Maybe you can relate to the feeling I had when I first used Samplr almost a decade ago: instant inspiration; a racing mind trying to consider all of the new possibilities that have just been unlocked. Only a few instruments have ever had this kind of effect on me, but Samplr - without question - is my favorite and most frequently used of the bunch.
One of the first apps to effectively take advantage of the touchscreen interface and multi-touch capabilities of the iPad, Samplr feels less like software and more like a physical instrument on the desk. Perhaps that’s why it has found such success over the years on some of the biggest stages in the world.
As Marcos Alonso, the app’s developer, described to me in our conversation recently, this was always part of the design philosophy for the instrument:
…the idea is that those buttons never change and never move, and they're always there, so when you're playing and you need something, you just can right away tap on it. You don't have to open a menu and look for it. That was part of the philosophy of the design: “How can I keep this as static as possible, like an actual physical instrument?” So once you know where things are, they're always there, and they're not going to move around. You don't have to dive into any of those.
And I think that's part of the success of what makes the instrument good as a live tool, because it feels more like a physical thing than a piece of software.
Just one look at the interface and you can see what he’s talking about - it looks (and feels) like an instrument you’d want to keep around and learn:
What’s incredible about the app that he’s made is that, really, not a lot about it has fundamentally changed since its inception. Sure, there’s been a steady stream of bug fixes, tweaks, quality-of-life improvements, and capability enhancements, but as we talked about in our interview, it entered the world in a pretty mature state to begin with and has only doubled down on what it does best as a multi-touch sampler.
It’s a rock solid, best-in-class creative tool that continues to find its way into the workflows of an astounding range of musicians. Everyone from Fred Again, to Matmos, to Ellie Goulding and a long list of others have used it in their music. I, myself, have used it too many times to count. It’s a frequent guest on many of my past Studio Diary posts here, and I’ve used it in almost every live show I’ve played since 2016.
So, of course, it felt like a no-brainer to reach out to Marcos and have a discussion about Samplr. I’ve always been curious to know where the idea came from, what he thinks about the incredible success it’s had, and where he sees it going in the years ahead. We talked about all of this and more in the latest interview for Sound Methods, a truly enjoyable conversation about an incredible instrument.
I’d like to personally thank Marcos for his time and generosity in sharing all of this information with us. Be sure to support his work at the link below.
Here’s my interview with Marcos Alonso. I spoke with him over videoconference on Sunday, February 18. Visit Samplr.net to read more about the app, and be sure to download it on the App Store through the link there.
Transcript
Sound Methods 004: Marcos Alonso
Andrew: Hi, and welcome back to Sound Methods. I'm thrilled to be speaking today with Marcos Alonso, the developer behind one of the iPad's most enduring and recognizable music apps, Samplr.
I've written about this app extensively in multiple Studio Diary postings on my site, and it's featured in so many of my songs at this point that I couldn't count the total by now. The music you hear behind me is one example. In case you haven't already figured it out, it's truly one of my all time favorite instruments, not just on the iPad, but on any platform.
Samplr was one of the first music apps to take full advantage of the touch screen and gestures that the iPad offers. It's an experimental playground that's so easy to use, anyone can pick it up and have fun…but at the same time, it's flexible and powerful enough to have attracted a who's who of notable users by now. It's been featured in music by Fred Again, Apparat, Ellie Goulding, Matmos, Richard Devine, Lullatone, and countless others.
I spoke with Marcos about all of this, starting from Samplr’s humble beginnings on a sheet of notebook paper, the initial fears that it might not work at all based on the early feedback that he got, all the way up to the present day, including what he foresees in the app's future and what he has planned for development.
Without further ado, here's my interview with Marcos Alonso.
Andrew: Alright, Marcos Alonso, thanks so much for joining me here on Sound Methods. Appreciate you taking the time.
Marcos: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much for inviting me, Andrew.
Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve gotta say, Samplr totally rocked my world the first time I used it. It was the first music app that I personally used. I was on an old - I think a first gen iPad Mini at the time, when I first dipped my toes into it.
And I've talked to so many musicians over the years who - it seems like Samplr is their gateway into iPad music-making, for whatever reason. It seems to be a very accessible, immediately interesting app for people to get started on.
So I'm really curious to hear what the origin story is behind it. How did you get the motivation or inspiration to start this project in the first place? Where did it come from?
Marcos: Oh, that's a good question. So before Samplr I worked on this project called the Reactable. That was…we started in 2003. So basically, the Reactable is this table-shaped synthesizer with a surface that has a projection, and it also detects these blocks that you move around the surface.
So I think I remember around…well, we were working on it around 2005 or so. I was projecting some waveforms on the screen, and I remember looking at them like, “oh, it would be cool if you could do gestures on them. Maybe I can just touch it to slice it.” We did have some gestures on the Reactable: you could touch the waveform to mute it; you could do a “cut” gesture on a waveform to mute it, too, so that's actually how you would mute channels or threads. And so, there was a little bit of that [gestural control] already in the Reactable, but in my head, I was like, “it'd be nice if it was more like a sampling instrument where I can use multi-touch.”
Actually, Reactable was multi-touch even before the iPhone came out. So it was a very new [idea], this idea of using multiple fingers, and my imagination was firing and I remember I took some notes. I have a notebook somewhere; I could share a scan with you where I took some notes of ideas, like “what if I could just touch the waveform right on the screen, and I can use more than one finger and make loops? And how can this be musical in some way?”
So I think that was the idea, but I put it aside. I was too busy with the Reactable, and I think the multi-touch screen of the Reactable was not good enough for something like that. I was focused on something else. But years later, I remember when the iPad came out - the iPad was announced and I was immediately fascinated by it, because it felt to me, the iPad was kind of perfect for a musical instrument in terms of the size of it, the fact that you can…it feels kind of like a little keyboard instrument that you can take with you and just play anywhere, and it has this super expressive multi-touch interface.
So then, when I saw it, I was like, “oh, maybe some of those ideas will make sense.” And that's how Samplr started.
Andrew: Yeah, I would love to see that that initial sketch that you've got lying around. That would be really cool to see. Gosh, yeah, and I forgot to even mention here too, at the start, anything about Reactable. I mean, in and of itself, it is a really amazing instrument, and so, for people listening here, I highly encourage you to check that out as well.
So, that brings up a couple of trains of thought that I'm hoping to touch on here, too. But the interface for Samplr, to me, is just very intuitive as a musician, as someone who's used countless samplers over the years - countless hardware samplers. It almost seems so well designed that I'm wondering if you have any personal musical background or musical experience that led to the feature set that we see there.
Do you have a music-making background, and if so, were there specific hardware samplers that you were thinking about when you wanted to develop Samplr?
Marcos: That's another good question because I love music, and I love instruments and the act of making music, but I don't really have a proper musical background.
I've always been fascinated by the act of making music. But I remember when I always tried to make music, I was never satisfied with how it sounded. So I was more fascinated and focused on the instrument part of it. I love musical instruments, so I've always been around music and I love music, but never really been in on the making side of it. I mean, I do - for instance, with the Reactable we did spend years demoing the instrument, so we'd have to prepare samples and perform live, but it was more like demos of the instrument, like “these are the things you can do with this instrument,” more than proper music that you would record and publish. So, I've always been fascinated, but never really made a lot of music. It was more of an intuition when I was making Samplr, like, “this is how I think a sampler should work.”
Maybe it's because I haven't really had a lot of experience with samplers - hardware samplers or software samplers - before, that freed up my mind to do things in a different way. That could be part of it.
Andrew: Yeah. It's just such an intuitive app to use.
I mean, coming from my experience using MPC - Akai MPC samplers, for instance, they're renowned for their ability to slice and dice samples, and there's sample chopping that people get really technically skilled at doing. But with Samplr, I mean, it's literally right there on the screen. You're just dragging with your finger to set the start points of these slices, and it just makes perfect sense from that perspective.
So it's, to me, everything I've looked for in a hardware sampler, and it's in a much more convenient form factor on the iPad, personally speaking.
Marcos: It’s interesting that you mentioned the fact that it's “intuitive.” It wasn't always the case. I remember when I made the app - I made it in my head and I built it and stuff. And then I have all these friends who are like, proper musicians, right? And before I launched the app, I remember showing it to them, and I remember putting it in front of them. And in particular, this one, Carlos, this musician from - a good friend of mine, a musician that used to play on the Reactable, he was so confused because it's a very unusual interface. It doesn't look like a traditional app. And I remember he was looking at it like, “I don't even know how to make any sound with this.” And I was so worried, like, “did I make something that doesn't make any sense?”
And it was very - it was a rough moment for me, because I was trying to do things in a different way. I imagined this is how I think things should work, or is how I expect things to work. But then when I showed the musicians who were more familiar with traditional samplers and synthesizers, they were very confused, and they were like, “I don't even know where to begin.” For a moment, I was like, “maybe I made something that doesn't make any sense.” And, to be honest, when I made it, I made it more like an experience for me, where I wanted to learn.
At Reactable, I worked on the interface, but didn't really work on the audio engine and other parts of it. So Samplr, to me, was more like a learning project. I wanted to make every single part of it, from the design to the implementation, to even the website, the demos, the promotional video, talking to press…I wanted to experience every part of the project. And I don't know, when I first saw people using it, I was like, “wow, this might not work.” To the point that I was like, “I'm okay releasing this app for free. I'm okay with putting it out so people can use it, and it’s more like a portfolio piece where I can go to people and say this is something I made.” But I think it was last minute that I was like, “maybe I'll charge a little bit for it.” I think it was 5 dollars, and at the moment I published it, it just blew up and it did very well. People really loved it. But there was a moment there, right before launching it, that I was very worried that maybe it was too different, you know?
Andrew: That's amazing to hear, because I mean, it makes perfect sense to me when I look at it. You've got the tracks lined up there, right in front of you; there's effects to apply to each one of them. To me - I don't know, maybe it's just my brain, but it made perfect sense, and it's so funny to hear you say you were thinking about doing it for free. I was about to say that I'd pay, like, 10 times what you're charging for it now.
I tell people all the time, it's worth getting an iPad just to get Samplr. For people who see me perform, and then inevitably ask questions about what I'm doing up there, or how things are made and how it's working, Samplr is a big part of that. So I say, “if you want to dip your toes into iOS music-making, I think it's, to me, a perfect place to start, and I'd recommend just buying a used iPad and loading Samplr on there.” That can get you quite a bit of…you know, you can get quite a bit of sound out of just that.
So, there's a couple of things you said there I wanted to touch on, too. You had mentioned some of the early feedback that you got from musician friends. It's gotta be amazing to see who is using it now. It's been adopted by some pretty high profile power users, if you want to say that. I know Fred Again is using it. Matmos, Apparat…the list goes on and on; there are all these really amazing musicians who have nothing but glowing things to say about it, so it's got to be pretty validating to see feedback like that come in.
But I'm wondering, too, what your process is in terms of collecting feedback on the app. Are you still reaching out to musicians to do that? Or is it mostly a self-directed kind of endeavor at this point? How are you continuing to think about the app and its growth going forward?
Marcos: I want to keep Sampler alive, that's for sure. Because like you were saying, there are so many people who rely on it and use it a lot. So, for sure, I want to make sure the app continues working, and everybody can rely on it if it works. And in that sense, I mean, it's done really well. The app still works on any iPad, and any version of iOS, and it's stable enough that people can trust it as a live tool.
Andrew: I think it's going on, yeah, probably…I don't even know how long at this point. I think it's been out there for 12 years or something like that?
Marcos: Yeah, it came out in 2013. So it's 11 years now. Last year was the tenth anniversary. Sorry, 2012.
Andrew: Wow. Yeah. Which to me, is like…that's one of my chief criteria when I'm thinking about what instruments and tools I want to use in my music. I'm a big fan of the Elektron hardware. I love the Octatrack, for instance, because it's been supported consistently for, I think, 13 years now at this point. [It was launched] right around the same time. They continue to update it and keep it intact, same as Samplr. It's reliable. It's up to date and you know it's going to work.
There are so many apps out there, I think, that are just kind of “fly by night.” You know: a guy had an idea, wrote something up real quick, published it on the app store, and then, sure enough, there hasn't been any updates or maintenance on it in five years, four years, or whatever. It's nice to know that you can trust [Samplr] is going to be around. I think that's something that's really important.
Marcos: Yeah. Going back to your previous question, if it's self guided or “how are you managing the feedback?” It’s been out for so long that I've heard many things from a lot of people. People ask very different things, right? Like, “I want it to work like this.” Most people bring their thoughts from other systems, like, “I'm used to working like this; can I do the same with Samplr?” Which is tricky, and I've been trying to protect it in a way. Samplr works in a special way. This is the philosophy of the app, and I want to preserve that.
Also, I feel like when I released it, it was already in a very mature state. I had this idea of touching the waveform, and “how can you actually make music by touching the waveform?” And I feel like in my head, I’ve kind of explored all the things that I wanted to explore in Samplr, so I think it kind of makes sense that the app hasn't changed much, because I feel like all the ideas that I had at the time, that I think makes sense for this concept, are in the app already.
I think I added at some point - I have a new mode, which is the arpeggiator. I think it’s something I wanted to have in V1, but I couldn't. Then I added it later. And I think adding little details here and there, I don't know, like panning, because people needed panning, or support - mostly compatibility with other apps, like AUM or Audiobus, so people can use it as in a host app and they can mix it with other apps easier. So, I’ve been making it so it's more convenient for musicians to use it.
But the core of the functionality, I've been trying to preserve the philosophy - the original philosophy of the app. I recently added a few changes. One is MIDI control. This is something that people have been asking for for many years, and I understand - I personally always thought that the interesting thing about Samplr is the multi-touch interface. So I wasn't sure about how useful MIDI was going to be, but…and you were mentioning Fred Again before. So Fred Again and his team had some requests, because they were playing these big shows and they were like, “if we could have MIDI control so we can make sure the volumes are down before a piece,” or something like that…it's more like, [a way] to make sure that things don't go crazy while you are on stage, or you know, in a big event. So I was like, “OK, I'll work on that.” So that's part of the reason I added MIDI control, and it's out already and it's free for everybody. Free update.
And the interesting thing is that, as I was building and adding the MIDI support and I was testing it with keyboards and controllers, I was like, “oh, this is actually pretty cool!” There’s a new dimension to the app, because you still have the the multi-touch part of it, but if you have a controller on the side, you can control things that are in the background that you were not able to control before, so it's adding even more ways to use the app. I'm excited to see what people are going to do with it. There's already videos online of people using the app with MIDI and stuff, but it’s pretty exciting.
Andrew: Yeah. I've got my own [video] ready, too. I haven't published it yet, but I was messing around with that the other day. Yeah, to be able to assign MIDI control over the levels, specifically, each of the sample levels, and then not have to flip back and toggle back and forth between the windows to do that…I just have a little Novation fader bank that I can use to set the levels and make sure that they're good. And just that alone; I mean, like you say, I think the app is already so good and so mature at this point, that it's hard to think of what else there is to do at this point, other than quality of life stuff like that. That's a huge benefit to be able to control it remotely.
I can't even imagine how many people are reaching out and asking about “when is AUv3 compatibility going to come?” Or stuff like that. I'm sure you get that constantly. It's gotta be a stream of requests coming in for stuff like that, but that's the beautiful thing, is that it's already so well built, so I guess, kudos for building an app that can stand the test of time like that. It seems pretty rare.
Marcos: You were mentioning how over the years, a few big musicians like Apparat and, recently, Fred Again have been using it, and it's been…I mean, it's incredible. I feel super honored and lucky that that's the case. I feel like somehow, I built something that they found useful for their music, so it makes me super happy.
One curiosity about Apparat is that I listened to his music a lot while I was making the instrument. I was very influenced by his music, and I would think - I would listen to his record, and in my head I was like, “okay, how would I play this? How do I imagine myself playing this music?” And that's how a lot of the ideas for the instrument came came to be. So when the app came out, he immediately, like on the first day, he started tweeting about it, using it live. I think he did a show a few days after I launched the app. I remember seeing a video of him on stage in front of a ton of people with the iPad, which was mind blowing. And it was very interesting to see that the musicians that influenced me to create the app, the instrument - now it's the instrument that they're using. That was very exciting to see.
And then in recent years…so that happened when the app came out about 10 years ago, but I feel like something happened about last year. It might be because of Fred Again; I think he was in a podcast or two when he was talking about the app, and I feel like, after that happened, a lot of producers picked up on it.
And what happened is that, I feel like that sound…there's certain sounds that are very characteristic of Samplr, like the way you can do loops that are very short and modulate the size of the loop. I feel like that's a very specific sound that became popular for a year or so, and I've been hearing it in more and more songs recently, like to the point that I even started a playlist on Spotify. Whenever I find songs that are like - most of them, I confirm with the artist if they actually used Samplr for this song, then I add it to the Spotify playlist.
There were a few months where I would listen to a new record from an artist that I like, [such as] Weval, and they use it so much. You play the new album and it's everywhere. And same with Fred Again. When you are actually listening to it, there's so much of that sampling effect used as a texture in the background. It became a very characteristic sound that producers gravitate towards these days. So, I feel like it's kind of a trendy sound that I can hear in so many places, which is giving the app a second life, in a way. It’s having another big resurgence after 10 years without me doing anything; it just happened organically.
Andrew: It’s such a good point. Because I think, yeah…that stuttery, glitchy vocal is so prominent in a lot of that kind of music. It's definitely making a comeback.
I think it is - I mean, it's a sign of a good app, or a good instrument, period, that it has that kind of longevity and can speak for itself after a certain point.
There's that one mode in Samplr, and I don't even know what you would call it, but you have the ability to drag your finger across and highlight a small slice of audio, and you can adjust the size of that slice as you're doing it, and it's like tailor made for that kind of “Fred Again,” glitchy,. stuttery, choppy kind of sound. That makes a lot of sense.
Marcos: Yeah. That's one of - definitely one of people's favorite modes. I feel like if I ever work on Samplr 2, a newer version of Samplr, I would love to dig more into that mode and extend it.
I feel like when I was making the app, I didn't know how people were gonna use it. So this was just one of the modes, and it has just one control, which is the size of the grain, right? It's more like a granular synthesis.
Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Yep.
Marcos: But there's so much we could do there, like we could change the stereo [panning], the grains, the [direction] the grains play…now, there's only 2 grains per touch, but it could be more or less, you know? So that's a mode that is very popular, and I would probably love to extend in future versions of Samplr.
Andrew: So you triggered two questions that I've got in mind here. One is, you mentioned you were listening to Apparat. What is your - how would you describe your musical taste? What else do you listen to these days? Who are some of your other favorite artists that you're enjoying?
Marcos: That's a good question. My entire life, I mostly gravitated towards electronic music. That's been my passion since I was very young. I also played in bands. I was playing more like rock, basic rock and guitar stuff - I used to play guitar. So I can enjoy rock music, Radiohead and whatnot, but it's been mostly electronic. Things like Apparat or IDM, like British IDM: Aphex Twin, things like that. That's what I used to listen to a lot.
These days, what is the…I should look into my library. I mean, Fred Again is a big one that I really like. The funny thing with Fred Again, is that I was really into - very excited about his music during the pandemic, and I was listening to it the whole time. And then one day I found that podcast where he mentioned that he was using Samplr. I was like, “Oh wow, really?” And then I went back. It was mind blowing when I listened to it again, and then I realized it's basically everywhere. “How come I didn't notice?” It's [only] now that I know there's so much Samplr in the background. So maybe it was working at an unconscious level or something, I don’t know.
These days, Four Tet, I’m really liking. Weval is another one that I enjoy a lot.
Andrew: Yeah, you read my mind, because I think Fred Again really blew up over that pandemic period, and then I feel like he really exploded when he started doing this stuff with Four Tet and with Skrillex. I love what those guys have been doing too.
All that old IDM that you mentioned too, Aphex Twin and Telefon Tel Aviv and all those guys…I really like that too, so makes sense in terms of what the app can do and what it offers.
Marcos: Yeah, I've always been interested in a lot of more experimental stuff, like Fennesz, or a little more noisy.
There's this space in San Francisco called Gray Area, and this other space called The Lab, that used to bring a lot of really interesting artists doing more edgy, more interesting stuff. That’s the things that I enjoy when I go out to see a live performance, stuff like that.
Andrew: Gray Area is a fantastic venue. I've also performed in San Francisco at a venue there called Envelop. It has 32 speakers surrounding the audience. We played the show there, and you can mix your audio live and place specific elements of your audio in different sections of the speaker array. It's a really amazing experience, so if you haven't seen a show there, I can highly recommend it. The guy who runs it, Christopher Willits, he's released a lot of really beautiful ambient music on labels like Ghostly and 12k and that kind of stuff. So if that's your thing, if you're into that too, I can definitely recommend seeing a show there. It's really great.
But the other question that I had that was triggered from something that you were saying earlier: Samplr 2, or a followup…
I'm curious; I've got to ask just as a fan of the app, what would be…because I think it's just kind of amazing to me to see the progress that iOS music, in general, has made over the last couple years, especially…it's extremely full-featured. Now, a lot of people I know are just using the iPad as their hub, as the computer, basically, in their recording setup, and I feel like there's so much you can do with it now.
Where would you even start with a Samplr 2? What is the…I guess what would be the wishlist for that? Or do you feel like, to your earlier point, do you feel like Samplr is already a pretty mature statement at this point? Is there anything left to - is there anything that you're still trying to to get out of it at this point?
Marcos: Good point. I agree that the main concept and the main idea of the app was explored in depth for the first version of the app. I feel like if I were to make a second version of it, I would focus on the things that I couldn't do for the first because of limitations of the hardware at the time, or limitations of technology at the time.
So for instance, now Samplr is limited to six samples, so I would probably like to expand that because, at the time, like I said, it works on the first iPad, which was not very fast. I had to make some limitations that are hard to avoid. Now that we have faster - iPads are much faster, like incredibly fast these days, but there's some limitations that are kind of embedded into the UI, like the fact that it's six samples and there's no room for more, so I'll have to rethink how that works.
Also, I've been adding more voices. So the app right now has - it's more [advanced] sound wise compared to the first version. I feel like if you have multiple sounds at the same time, there's many more voices available, so it has evolved with the new iPads. But there's things like the reverb, for instance, that in Samplr - even though it looks like you have six reverbs, there's only one. There's sends to the same reverb. That's something else that maybe I would like to to adjust now, because iPads can do, you know, more than one reverb these days.
So yeah, so that's one. These are a few things that were limitations of the hardware. In terms of limitations of the software…well, another limitation of the hardware actually would be the display size, like not having it constrained to 4:3 [aspect ratio], and maybe even potentially make an iPhone version of it. When I made Samplr, the iPhones were very small. It was the iPhone 4, I think, or the iPhone 5. But these days, I feel like Samplr could potentially be on a normal iPhone in terms of real estate for display and performance, so that would be something else interesting to explore if I were working on a second version of it, like how to make the UI more responsive and make it so it adjusts to different sizes.
That would also open the gate for potential AuV3, where you can run Samplr in a little window if you want to. Other things would be better integration with other apps, like the ability to have the audio route separately [on separate channels] out of the app, which is something that, when I made the first Samplr, it didn't even exist. There was no way to send audio from one app to another. But now there's Audiobus, and then there was Inter-app Audio, and these days AUv3. So these are things that didn't exist at the time, but will be great to have on a future version of Samplr.
Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that point about the reverb, like that's…another reason why I like Samplr so much is that it is CPU efficient. It can run, to your point, on pretty ancient iPads and still holds up, still keeps chugging along.
Just thinking through it, how difficult is that to do? To balance CPU efficiency on that platform [iPadOS]? Just as someone who's not familiar with the development process, is it a friendly - is it relatively easy to do that? Or how do you think through how to optimize the efficiency? When you're coming up with updates, like the recent one, for example, did that add huge strain, or what is the thinking like for that?
Marcos: Yeah, good point. I think when I was building it back then, like I said, I was using an iPad 2, so that was the benchmark in terms of performance. I wrote the entire audio engine from scratch, because like I said, I approached this as like a learning experiment. I didn't want to use libraries, and I didn't want to use third party frameworks. So I just started writing code, like, “this is how I imagine [it should work],” and I've never done that before.
So I was like, “OK, this is how I imagine you have a buffer of audio. I'm writing samples here.” And I learned so much throughout the process, but I think one of the advantages of doing it that way and making it as simple as possible, and not using frameworks, is that it's very efficient. It's all very low level C++, and I was trying to make it as fast as possible because at the time, there was very [limited] performance on iPads. It was kind of limited, because rendering audio is always very costly. So that was basically the way I did it. I was just trying to make everything as efficient as possible, as low level as possible, and then I would just benchmark. I would try to have all the samples playing at the same time on an iPad 2. “If I play all the samples, it doesn't work, so I have to cut corners, have to limit the number of voices, or have to do this to make sure that, oh, now when I turn on all the effects and I play all the voices, it doesn't stutter or it doesn't drop frames.” So that's basically how I optimized it, stress testing the app until I found the limits of what the iPad could do at the time.
So that's part of the reason it's so efficient, and it works so well on older iPads. And then over the years, because iPads, you know, the performance grew exponentially. So, like I said, I've been adding things that I couldn't do back then, like the quality of the reverb is better, or the number of voices has increased. But most of the time it's just looking at the current current hardware on an iPad, and what can you do with it in a way is a bit like optimizing for a game console.
One of the advantages of developing for iPad is that they're very consistent. Like, they're all very…all iPads are the same in a way. It gets faster, but it's friendlier for a developer if you compare it to Android, where there's many more different devices and it's hard to optimize for all of them. So it feels a bit more like developing for a game console, where you have that hardware and you know that the people using the app or playing the game will have the exact same hardware, so you can optimize for that and assume that it will work the same.
Andrew: Yeah. I think it's hard for a lot of people to grasp, like, “Oh, we'll just do an AUv3 version of it, you know, how hard can that be?” Could you explain like what are the…what are the challenges in doing something like that? What makes the iPad environment, specifically, different to develop for, or potentially more difficult?
And you know, how did you get into that yourself? I'd be curious to hear your history as a developer, too, and how the iPad ecosystem has developed over time.
Marcos: That's very interesting. I mean, like I said before, the moment I saw the iPad, to me, it felt like a perfect device for music because of the size of it, it's so easy to carry around. It's so powerful, has a super expressive multi-touch interface. So to me, that it was already a very good platform, and then the tools you use for it is just…Samplr was built so long ago. At the time I only knew OpenGL and C++, so it's pretty primitive in that regard. The entire app is built using C++ and the interface is very basic OpenGL. I would definitely do things differently if I were to make it today. Like for instance, I would love the interface to not be - right now it's fixed to 4x3, because that's the original aspect ratio of the iPad, and the way I built the entire interface is very rigid in the sense that everything is hard coded to be 4x3. So it's going to be challenging to adjust the current version of Samplr to other display resolutions. That's part of the reason AUV3 is very challenging, because Samplr doesn't scale very well. So if you want to run it in a window, that part is going to be tricky.
Also, the other issue with AUV3 is the current version of Samplr is pretty stable, like the audio engine and the low level audio unit stuff, and I'm really worried about messing with it, you know? Because in order to add AUv3 support, I will have to change how the samples are mixed, and change how the low level audio engine works, and I'm really worried that it might break Samplr for other people, and that is something that I really to be very careful about because I know people depend on it for live shows and they're very attached to it. It's like their instrument, and if it starts failing or the engine crashes or it doesn't sound how it used to, it could be a bit of a disaster.
Andrew: Yeah. I mean, it's rock solid. I've been using it for pretty much every show I've played since 2016 now, at this point. So going on like seven, almost eight years worth of live performance and it's never been the issue in my setup. If anything, other things on the iPad always mess with it.
Yeah, the scaling too, I can envision that being like a total nightmare to try to deal with. Especially because it's so centered around the waveforms, and to be able to touch and freely gesture with those, I can see it being extremely difficult if it was to be scaled down to a certain size. It's tough to even navigate with a finger on a surface that small. So, it makes a lot of sense why that would be a challenge.
Marcos: Yeah, the interface was really designed for the iPads at the time. I think I made it on an iPad 2, but it also works on the first iPad, which is kind of fascinating. I remember that iPad was not out in Spain yet; it was only available in the US, so I printed a life-size iPad and I started sketching on it, and the entire interface was really built around that display size and display aspect ratio.
So the waveform is 50 percent of the screen, exactly 50%. The rest is dedicated to buttons. I was trying to…I brought some of the concepts that I learned from Reactable when designing the instrument, like the idea of trying to have as few menus as possible while you're performing. The interface of Samplr looks a little daunting since there's so many buttons, but the idea is that those buttons never change and never move, and they're always there, so when you're playing and you need something, you just can right away tap on it. You don't have to open a menu and look for it. That was part of the philosophy of the design.
“How can you keep this as static as possible, like an actual physical instrument?” So once you know where things are, they're always there, and they're not going to move around. You don't have to dive into any of those. And I think that's part of the success of what makes the instrument good as a live tool, because it feels more like a physical thing than a piece of software.
Andrew: Right, exactly. And it does work for that purpose, too. I mean, I've seen so many musicians who just have a dedicated iPad running Samplr off to the side, and it's just its own instrument. I think it's really well suited for that, just the way that it's built and the way that it looks. There's definitely some muscle memory that's been developed for me. I can definitely vouch for that.
Another thing I wanted to ask you about with regards to the app is the logo. I love the design there, that infinite loop with the S carved out of it. My eyes are drawn to it every time I open up the iPad.
So, can you talk a little bit about that? How it was created; who came up with it? How was it developed? I'd be curious to hear the story behind that just because I personally like it so much, so I would love to hear it.
Marcos: That's so interesting. Thanks. To be honest, no one has ever mentioned that before. I don't think no one has ever asked me about the logo before.
I don't know, I don't remember…I made it, but I don't remember how I came up with it. I think I was just trying things with an “S” and then the infinite, like it's…the looping concept is very common in the sampling world, so it made sense. It's like an infinite symbol. And I just was trying with the S until I figured out, Oh, if I make the, the infinite part gray, it kind of looks like the symbol with the S.” So I don't know. That's how it happened. It looks cool, yeah.
Andrew: Yeah, I just think it works really well and I had never really noticed that it was - that it did connect or make the loop until a couple of years ago, on closer inspection, so it was a nice little hidden layer to it there.
Thinking about the app too, just how it works and how it functions, I think one of my favorite aspects of it is - there's the ability to record audio, of course, but there's also the ability to record gestures and movement, and you can loop the motions that you're making with your fingertips on the screen. Is there a moment or something that spurred that thought, too?
Because I think it's a nice…especially as so many people are trying to go “DAW-less,” quote unquote, or move away from computers now, I think it's a really nice way to add motion and variation and things that you would normally have to spend time doing in an automation lane in a DAW, and kind of tedious editing to achieve motion like that.
Was that always part of the plan for you when the app was developed, to enable that feature too? Because I think it's a really differentiating factor for the app compared to a lot of other things that are out there.
Marcos: Yeah. I think it happened during the development when I was working on it. I don't think when I started - I don't think I had the idea yet, but the way Samplr works, there's so many parameters that you're controlling when you're touching the screen, like the X and Y axis with multiple fingers, that it would be really hard to create a piano roll. It feels very at odds with what Samplr is. I could be recording the things, and maybe there could be a different view where you have a piano roll with the textures, but it's…what are you going to have on the left? It's not a piano. It's just some slices of a sample. So I think it just happened naturally, like, “maybe the only way to sequence this is to actually record the gestures,” and I think it works really well. It feels like it's part of the philosophy of the instrument, and feels very true to the medium, which is a multi-touch screen as opposed to using a mouse on a computer when you're putting in the notes in a piano roll. I feel like there was no other way to sequence.
But it led to some very interesting parts of the app, like the fact that you can have multiple loops, but they can be any length. I feel like that's something that is potentially kind of hard to do with other devices or other DAWs, but it's very easy with Samplr and I feel like it's very musical. Like, I have a 6 bar loop on this sample, but a 12 bar loop on this other one, or an 8 bar loop, and they meet sometimes, and I feel like it's very musical, very interesting, and it feels very natural when you're recording and using Samplr. So that part really - it worked really well, and I think at some point initially, it had only one layer of touch recording. I think I added two more, because people really wanted to overdub, to record on top, so that's something else I added later on. Now you have three layers of recording on top, which is pretty cool.
And now, actually, with the MIDI update, you can combine that with MIDI, so you can be recording with the keyboard and then touching the screen, and have three layers sometimes: Keyboard, MIDI, plus your hand. So, there are many many layers, different possibilities. One of my favorite things, actually, about the touch recording part of it, is that you can record the sequence and then when you change the tempo, you can actually see your fingers moving at a different speed. It's kind of unique. You don't really see that very often, but it feels very nice, and it feels natural.
Andrew: Right. Yeah. It's very natural. It doesn't feel jarring, or sudden. There's a really nice responsive aspect to it.
Marcos: I definitely would like to extend the recording of gestures to the rest of the UI. That's something that so many people have asked for. I want to be able to record when I'm changing the effects, you know?
Andrew: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly where I was going to go, to the effects section. I could see that being really, really powerful and interesting.
Marcos: Yeah, that’s…but I feel like with the current UI, it could potentially become a little confusing. So I want to make sure that If I ever add that, it feels integrated into the UI.
Andrew: Another question that I had for you is, I can think of a couple….there are a couple iPad “staple” apps to me. Samplr is one of them, Borderlands is another classic app, Fugue Machine is another one.
I'm curious if you're in touch with those guys at all, with Chris [Carlson, Borderlands developer] and Alex [Randon, Fugue Machine developer], and do you share ideas about any of this, or share thoughts on development and things like that? I'm just wondering what kind of a community there is behind the iPad developers.
Marcos: Yeah. I love the fact that you mentioned. Those two apps, because we are friends. I met Alex, the creator of Fugue Machine, when I first moved to San Francisco 10 years ago, and we've been friends with [Chris]. We launched Samplr and he launched Borderlands around the same time, and I think he came to Barcelona to Sonar - I was living in Barcelona at the time - to present the app, and we met and we've been friends since.
And the funniest thing is that we do have a thread in iMessages, the three of us. We are pretty active talking about - like the other day, I had some questions about MIDI. And I mean, Alex’s app is mostly MIDI, so he's like an expert, but he was helping us and then he had questions about audio, and I was sharing what I know. And so we try to - yeah, we do talk to each other a lot. And whenever there's like, “oh, this new app store rule and my sales are down; how are your sales doing?” It's stuff like that. It's pretty interesting. So we are in touch. Yeah. It's a really nice community.
Andrew: It's like the iPad app Hall of Fame on a chat thread. That's cool. Yeah, I was curious. I thought there might be some level of interaction there, but cool to hear it confirmed.
Marcos: The other one that I that I used to work with at Apple is Marek [Bereza], creator of Koala Sampler.
Andrew: Oh, yeah, of course.
Marcos: Yeah, we worked together at Apple, and he decided to quit to make Koala. And it's been doing amazing; the app is incredible.
Andrew: Yeah. That's another stone cold classic I forgot to mention, but yeah, I feel like everyone comes through…everyone comes to the iPad through one of those handful of apps. It feels like [they’re] inevitably on everyone's device at some point.
I've got to ask, too, about the the touch bar version of the app that you had a couple of years ago. I was really sad to see that go.
The touch bar concept…I feel like people kind of ragged on the touch bar version of the MacBook, and some people thought it was stupid, or not worth it, but I thought there was still potential there. I thought there were opportunities to make that a really cool feature. I'm on an M1 Max now, and it's phenomenally powerful, but I don't know…I can still see areas where I would like to have that element of touch and gesture on the keyboard.
I'm curious if you feel the same, because to me, that was a really innovative use of the feature there, and I can think of a couple other apps that would benefit from that extra bit of surface control, like you were exploring there. I'm curious to hear your thought on that.
Marcos: Yeah, that's funny. I mean, that came out of the boredom of the pandemic. So I was at home with my partner, and we were trying to find things to do because we were at home, and that seemed like a fun little project. I always…I don't know, whenever I see a new piece of, like, input…it happened with the iPad and Samplr, or in this case, with the touch bar. Whenever I see a new piece of input, I'm always excited. “Oh, what are the things you could do with it?” I feel like touch bar was super cool in the sense that you had this multi touch strip directly on the keyboard, and it adds a very expressive layer to your keyboard. If you don't look at it, you don't think about it as virtual buttons, because the virtual buttons will never be as good as the physical buttons you have next to it. But if you think of it as, “oh, this is a continuous strip that you can control with multiple fingers.” I was like, “that kind of aligns very well with Samplr. So it seemed like a good match and it was kind of a fun challenge: “how can I make this as quick as possible? Like a very simple version of Samplr, where you can just do many little loops, and have two or three effects.” It's more like a demo, or like a mini version of the app. It really doesn't have as many features, of course. It was like an idea of “can we make something fun with it?” And a lot of people mentioned, “wow, that seems like an interesting use for the touch bar.”
Not many other companies used the touch bar like that. When they were making apps for it, it was mostly just a dynamic row of buttons that change, but I was trying to see if you could do more than that. I also made it free, and I do say on the website, there's no support - use it at your own risk. It's just for fun as an example, and it's out there if you wanna use it. Just have fun with it. But that’s about it.
Andrew: I thought it was fantastic. Because half the time I'm using my iPad…I mean, probably like 80 percent of the time using it, I'm running Samplr, but then my biggest secondary use case is using it as, basically, a MIDI controller. I run Loopy Pro and then I set up a custom screen of widgets to control devices in Ableton Live and stuff like that, and send MIDI through my iPad to my laptop to control it.
Check out an example in a prior post here on the Sound Methods Substack page: LINK
And yeah, I could just think of so many examples where it would be nice to have a touch surface, a touchable surface with gestures to control things in my desktop software, desktop programs like that…but I'll keep advocating for it. I wish they would bring that back, but I may be on an island here. I'll Keep shouting about it. Maybe someone will do something one day.
Anything you want to plug in terms of things you're working on? Where can we go to see more of your work? Anything you want to direct people to to check out?
Marcos: Oh, definitely check out Fugue Machine and Borderlands Granular and Koala Sampler, if you haven't used them or don't know about them. They are incredible apps made by really cool people, so check those out.
Andrew: Really glad that we had the opportunity to to chat here. This was very illuminating. And again, as just a major fanboy of the app, I’m glad I got to get some insight and background on it. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Marcos: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for giving me the chance to be here.
Sound Methods 004: Marcos Alonso