Tech

Auxy: One sound engineer’s dream to build the perfect music app—and give it away

Easy, fun, and fantastic-sounding: Could Auxy produce the first mobile-made hit?

Bob Dormon – Aug 17, 2016 8:05 am | 12

Credit: Bob Dormon

Are you looking for something more productive than chasing after cute animated phantoms in Pokémon Go? How about a creative app that’s also utterly addictive and free too?

Enter Auxy, a step-time music composition tool for iOS that features an outstanding selection of contemporary synths and percussion that can make even the most basic musical ideas sound inspired. No musical experience is required, but musicians of all abilities will love it.

The force behind the app is Henrik Lenberg, a former key SoundCloud developer and Propellerheads staffer. Keen to see mobile develop as a platform for music, Lenberg decided it was time to put his ideas to the test, leaving SoundCloud to found Auxy along with developer Fredrik Gadnell. Based in Stockholm, the company debuted the Auxy Music Creation for iPad in 2014 and followed that up with Auxy Music Studio for both iPad and iPhone in 2015. An Android version is also on the cards.

Released in June this year, the Auxy 2.0 revamp features a redesigned user interface together with exciting new sound-manipulation functions. It’s a winning combination that earned Auxy Music Studio 2.0 an Apple Design Award at WWDC 2016.

Auxy's editing grid.

With supreme simplicity at its heart, Auxy has no live-audio recording or real-time playing; instead you work with looping tracks, adding different instruments as needed. Just tap on the display grid to insert notes, drag the bottom edge to lengthen them, and tap again to remove unwanted notes or drag to move them.

You build up compositions from the musical loops you create, and these can be duplicated, extended, and muted. The various patterns can then be lined up in different combinations, called scenes, in a separate arrangement area. Besides echo and reverb, Auxy also has a number of inventive effects to spice up the mix as well as functions for key and scale, if desired, which ensure the notes available in the grid are harmonically correct.

Those familiar with desktop music apps will spot that Auxy’s emphasis on arranging loops has some parallels to Ableton Live, though these were more obvious in the app’s original form. Yet, given the absence of an iOS version of Ableton’s performance-friendly digital audio workstation (DAW), Auxy would appear to be an ideal GarageBand companion. Perhaps Auxy’s sequences could be configured to play in tandem with recorded instruments on GarageBand using Inter-App Audio?

Lenberg, however, would rather his app stood alone: “Looking it at from the music perspective, the question for us is: what do people want to achieve? If being able to have vocals is a key component, then we need to facilitate that in an Auxy way in our own app and not force people to go to some strange set-up running multiple apps, because then it defeats the purpose.”

So Auxy looks destined to become a DAW as it evolves, but it won’t be like anything you’ve used before. While Lenberg admits the original version copied Ableton Live’s sequencing paradigm, the new version is striking out on its own.

“Everyone’s so focused on the legacy of the traditional studio—with GarageBand you have wood panels, with other apps you have a mixer and essentially a tape machine and effects," he says. "Whereas we’re thinking 'if you’re a person with musical ideas, how could we build the ultimate instrument for you, regardless of how things used to look and work?'”

A brief Auxy demo video.

Auxy isn’t exactly an island though. It does have Ableton Link support on board, which uses Wi-Fi to distribute tempo information between compatible apps, so they can sync up. Also, it can export MIDI files of the song-sequence data that can be used by other music applications, although you’ll need to find substitutes for the impressive sounds Auxy can make. You can, of course, export the audio as a CD-quality WAV file, which can be sliced and diced in a DAW or uploaded to SoundCloud and the like.

Those helpful integration features aside, Lenberg prefers to move away from the more established approaches to desktop music-making. He doesn’t have a problem with those methods in themselves, but they just don’t fit with the Auxy ethos.

“For the hundreds of millions of people that we’re targeting, they are only going to be interested in using their phone or iPad and we want to optimise that use-case. We want to build a studio for mobile. We’re set on taking this further by adding different types of sounds, and looking at how we can let people add more of their own flavours—whether that’s voice or samples,” he enthuses.

An exceptional palette of sounds

For now though, Auxy has a really rather exceptional palette of sounds. This is no tired General MIDI set that’s adorned sound cards for the past 20 years, but fresh electronic instruments that have been curated with care and attention to detail, combined with ambitious plug-ins originally designed for desktop DAWs. Sonic Charge, a Swedish developer, provides filtering and other components for the synths, while UK outfit FXpansion takes care of dynamics and EQ.

“They’re not doing any of the sound design, they just provide pure code," Lenberg says. "We have built our own modular synth-architecture. At the core, the whole sound engine is written in C, so it’s very low-level; the same as they would use when making plug-ins. So there’s an SSL [Solid State Logic] bus compressor in the app and some other fun things. It’s the same DSP [Digital Signal Processor] that you would run in Logic or Ableton. ARM optimisation is handled by our own architecture and it gets a lot of power out of the processors. The actual sound design we do with a bunch of producers and composers. For instance, Italian producer 7 Skies has created a lot sounds.”

Former SoundCloud developer Henrik Lenberg reckons it’s only a matter of time before hits are made on mobile phones.

It all sounds wonderful, literally. Even so, Auxy’s VC funding will only go so far, which begs the question—what’s the business model for an addictive app that’s also free? Selling synth sounds with in-app purchasing is “one way it could go” says Lenberg, adding that he has “a ton of ideas” for monetisation but preferred not to go into detail. Still, he’s not alone in thinking that Auxy will be calling the tune in years to come—that Apple Design Award at WWDC 2016 last month certainly suggests recognition of its potential, and Lenberg is not short of ambition.

“The idea is about changing how millions of people make music and ultimately change music," he says. "We think that’s a big thing and our investors think so too. The bet is, if you create a lot of value for a lot of people, there is going to be money in that.”

Indeed, what have you got to lose? You can compose anywhere: on the plane, on the beach, or even on the loo. No matter what your musical preference, experimenting with Auxy takes you to places that are a lot more satisfying than chasing elusive animations. So why play this summer’s hit, when you can become this summer’s hitmaker instead?

Bob Dormon’s technological odyssey began as a teenager working at GCHQ, yet his passion for music making took him to London to study sound recording. During his studio days he regularly contributed to music technology and Mac magazines for over 12 years. Fascinated by our relationship with technology he eventually turned to journalism full-time, and for over six years was part of The Register’s senior editorial team. Bob lives in London with far too many gadgets, guitars, and vintage MIDI synths.

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