What is it?
Sprak is a noise/drone synth designed to make phat and gritty ehhrm, noise and drones. While we love the existing noise and drone apps available on the app store, none of them combined the two in that special way we had a craving for. So what did we crave?
* Phase realign
* Stereo
* Gritty sound
* Something you could take pleasure from exploring.
* Being able to get new and interesting sounds
* Distortion, two cup fulls!
* Being able to feedback the sound back into itself, ahh yeah, nice!
* Easy on the eye.
* Borrow aesthetics from DIY pedals and Circuit bent “stuff”.
That’s about it, we like to connect a headphone and sit in a comfy chair and just play with the knobs and zone out.
In one sentence: Phat-noisy drones in an iPhone app.
If you want to listen to Sprak in acion, here is a little mp3: test1-Sprak
How do I use it?
It’s dead easy really, real easy, just turn the knobs and you’ll get new and exiting sounds. If you still want to know what the knobs and levers do, press the little ? up in the left corner and there will be an overlay of the parameters.
Did you try turning several knobs at the same time? Big knobs change things much, smaller less.
What is it really?
Ok, so I see that you are really interested in softsynts and synthesizer engines, so I’ll go through it with you. First of the oscillators are based on the cubic hermetic spline. Those splines are awesome because you can just set points out that they pass through, instead of just near. there are 64 parameters per oscillator to control, and that is done by the sound-knob (big ass top left knob) . How about that Huh!
Then the audio splits and adds to the feedback from last sample at the volume set by the slider. and it also adds with another oscillator per channel that is just like the first one, but on a slightly different Hz so you can get it to drone. We’ve found that the volume of the second oscillator per channel really needs to be tweakable to get awesome results. The distortion is an overdrive type distortion, but we’ve tweaked to make it behave in a usable way.
Oh and the lowpass that we put on everything when you press down on the speaker adjusts when you drag your finger away from the center. Try it!
Pingback: idle hands › Sprak
yo give some examples of sounds it makes. if they’re cool people will buy the app. no samples-it’s probably not much good
Ofc, our bad, we just got a little surprised by the quick approval process. One mp3 is added, hope this helps you!
Interface looks great. Sound is very plain vanilla and boring…at least the sample. I envision extreme FM where the sound is unrepeatable and off the wall strange. A filter would help in shaping it (just a suggestion). I also love the idea of easter eggs and surprises. Although unrelated, I just LOVE the app “Random Drawing Generator.”
http://creepco.com/ for inspiration. Thanks.
Hey
I bought your app for my ipad (ios 3.2.2)but it starts just for a second and then it crashes.
Gimme my buck back or fix please!
Regards,
Ben
It crashes for me too on the latest iOS.
Ben I tried the Sprak on my iPad just before I updated it and I had no issues at all. I’m unable to revert But I’ll try and see what I can do to fix this issue. Maybe find a friend that has 3.2.2 installed.
I thought Apple did test the app on every version of the os though before letting it through.
I’ll have a look into this as good as I can.
Mike,
It’s been tested on an iPad and on an iPhone4 both with the latest and greatest, as for what Ben commented this is pretty bad that it crashes. It shouldn’t. It’s been on enough devices to make sure it shouldn’t. I’m on this right now!
BTW could you tell me what device you’re running it on?
I was sold after 5 seconds of the audio sample! Noisy bastards ftw!!
Oh, man, there are no crashreports at Apple’s developer pages.
Great, another fart app !
It crashes at the “splash” screen on my iPhone 3G. The splash screen I’m referring to is the smashed speaker cone background. It freezes on that for a few moments and then the app quits.
Yeah,
It’s same like what mike describes.
I see the speaker for a sec and then it crashes.
Btw you need to add ipad screen resolution!
Hi,
I just bought the app for my 3G and it is also crashing on the speaker and backround with no knobs.
If any of you guy’s who have had crashes would like to contact johan.larsby @ gmail.com to test a possible fix it would help us formidably.
One more thing, we’d like to give you promo-codes for another of our products to you guy’s who reported the crashes above! So send you’re email addresses and we’ll hook you up.
Hey,
I just wrote johan larsby a mail.
Please give me your mail adress so i can send you mine as i do not want to post it in a comment.
Ben
I sent Johan an email. Let me know if I can help.
I too just sent Johan a message – having issues on an iPhone 3G running iOS 4.2.1. I can get Sprak to open (after a while), and to play, but it runs extremely slowly, to the point that it takes around 10 seconds for a change to a knob to even register. The app sounds great, though, so I’m sure this is just another kink to iron out.
Hey,
You could mail me your app and i test it if don’t have someone with my configuration.
Cool little app for experimenting with sound.. Be nice to have hd graphics on ipad and smoother response from the controls..
I love this little app. Just need a simple recording function and audio copy to bring the noise into other sample apps for example. Do you plan to add this?
Love the glitchy sounds, thanks! And I’ve the same request as PG: a recording feature would be very appreciated.
Hi PG and gwm.
We were kind of thinking that if you wanted to record something, you would just do an oldschool analog recording from the headphone jack. So we currently have no plans to add digital recording within the app. It’s nice to keep the functions at a minimum, because it leads to an app the looks less cluttered and is easier to learn.
Would you please give an example of another synth that has the functionality you’re after?
What would you do with the sound if you could export it?
I work under the assumption that the most common use of Sprak is to just turn it on, and zone out. Let the drone massage your brain for a few minutes, and just stay in the moment. My imagination is probably limiting me here, but I have a hard time imagining the sounds of Sprak ever making it into a song with other instruments. Do tell me if I’m wrong.
Oh Yes Sprak could definitely be used in a song.
Sure one could record the output into a DAW and work with it there, but with so many apps supporting audiocopy and paste on iOS now it would be so convenient to be able to work with Sprak soundclips in the device. I would copy into Samplelab, and make short clips of Sprak noise and use them as beats. Could be used for some very interesting rhythms. And there’s lots of other apps where you can import wav-files and tweak and slice and make interesting things with them. Also, I would copy longer noise sequences into the new app Synthtronica, where they’ll be synthesized and playable on a keyboard, the texture of noise samples work really well there.
For me (and lots of others) any sound source is interesting in music creation. Especially Noise.
It seems like Sprak has gained some attention in the music making community, and the ability to record and use the output in other apps on your iDevice, would really increase the attraction of the app, IMO. And I agree that the interface shouldn’t be cluttered, but just a R(Record) and C(Copy) rusty plate somewhere would be nice.
If you do this, I promise I’ll make a demo song with only Sprak generated sounds.
Another thing, if you decide to develop Sprak further, a really cool function would be to be able to randomize movements of all the controls, get them to turn slowly, and stay for a while, unsynchronized to each other. Then you could really sit back and listen to slow evolving noise nirvana. Or get strange pulsating drones to make music of.
Hi there
So recording could either be done via Audiocopy, and this inserted into any other Audiocopy compatible app or it could be done via a save to wave-file that you can sync over to your computer via iTunes. These are the two way’s I’ve been thinking of, I see merits in both solutions.
While this might not be obvious, Staffan does all the graphics and user interface design and I do the coding. I’m also the old noise/drone-nerd with Staffan being the fairly new to that specific part. Yes we are two in tinkerteam.
As for the total zone-out idea, I’ve been thinking along those lines, but not as part of Sprak but something else. With balls bouncing around controlling the different parameters, or perhaps you could load an image into the app and the image will control the different parameters.
There’s quite a few apps that have both wav-export and audio copy now, but If I had to choose one, audio copy is far more important, since it enables working with other apps in a good way.
Bouncing balls and total zone-out sounds great. Go for it!
audio copy would definitely be handy… having to record these apps into a DAW on my laptop and then re-import them back into another app for further processing and looping is a slightly tedious task. love the apps though!
Pingback: musikgear » Blog Archive » App Store – Sprak noise app
I like Sprak!
Do you have Sprak as a plug in for Logic?
Matti
Guys, the Sprak crashes on the latest iOS (5.1) on my iPhone 4S. Or rather, it makes the sound disappear completely after a while on the whole phone, not just Sprak. Only way to get it back is by reboot. Any suggestions?
Your palm spaz just crashed my sound on iPad Twice
Refund?
Same problem as Stefan but iPad all sound crashes till restart…..use ? Able
Due to some problems that appeared in recent os updates from Apple, that we are unable to solve, we’ve decided to lower the price to Free.
FREEE
WHEEE!
WHIIIII!
I share the problem on iPad 3: the app works really great until suddenly it just goes silent. Nothing will bring the sound back short of re-booting the iPad. I appreciate that the app was free, but I would still really love to see this problem fixed as the app is unique and quite brilliant.