MoMinstruments Elastic Melody

Elastic Melody offers creative melody generation in a compact iOS app format.

Oliver Greschke of MoMinstruments will be well known to long‑standing iOS‑based music makers for his very popular Elastic Drums app. First released some six years ago, it is still one of the best drum‑synth‑meets‑groovebox apps you can run under iOS and the only real shame is that it doesn’t also exist in a desktop format. Oliver’s latest offering is Elastic Melody, which runs either standalone or as an AUv3 plug‑in. So, if you like the idea of a self‑contained app where you can experiment with up to three different monophonic synth‑based sounds, each with their own step‑based sequencer lane that supports comprehensive automation, plus some cool global effects, then Elastic Melody ought to appeal.

A Quick Tour

The screenshot included here shows the synth engine and the main step‑sequencer environment. The controls are identical for each three lanes (you switch between them using the buttons located on the right of the UI) but they are independent of each other so you can have different sounds and sequences assigned in each lane. The synth is a subtractive affair with a single oscillator that offers multiple waveform types. There is also a filter with modulation, an envelope filter and the option to add noise. It’s not the most powerful synth you will ever use but the controls are very easy to navigate and for some old‑school analogue synth tones, it does a very respectable job.

Within the Settings page, you can set a global key/scale for the sequencer and the number of lanes within the grid layout changes to reflect the number of notes within the scale (for example, five lanes for a pentatonic scale). You simply tap on a grid square to add a note and can drag up/down within that grid square to set the octave of that note, with a range of seven octaves offered. Interestingly, you can adjust both the number of steps and the step length for each sequencer lane independently, making cross‑rhythms a possibility. You can also build multiple patterns for the three sequencer lanes, and these patterns can be dragged and dropped within the neat Song page to create a longer arrangement.

Tap on the Autom button (bottom left) and you can then add automation for virtually every parameter in the synth engine on a per‑lane/ per‑pattern basis, and this makes it possible to coax plenty of sonic variation out of each synth instance. In the FX page, you get global EQ, modulation, delay and reverb effects. These are all very usable and, again, you can sequence every parameter on a per‑pattern basis.

Elastic Melody works great as a standalone app, allowing you to generate sequenced synth ideas very quickly, and that might be more than enough reason to add it to your iOS app collection. However, it also has MIDI support so, for example, you could run Elastic Melody within a suitable AUv3 host and then route MIDI out from the three sequencer tracks to your virtual instruments of choice, integrating your Elastic Melody ideas into a broader project. I tried this within AUM and it worked very well.

If sequenced synth ideas are your thing, this is well worth a look.

Conclusion

At the very modest asking price, there is little not to like here. Elastic Melody is a very cool synth‑based ideas platform, letting you sequence and arrange ideas in a very streamlined workflow. However, both the synth engines and the sequencing have enough features to keep things interesting and the automation and effects are surprisingly flexible. Mobile music‑making really does offer considerable bang for your buck and the App Store is a bit of a treasure trove of cool and quirky music creation tools if you know where to look. Elastic Melody is another great example of the kind of niche tools on offer. If sequenced synth ideas are your thing, this is well worth a look.