Drums that know where the music turns.
BY SONGDEED
Every other drum generator asks what genre you want and how busy it should be. Talea asks where your music turns — and then plays it. Give it bars, a meter and a mark wherever the music changes; it works out which bars the form leans on, and puts the fill in the bar before and the crash on the downbeat after. Fifteen styles across five kits, nineteen time signatures, an engraved drum staff, and MIDI or MusicXML straight into your session.
Download on the App Store iPhone & iPadEvery other drum generator asks what genre and how busy. Talea asks where the form turns — a section arriving, a phrase closing, the ending — and puts the fill in the bar before it and the crash on the downbeat after. The gold ticks on the timeline show you where, before you press play.
Rock, pop, funk, jazz, bossa, samba, reggae, Motown, boom-bap, four-on-the-floor — and five concert idioms: march, bolero, tarantella, swell, tutti. Each one is written against the pulse of the bar rather than against 4/4, so 6/8, 5/4, 11/8 and 2/2 are not special cases. A 7/8 rock groove exists because the rule does, not because anyone wrote one; so does a 6/8 march.
Acoustic, 808 and 909 — and Concert and Orchestral, which are the same fourteen voices re-voiced: timpani, tam-tam, triangle, tambourine, suspended cymbal, concert bass drum. They rename and renumber themselves on the way out too, so a file that sounds like a tambourine says Tambourine in your DAW instead of Closed hat.
Mark where the music changes and give that section a feel: half-time, double-time, broken, build, stop-time. The control names the bars it is about to change, so a chorus goes half-time in one tap and nothing else moves.
Not a grid of blobs. An engraved percussion staff with two voices — hands up, feet down — beamed by the pulse, with x noteheads for the cymbals and ghost notes in brackets. What you see is what lands in the MusicXML.
MIDI on GM channel 10, or MusicXML as a percussion staff. Bring a bass line in and the kick locks to it. Bring a drum part back and Talea reads its style, density and swing off the file and moves the sliders to match.
Bring in a file from Anacru, the line's polymeter app, and its cycle rides over your bar — five quarters against your 4/4, going in and out of phase and realigning every five bars. You choose which layer rides and what it plays. It survives swing, because a phasing cycle is not on your subdivision and should not be swung with it.
One small payment. No subscription, no ads, no account, no sign-in. It works in airplane mode and it collects nothing — no analytics, no crash reporting, no network code at all.
A loop repeats. Music does not. The reason a programmed drum track sounds programmed is almost never the sounds — it is that bar 8 is identical to bar 7 when every drummer alive would have played something there, because bar 9 starts the chorus.
Talea builds a turn map before it writes a note: a weight for every bar, from the form alone. A section boundary weighs more than a phrase ending; a phrase ending weighs more than nothing. Fills get longer as the weight rises, crashes appear above a threshold, and the velocity contour lifts into the turn and settles after it.
It is a pure function of the form — no model, no dataset, no network. The same form gives the same answer every time, and you can see the answer on the timeline before you press play.
It will not adopt an imported drum part and let you edit it hit by hit. Talea is a generator, and a pattern it could not regenerate is a pattern its own controls cannot touch. What an import gives you is the form, the tempo, the meter — and, from a drum file, the character: it reads the style, the density and the swing off the part and moves those controls where you can see them.
It will not pretend to be a polymeter sequencer. Talea counts in one meter, and an imported cycle rides over it as a voice rather than as a second bar — because the thing that makes one style library serve 4/4 and 7/8 is a single pulse map, and a second one is a different program. It says so when you import: what it took, what rides, and which layers it did not use.
It will not guess at a control it cannot read. Motion is never inferred, because it was built, measured against the app's own output and found not good enough — and a slider moved on a bad guess is worse than one left alone. Every control that does move is named in the report.
No account. No sign-in. No analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifier, no network code. Your forms and your parts are saved on the device and nowhere else, and the app is fully functional with the phone in airplane mode.
Availability is worldwide except mainland China. Requires iOS 15 or later; iPhone and iPad.
Also from Songdeed: Mediant for the chords, Continuo for the bassline, Melisma for the words, Filigree for the theme, and Contrapunctus for the second voice.