DEVINE MACHINE SOFTWARE Devine Machine 1.0 (WIN)

Dec 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Peter Freeman

Devine Machine Software's Devine Machine is a loop-manipulation tool that gives users unprecedented control over multiple loops in real time. Because it doesn't fit neatly into any existing category, I can't refer to it as a sequencer or a simple beat-munger. Its developers call it a “loop workstation,” which seems an appropriate designation.

PRODUCT SUMMARY
Devine Machine Software Devine Machine 1.0 (Win) loop processor $249
FEATURES	4.0
QUALITY OF SOUND	4.0
DOCUMENTATION	2.5
VALUE	4.5
RATING PRODUCTS FROM 1 TO 5
PROS: Innovative. Powerful loop manipulator for studio and live use. Works alone or as a VST instrument. Very stable.
CONS: Unusual interface takes time to learn. Manual adequate but not great. Currently Windows only (Mac OS X version in development).
Manufacturer
Devine Machine Software e-mail dmteam@devine-machine.com Web www.devine-machine.com

Devine Machine, which functions as both a standalone application and a VST instrument, does two main things. First, it allows you to play and manipulate up to eight mono or stereo, 16- or 32-bit drum/rhythm loops (WAV format only) in real time by letting you determine the order of the loop slices on the fly. The individual transient “hits” of the loops are detected automatically when loaded, but you can easily fine-tune the slice points at the sample level. Each of the loops can have its own independent pitch, distortion, filter, level, pan, and delay setting; changes to these settings update nearly instantaneously.

Next, Devine Machine's Live Loops mode lets you trigger loops that are assigned to MIDI notes while up to eight synchronized loops run in the background. However, this is not simply dumb sample triggering (though that is possible). You can choose to trigger loops live and have them always start in the same position in the bar as the currently playing loops, so that whatever loops you trigger are always “musically relevant” to what's going on.

GET SET

As of this writing, Devine Machine is available only as a Web download, though that may change by the time you read this. The program requires at least a Pentium II/500 MHz processor, but a Pentium 4/2 GHz is recommended. The download includes two separate versions of the program, one to support ASIO, the other, MME.

I tested Devine Machine on a Sony Vaio Pentium 4/2 GHz PC with 1 GB of RAM and plenty of disk space. I used the ASIO version of the program with my Steinberg Nuendo (actually an RME Hammerfall) Digi 9652 card running under Emagic's Logic 5, Steinberg's Cubase SX, and Image-Line Software's Fruityloops Pro 3.56.

IN LIVING COLOR

FIG. 1: Devine Machine's main window displays waveform views of up to four of the currently loaded loops and toggles between Pattern and Song modes. Additional controls, including Start and Stop buttons, appear along the bottom of the window.

Devine Machine's brightly colored main interface is a single fixed-size window that provides access to a variety of different work areas. When the program first loads, you'll find basic controls for loop selection, start/stop, and relative volume for each of up to eight loops. Although the waveform displays of up to four of the currently loaded loops that appear around the top perimeter of the window represent a rather novel design concept, they are not particularly crucial to the program's operation (see Fig. 1).

In the standalone version of the program, the top of the program window offers standard menus: File, Edit, Track, Pattern, Song, Options, and Help. In the VSTi version, these are hidden, but you can call them up by right-clicking anywhere in the lower half of the window.

At the center of the main window are two buttons labeled Pattern and Song. These are Devine Machine's two main modes, though the terms don't have the meaning you might assume. Song mode, which loads by default, lets you control which loops (and variations thereof) play in real time. Pressing the Tab key (or clicking on the Pattern button) “flips down” the editing screen and brings you into Pattern mode, where detailed loop manipulation takes place. Devine Machine continues to play as you move among its various editing screens.

In Song mode, you have access to six work areas: Levels, Sample, Record, Live Loop, Options, and Bank Manager. Levels gives access to an animated level meter for each of the eight tracks: click and drag on a track's indicator to adjust its level. The Sample display is for adjusting the currently selected sample's loop point (only the end of the loop is adjustable).

The Record button brings up a sampling display where you can record mono or stereo 32-bit WAV files directly into Devine Machine. I rarely had occasion to use this, as I was working with samples from my existing library, but it's a handy inclusion. The Options screen gives access to a variety of setup parameters, such as the Live Loop MIDI channel and the Remixer/Panner, and the Bank Manager is used for the function its name implies. (I'll cover Live Loops later.)

LET IT FLOW

Pattern mode offers six more work areas, some of which have their own subwindows. The most important of these areas is the Incarn window, which has three working modes of its own: Flows, Drums, and Synth. Flows, which appears by default when you enter Pattern mode, is for rearranging and manipulating the individual segments of a loop either by drawing freehand or by drawing on a quantized grid (from quarter notes to 64th notes, depending on the current Snap quantization value). You can reverse or repeat individual segments and easily make scratching or scrubbing effects.

FIG. 2: The Flows screen, found in Pattern mode, displays individual loop segments arranged on a two-dimensional grid. You can rearrange segments by drawing directly on the grid.

Like the other windows, Flows displays time from left to right (x-axis) and the position in the current loop from bottom to top (y-axis; see Fig. 2). A diagonal line from the lower left to the upper right of the window (which is drawn automatically) will play the loop's segments in their original order. By clicking anywhere on the screen, you can make the segment that is found at the vertical position you clicked sound at any point in time. Basic editing is as simple as that: drawing on the screen enables you to create just about any imaginable variation of a loop.

However, your options extend much further than that. Devine Machine also allows you to independently alter pitch, lowpass- or highpass-filter cutoff and resonance, distortion, delay (with regeneration), and volume, for each preset, using the same method. I'll describe some of those features in a moment.

ON DRUMS

Drums mode is Incarn's second main editing mode. Here, loop slices are represented as colored blocks on a grid much like the piano-roll editor in a sequencer (the color and length of each block is determined in the Region Editor screen, described later). By moving blocks around, you can change the actual drum sound that plays at each point in the loop.

Working in Drums mode is easy. As in Flows mode, the slices in your loop appear arranged diagonally across the screen when you first access Drum mode. One way to begin is by clicking in any of the grid squares to “paint in” new blocks. This allows you to create an entirely new pattern from the slices of the current loop.

FIG. 3: Devine Machine's Region Editor is where you specify what instrument (such as snare or bass drum) is playing in each segment of a loop (bottom). You can also manipulate slice points manually on the waveform display (top).

Another option is to start in the Region Editor, then return to the Drums screen and fine-tune or edit the results. The Region Editor is home to the program's Drum Coloring feature, a very cool capability that I haven't seen elsewhere. On the Region Editor page, directly below the horizontal Region Editor itself, there is a grid of six rows spanning the length of the loop. These are labeled Main, BD, Sn, HH, Perc, and MSC (see Fig. 3). By clicking in the appropriate grid square under the slice you want to label, you can “tell” Devine Machine which instrument (bass drum, snare, hi-hat) is actually sounding during each slice of the loop. (The developer reports that an upcoming version of Devine Machine will be able to detect the drum sound automatically.)

What's the point? Basically, once Devine Machine knows the specific instrument sounds you're using in a loop, it can use that same set of instruments to “play” other loop patterns (you have to do the coloring on both loops). In other words, you can “re-orchestrate” your loops by having the instruments of one play the pattern of another.

Drum Coloring is tremendously useful and time saving. It makes it quite easy to make multiple loops play the same actual pattern without the usual process of manually slicing (or Recycling) loops and then importing MIDI files into a sequencer and editing the sequences to match.

The Region Editor screen also lets you fine-tune the individual transient slices of a loop so the program knows precisely where each beat is located in the sample. This feature, which is functionally similar to Steinberg's Recycle, is extremely fast — just click on the small box under each slice, and the display takes you to the approximate start of that slice in the waveform display. A yellow vertical line marking the precise start point appears, and if you drag the yellow line left or right to the desired point and release the mouse, the display automatically jumps to the beginning of the next slice. (Auto-jump can be disabled if desired.) Conveniently, loop-slice information (region, location, and color) is stored within a unique database file, so the program remembers this information even if you move the original file to another drive or rename it.

When you're done in the Region Editor, press Ctrl+D, and you're returned to the Drums mode screen. Devine Machine automatically creates the colored blocks on the grid that will play the slices of the current loop in their original order. The block colors correspond to the ones you chose (representing the kick, snare, and so on) in the Region Editor. This is highly convenient as a starting point, and I quickly made it part of my normal Devine Machine work flow.

IN EFFECT

After working with the Flows and Drums mode screens and getting your loop reordered the way you want it, Devine Machine's effects are a good place to go. The windows for manipulating Distortion, Filtering, Delay, Panning, Pitch, and Level are all similar to the Incarn graph, but with one main difference: because you're changing effects parameters over time, lines drawn higher in the window represent higher parameter values, and lower ones represent lower values. It's very intuitive once you get used to the general process of working with the graph interface.

Devine Machine's effects themselves are not parameter-heavy and seem intended primarily for broad strokes rather than fine detail. This is not a criticism so much as an observation. In practice, the effects are quite serviceable and, used with one another and with the loop-reordering process, can be very effective.

Other nifty and unusual MIDI-controlled real-time effects are mapped to the MIDI key range an octave below the Live Loop keys. These features, which affect the program's eight core loops, include momentary repeat keys for “stuttering” effects and a mod-wheel-controlled lowpass filter and ring modulator.

The repeat keys grab a piece of whatever patterns are currently playing and repeat it as long as they are held down. The length of the piece is determined by which key you're holding. When you release the key, the program resumes playback immediately from the place in the bar that it has advanced to while you held the key down (the clock runs in the background even during the repeating process). So in effect, you never stop playback no matter how many momentary repeats you create.

The Low Pass Filter effect (activated by holding down the B1 key) maps the mod wheel to cutoff frequency, and though resonance is fixed, the filter can still be useful (it happens to sound quite good). The Ring Mod (accessed using MIDI key A1) is similarly limited — the only control is mod-wheel mapped to modulator frequency — but useful nonetheless.

Finally, there's the rather confusingly named Realtime Remixer/Panner effect, which uses the mod wheel to control panning and to grab a random slice of whatever's currently playing (it's different every time). This effect uses the grabbed data to create momentary unpredictable rhythmic effects. The Realtime Remixer/Panner effect is more of a happy-accident generator than anything else — you never know exactly what you're going to get, but it's often something interesting.

LIVE LOOPS

FIG. 4: Live Loop mode is used for triggering up to 24 loops in real time. Loops are assigned to individual MIDI keys and can either be mixed with any other sounds currently playing or replace those sounds.

Devine Machine's eight simultaneous loops and their associated editing capabilities are only half of the story. The other main feature is the Live Loop screen, which lets you assign up to 24 additional loops to a two-octave MIDI key range for use as a live-performance tool (see Fig. 4). These loops can be triggered at any time and, if the Devine Machine transport is running, will always trigger in sync with the current bar position. (You can override that feature if you want them to trigger freely as they would in a conventional sampler.)

For each Live Loop key, you have control over the quantization of the trigger sync (that is, whether it will align the triggered loop to the nearest playing quarter, eighth, or 16th note, or not at all) and whether or not the loop will be added to the mix or replace all other sound momentarily. There are also individual Level and Pan controls for each loop. In addition, a handy two-stage (AR) envelope is available for each Live Loop key, so you can determine whether a triggered loop will start and end instantly or fade in or out.

ON DECK

Minimum System Requirements Devine Machine 1.0 Pentium II (or AMD equivalent)/500 MHz; 256 MB RAM; Windows 98/2000/XP

The program allows you to group two sets (called Decks) of four simultaneous loops that can be faded from one to the other using a DJ-mixer-style horizontal crossfade control. Each Deck has five pattern-variation memories for each of its four loops (A-D or E-H), and each loop can be loaded with a different loop-manipulation preset. This gives you many possible four-loop combinations for each Deck. Presets are stored in banks and contain information about the order of loop slices as well as controls for the effects, but not the actual sound data.

Devine Machine also allows you to store “snapshots” of the currently selected patterns, which can be recalled using keys on the PC keyboard. That makes it easy to move from one combination of loops to another to try out arrangements ideas.

Devine Machine supports up to 14 stereo outputs (1 through 8 are hard-wired for loops A through H), as well as an additional output pair for Live Loops. This is key, as it allows you to process different loops independently in real time, using the capabilities of your VST host (or other tools, if your system can route the audio to external destinations). In my experience with Devine Machine, this proved to be one of the most useful and powerful configurations in which to use the program, owing to the flexibility it provided. Setting up different VST-effects chains in Cubase SX for each stereo loop output quickly yielded some amazing results.

IN SYNC

The Devine Machine standalone version will lock to MIDI Clock, while the VSTi version syncs to host tempo (and thus whatever sync methods the host can use). In practice, Devine Machine's sync is impressively fast and solid. I tried it running standalone locked to Pro Tools on another computer and as a VSTi inside Logic for Windows. In both cases it worked extremely well.

My favorite way to use the program turned out to be as a VSTi inside Fruityloops. That setup let me combine Fruity's fast sequencer/sample playback and drum-machine-style programming with Devine Machine's loop-manipulation capabilities — a very inspiring combination.

SUPPORTING MATERIALS

Devine Machine's manual is a PDF document with plenty of screenshots. Links to Flash tutorial movies on the developer's Web site are included, as is a simple “first steps” tutorial application. These materials made all the difference, particularly in the early stages of learning the program. There's also a contextual help function which, when enabled, displays help text about whatever area of the program window the cursor is in.

Apparently, Devine Machine does all its internal processing with 32-bit precision. That may explain why its output has such noticeably high clarity. Even when all eight loops are playing and mixed down to a single stereo pair, their individual details come through extremely clearly, something that is not always a given with digital mixers in this context. I was quite pleased with the sound of every aspect of the program, including the effects; everything is quite up front and present.

Devine Machine is a truly innovative program, with far too many features to cover in the space of this review. The important thing is that it lets you do things with loops in real or near-real time that would be difficult or impossible to do by other means. This is true to a degree that can't fully be communicated in print — you have to see, hear, and work with the program for yourself (downloadable demo versions are available at the developer's Web site).

My experience working with Devine Machine could be broken down into three stages: the “What the hell?” stage, the “I think I get it” stage, and the “Oh my god!” stage. Initially, you may be confused by this program. You'll soon begin to get a handle on it, and finally, the creative possibilities will dawn on you, and you'll be completely amazed. I should also note that the program didn't crash once during the review period, which is remarkable given the complexity of its moment-to-moment operations.

On the minus side, the interface is not immediately obvious and requires a definite adjustment period. But once you're comfortable with the program, you will find yourself wondering how you ever got along without it. Devine Machine offers immense power as a studio loop tool and a live-performance instrument, and that is a potent combination.

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Peter Freeman is a bassist, composer, and producer based in L.A. He has worked with Seal, John Cale, Jon Hassell, Sussan Deyhim, Shawn Colvin, Nile Rodgers, and others.