using it.
Amazing how much you look like Doc Brown in the thumbnail. Also, as a sort of head-worn monitor, there are AR glasses that do something similar. The NReal air were some that I looked at to use in conjunction with my Steam Deck. Considering that the Deck is more than capable of running a daw and with the dock has the connectivity for an interface, it seems like it would be very useful for someone like myself who is very often bedridden and unable sit at my computer for very long.
As a digital artist, VR has been awesome for me. Drawing / sculpting in stereoscopic 3D, with a sense of scale and depth, being able to push and pull in/out as well as up/down/left/right, being able to twist my arm as I sculpt, etc etc. Like you said, it's not yet at the point where it allows real professional work at length, mostly due to the inherent discomfort of a headset. But my god if I don't find myself smiling in wonder every time I use VR to create a 3D drawing or sculpture.
Small correction. You won't have to subscribe to Tribe if you already bought it before they switched to subscription. If you email them they give all existing owners a lifetime sub. Just been through this myself. They really should lead with that on their login page.
Pretty cool. I heard that Dreams PS4/5 has a really great music tool that is a bit more casual but intuitive for composers and lay people. I'm not a hip hop or beat artists so I don't really touch synth pads or understand how to use synthesizers. I'm willing to learn but I usually notate and then import to a DAW 😅 unless I want to just fiddle with the soundbanks
I was expecting dedmau5 and devo! Or maybe jocks and jarheads making music in uniform... but was blindsided by Facebook apps that haven't even been updated since last time, or barely. For that many billions of dollars investment, you'd expect a DAW and a modular, that both work, and include copy, paste, undo, those kinds of advanced features.
Honestly you might have not felt sick in VR recording this but I had to stop the video with the motion sickness the head-bobbing induced in me. I don't think I'm trying VR anything any time soon.
FWIW, it's much better when the view moves with you. Watching other people (like this) in VR is miserable...as the view moving exactly with you in it is critical to not feeling sick. Just like you don't notice all head wiggle/bobbing we do in real life. (If you do try it, as soon as you feel a bit off, stop. Don't push it, and try again later...you do get more used to it. And non-walking games like Beat Saber are great for starting out.)
That fully corresponds to my experience with VR music apps. For me, the only “music” related VR app that just doesn’t get boring even after 2 years is Beat Saber. Apart from that, the real winners are VR games like “Moss”, the “I Expect you to Die” series, “Half-Life: Alyx” or “Eye of the Temple”.
I think the most reasonable prospect for VR being actually useful is VR sculpting/3d modeling. I haven't found any such program that has settled on an actually usable control scheme yet, though, so I'm not exactly holding out hope. Some stuff is out there, but most of it doesn't do traditional poly modeling well, it's all voxel sculpting, which is not very good for high-detail models or game-ready geometry.
@@littlesnowflakepunk855 I agree, you would think that there should already be sophisticated 3D modeling apps for VR. But I haven't been able to find any yet.
Not that it argues any of your points, but FYI Paradiddle does support external MIDI for foot pedals! (At least, allegedly. I haven't tried it or seen it work yet, but I did notice that option in the menu when I played with it! Also supposed to be able to do MIDI output to an external DAW)
I am typically a fiend for all things VR but I just can't do it with music. Tried so many things, many of the ones mentioned here, but it just doesn't work for me. Physical feedback is just too much of a core musical aspect for me, I can't just air play instruments like this.
Thanks for this video! I keep thinking about playing around with some of the VR music apps, but skepticism has kept me from doing it. And it looks like that was warranted. I think one of the most promising areas would be modular, but if it doesn’t try to look as much like hardware modules as in SynthVR. Give me a 3D version of something like the iPad’s BYOD. (There’s probably a better iPad example app that is actually a modular synth, but I haven’t yet gotten past miRack, Model 15, and Drambo in the iPad’s modular synth apps.) Virtual cables emulating physical cables are more annoying than physical cables, and while Drambo’s idea for the connections seems perfect, I’ve most often found it difficult to make the connections I want in practice.
Hey Benn :) I love your content! However, I'm stumped as to why no one is talking about Movemusic VR DAW Controller for Quest2/3. Have you tried it? Has anyone else tried it? I don't work for them or anything - I'm just curious how this one seems to have slipped through yours and so many peoples nets. All the best!
VR motion sickness goes away quickly if you’re willing to push the boundaries. Try something like Battleglide, don’t try to make yourself sick, but don’t try to make yourself comfortable. Take the headset off when you feel unwell. 2 weeks of that and you’ll be a VR god lol
Benn, is there a way to collab with someone else remotely? Like a VR meeting but both of you can hear each other PC sound and record things? I would imagine this is be easy to do, a mix of Virtual Desktop, Teamviewer and OBS I guess?
Oh boy 🤦♂️ love ya Benn, but I think you need someone who is more into vr and tech to guide you here. Of course if you tiptoe in as a newb on surface level, all you are going to experience is “gimmick.” That’s expected. However, that isn’t the fault of the set of inputs. There truly is a ton of potential here.
It's all still slower and more cumbersome than just using a computer and/or dedicated music hardware, just like most non-game VR content. The inability to "touch" things breaks it for me.
I was playing around on virtual desktop the other day and i saw the FL studio icon and i was like 🤔🤔🤔🤔 It definitely didn't go so well lol but it was fun
Is there a decent music production tool for SteamVR that's been released or significantly updated in the last year that I missed? The vast majority of VR developers are making things for standalone headsets.
I'm sure that in years to come, we will eventually get the Star Trek style holodeck. But i cant help but see the current state of VR as nothing more than the very first stepping stone, and nothing else. Like the very first adding machines that led to the computers and smartphones we have now, but are kinda cringe in hindsight. And some people might think that this is now affordable. But i routinely spend large sums on music hardware and software, and so far VR just looks a gigantic waste of time and money to me. But then I'm not a gamer.
Jeez Benn, you actually earn your money. If I had to wade through that stuff, I’d get tired and frustrated and be rather inclined to be quite mean about the whole gamut. Trying to imagine what aspect VR could exploit, and I would say this: it would be ten times better, at imitating a ‘big’ audio studio, and letting a punter experience that, than maybe trying to enable a VR version of home studio work? In other words, you could envision (envisage) a studio with a bank of sliders, and you really have to go all the way over to get at the last one, and actually, sound sculpting might be a ‘real’ VR thing worth doing? So you can move a virtual mic further from a virtual big amp/combo and so on. Almost, simply using VR as a way to more interestingly interact with actual sound sculpting tasks, than sliding an adjustment for room size, or hardness of the walls? Just spitballing. A great roundup of the technology as it stands. Everyone, have a great New Year. The world’s going to hell in a handcart and probably we can’t stop it - but at least we didn’t cause it, so we still have our self-respect! Good luck in 2024 to all kind souls.
Man, it's too bad about gadget vr. Probably my favorite iOS daw so I was looking forward to the VR version. The steam reviews scared me away tho. Hopefully they fix it but it seems to be silence from the developers since release. (And it's Detune who has a long relationship with korg doing their ds ports and I believe the switch gadget port.) So you'd expect them to know what they're doing 😑
Shame about the shortcomings of virtual desktops. First time I saw this I imagined picking up one of these and selling all my monitors... Maybe one day
@BennJordan Hey, just an idea I've had in regards to music prod in VR for a while now. Somebody could create a branch of VCV Rack and try to port its interface into a VR environment. VCV is already using OpenGL for all its rendering, it's been a while since I looked at the source but I think they're just using the GLUT library. This undertaking is a pretty low priority for me personally. I'll do it in a couple years if nobody else does.
Has anyone else tried the DAW controller called MoveMusic VR??? I've been using it for a few months and I have mapped 100s of Ableton parameters with it. It has AR passthrough and you can control up to 6 parameters at a time. Lacks basics like copy/paste, undo/redo and no hand tracking yet but I think it is the best AR/VR MIDI DAW Controller I've tried.
To be honest ... this VR thing doesn't solve any problem ... it just creates new ones. Coming together and making music is easy ... making music is easy - why need some extra device to make something which is not feeling real. I think something should solve a problem ... metaverse doesn't. It's this point where I like to say: Just go out, enjoy the sun and breath air. The world is more exciting than just some computer generated worlds
Hey Benn, long time watcher first time commenter here. I'm a big fan of your channel, but as a long time VR nerd and music technologist, really not a fan of this particular video. I think we're on the same page about a lot of things, like, I don't think VR will ever *replace* producing outside of VR, but there is definitely a place for VR production in the future. I think your video would have been much better if called "This Prolly Isn't The Present Of Music Production" given that all of the experiences you talked about are still in very early stages considering the loooooong history of music production as a whole. I think ultimately the video suffers from taking a particular stance or conclusion and working back from there... You didn't have a great time, so a lot of babies were thrown out with the bath water in order to fit the catchy title. For starters, I really think you should go back and give Patchworld another chance. I was in the same boat as you up until I joined the weekly multiplayer workshop yesterday and was taught about the incredible range of things that are possible in the program. There's more than just premade synths and 10 year olds. There's an incredibly robust system for creating instruments and interactions from scratch which lets you tap into the basics of making music, but combined with interactions that would be impossible in the physical world; you can design your environments from the ground up, even importing models to create worlds the way that you might in a game engine like Unity or Unreal and have these elements respond to the music; and the community is one of the kindest, most helpful, and mature (which is saying A LOT in the current state of social VR) social VR communities that I've experienced in my nearly ten years of being in the industry. For your own sake, I recommend turning on the beta, joining the Discord, and giving it another go. Patchworld is really the best example in my mind of a VR application that makes the previously unimaginable possible. Virtuoso on the other hand is still my go to if I want to just hop into VR and start playing because of it's simplicity. And I'm sorry to say, but the issues that you brought up with it, really aren't problems with the program but how you used it. It's possible (and has been possible since it was still in the App Lab) to use Virtuoso as a MIDI controller that sends out data to another DAW. This both solves the problem you were talking about around using external sounds, but also the issue that you had with jamming. Just two days ago I did a jam with a friend where I controlled synths in Ableton using Virtuoso and then synced our DAWs using Ableton link. VR music production isn't on the same level as production outside of the headset, and it very well may never reach that place. But we are getting closer to having a whole new experience, something that acts as a different kind of interaction using new kinds of interfaces that are impossible in the physical world, and I think that we should judge that emerging medium on its own merits rather than comparing it to a practice that's been around for decades! If we look at it from that lens, we've come a long way, and have an even longer way to go :) P.S. check out Synth VR, I think you might vibe.
....games look a whole lot better, and on top of that, distract you from the look with gameplay. UI stuff (like these are)...not so much. Real world object UI is extremely info dense, which doesn't translate well, and you get chunky stuff. There are some music games that are pretty....
Leave it to Ben to find the most obscure, niche way to make music! I'm equal parts surprised and stunned at what can be done with VR now. The experience you have is still Alpha level from what I see, and imho charging money for THAT is just a wee bit rich. But whatever, I guess the execs up top want to see some greens, otherwise they'll not be able to afford all those extra rounds of blackjack and hookers. This _might_ become good... in ... about 10 years. And at that point, we will already have eye implants from meta and google. Probably the best way to sell yourself for the privilege of ... selling yourself is to have the left eye from meta and the right eye from the alphabet. That way they can market you and your data the best. // sarcasms
When I think of scifi VR, I think of somebody with a headset connected directly to a bunch of keyboards, mixers, and amps, and maybe its a psychic link.
Maybe not a DAW, but making music through something like that music making program you got off steam (in a previous video you made) would be kind of dope!
Thanks for sharing a peek into the current state of the VR music space. Still doesn't like that avenue is for me. It's hard enough for me to carve out some music making time with my actual physical rack. Hope you are well, you looked extremely exhausted in this video (judging by your eyes). Please get some rest!
there are some developers who try to bring in new interfaces (instruments) and workflows for the creative process in VR, which is a good thing. imo, trying to copy a complete production workflow in VR will most probably result in a bad experience. i don't want to turn knobs or sliders in VR. we have unlimited space in VR and we can use our whole body to interact with the VR world. nice to get the perspective of a professional and nice video as always, thanks.
Some thing else I noticed that copy of virtuoso he’s using is definitely an Old copy, and it looks like the update hasn’t been applied because there’s been some major changes to the chord instrument..
I currently use Korg Gadget on a borrowed iPad, & I have to open it twice to open it once. I’m not surprised that you had to open the VR version several times.
Ok And there’s a great point you just brought up what another person hears is actually different from what you hear, So if you’re recording a video and they’re recording a video, play those back so you can hear how different the audio sounds with each person… But yes, you use link that way both you and the other person are connected and hearing the same audio through your computer headphones
