sample magic midi elements future melodics

#Sample magic midi elements future melodics pro
#Sample magic midi elements future melodics software

Whitaker puts a finger on a round plastic knob on his keyboard.

To an untrained user, it sounds like a voice recording on fast-forward. Over the years, Whitaker has fine-tuned how he interacts with the program: He’s set the verbosity setting-how many words are used to describe certain things-to his liking, the maximum speed. Whitaker started using VoiceOver in 2011 when his dad got a Mac. “Depending on the interface, I have to interact a lot with sliders and buttons and various other elements, whereas a sighted person can just drag or click or tap or whatever,” says Whitaker. To return to a previous screen, he’d use two fingers to quickly draw a Z shape on the screen. A three-fingered tap will compel VoiceOver to relay more information, while a three-fingered swipe up or down is how he scrolls. For example, tapping with four fingers near the top of his iPhone screen will select the first item on the screen. Whitaker uses VoiceOver across his devices using an expansive and customizable set of gesture- and touch-specific actions. “But we achieve the same result, ya know?” “It’s different because of how we as blind individuals control everything,” says Whitaker. Before and after the gorgeous piano keystrokes, VoiceOver, Apple’s built-in screen reader, speaks in a rapid-fire stream to Whitaker, who can then navigate and manipulate his computer. Whitaker’s computer audio, though, is the key to all of this beauty.

It’s impossibly beautiful, light and bold, the sort of thing you might imagine playing when you feel on top of the world, strutting at a cutting pace on a sunny day. After a click track counts Whitaker in for one bar, his hands set to work, pumping out a dazzling bouquet of complex chords and melodies. He sets the beats per minute at 192 and hits record.

#Sample magic midi elements future melodics software

He’s working on a song idea that afternoon, so he opens a session in Logic with a track for his MIDI keyboard, which connects to computer software for its sounds. On a Zoom call from his basement studio in May, Whitaker shares his screen to demonstrate how he records.

#Sample magic midi elements future melodics pro

Whitaker first started home recording on GarageBand, before upgrading to music production app Logic Pro around 2015. “Depending on the interface, I have to interact a lot with sliders and buttons and various other elements, whereas a sighted person can just drag or click or tap or whatever.” So how does Whitaker do it without sight? With a nod to Sinatra, Whitaker does it his way. Playing, recording, mixing-all of these are carried out on visual cues, especially on a computer screen. He’s driven and he values control over his creative process, but for most people, recording music in the digital age is as much a visual process as a musical one. Now at 21 and entering his fourth year at New York City’s esteemed Juilliard School, he’s an established recording and performing artist, a Gen Z jazz wunderkind with three full-length records under his belt and collaborations with jazz veterans like Christian McBride, Rhoda Scott, and the late Dr. He’s blind, and has been since he was an infant-a result of complications from being born prematurely at 24 weeks. But he doesn’t use home production software or mixing boards the same way that sighted musicians do. This basement is where Whitaker records and produces his music. The piano is an extension of Whitaker: When he’s particularly excited, or laughs, his hands dart across the keys, creating short melodic trills and riffs. He grins while they dash across the keyboard, producing a raucous, cheeky major-key run. A turn of a knob here, a click there, then his fingers turn to their true love: the piano keys. While chatting on a video call, Whitaker flits around a sea of dials, sliders, LED displays, and keys, like a pilot in the cockpit of a jumbo jet.

It sits at the helm of this tightly organized chaos.

All of these run through five interfaces which route 40 signals-eight apiece-into the 21-year-old jazz musician’s computer. He’s surrounded on all sides by an arsenal of machines for creating music: a MIDI controller keyboard, four keyboards stacked in racks of two, and an organ, while a bass cabinet, guitar amp, drum kit, and percussion section fill out the rest of the cramped basement. Holed up in his eggshell white, low-ceiling basement in Hackensack, New Jersey, Matthew Whitaker is making magic.