What is Mixtikl? (part 2)

I've been try to put into words what Mixtikl is as a music application, or rather how I see it. When I first used Mixtikl V1 from Intermorphic I really enjoyed using it, and that was because I could make something quickly and easily with this application and for me that's what mobile music is all about.

V1 was a great little app and I used it a lot on my Axim. Now that Intermorphic have not only ported it to the iPhone but updated it too it does a lot more than before, in fact, sharing has become a big part of Mixtikl V2. Mixes can be pasted into emails, webpages and forum posts. Users can also expect another real surprise on launch day.

In V1 I used Mixtikl mainly as a kind of loop mixing app, and it worked very well like that. Now there are lots of apps like this on the iPhone app store at the moment. Most of them will let you mix loops together to make a track. Some will let you bring your own loops in too.

Mixtikl can do both of these, but gives you a lot of control over each loop in terms of volume / pan and assignment to effects. Mixtikl uses a 12x4 matrix of cells, and each cell can contain different content, loops, MIDI, and now generative content as well (more on that later).

Mixing loops is all well and good, but being able to assign effect to a specific set of 4 loops is very useful. Effects processing in Mixtikl can be as easy or difficult as you like really. There are basic effects available or you can create your own FX network. Obviously using a network takes up more resources on the system you are using, but it can give you a degree of flexibility that isn't present in other application.

Using MIDI is one area I've not really delved into a great deal with Mixtikl and is something I should probably do a bit more of at some point.

The best thing (as far as I'm concerned) is the use of generative audio. The generative content included in the app is excellent. It is like having a far more tweakable version of Bloom or one of the other Brian Eno apps.

You can combine generative audio and loops together to make some really nice ambient sounding pieces right there on your iPhone, which is great, and hopefully was demonstrated by the piece I made here. But there is also potential to go much wider than ambient, and some of the included content points to that future. More of that in the next few days.

Obviously the best way to show this app off is to do some video for it, but at present I can't do that and won't be able to for another week or two, but when I am able to get back to making some videos I will.

I hope that gives a better explanation of Mixtikl, here's to seeing it released on the 8th of December.