L.Dre has created a pack of raw hiphop patterns, while Polaris has created an inspiring pack of driving drum & bass patterns. Lastly, finish by exporting the Audio or MIDI to your DAW.Ĭaptain Beat includes two new Pattern Packs by L.Dre and Polaris (Hospital Records). Sounds can be sculpted inside Captain Beat using the envelope, pitch and pan controls, and effects such as a filter, reverb and delay. If you prefer to draw in rhythms, the Pencil Tool can be used to sketch in beats. Original patterns can be recorded in by finger drumming on your keyboard or MIDI controller. Use Captain Beat to easily mix and match patterns from different genres to create original percussion.īeats are laid out on the Drum Roll, which includes a vertical stack of the drum sounds available in Captain Plugins. Captain Beat gives you complete control of your beatmaking by equipping you with a multitude of patterns, drum kits and the ability to record and edit your rhythms. When you’re making electronic or urban music, getting your drums right is half the battle. It’s cool to see what melodies are suggested when you are looking for a new idea.” I love the color feature that tells you how stable the note is in the scale. David Guetta writes: “Captain Melody is super convenient for songwriting. Using a DAW, users can route Captain Plugins to their favorite analog synths that support MIDI.ĭavid Guetta wrote the melody and chords for his “Stay (Don’t Go Away)” remix with R3hab using Captain Melody 3.0 beta.
Captain Deep is built for building bass lines and Captain Play allows you to jam in melodies that are in key with your track.Ĭaptain Plugins allows real-time routing to other VST plugins, such as Sylenth1, Serum, Massive, Omnisphere, Kontakt, Curve 2 and all others. Captain Chords is designed to create inspiring chord progressions, while Captain Melody allows you to write melodies that work with your chords. Created by Mixed In Key, these unique plugins connect together and allow users to compose chords, melodies and basslines in the same key. This is a big update that provides much more control and power to edit the shape of your melodies, and putting you more in command allows you to imprint your own creativity rather than simply letting the software compose for you.Captain Plugins + Captain Beat: Award-Winning Plugins by Mixed In KeyĬaptain Plugins are an innovative series of plugins for music composition. Although this is a pain, the upside is that Mixed in Key can push constant useful updates without the need to download new installers. Something that remains and may still be a big issue for some though, is the need for a constant Internet connection to use the plug-in fully. Thankfully, in this update you can now edit notes on the plug-in screen, so you can get your melody closer to how you want it before exporting. Once you’re happy with your pattern, you can simply drag and drop to your DAW of choice. You can also use the Lanes tab of the Idea Tool to quickly reshape how much of this tension is present in your melody.įinally, there’s a cool dice randomisation feature that gives an alternative pattern based on your settings, which is useful for generating variations. There’s good use of colour here to indicate how much tension each note brings in relation to the chord shape, which is a great way to visualise harmony and scales.
You’ll need a degree of trial and error, but overall it’s a very flexible tool. Once you have your rough melody, you can use the innovative Idea Tool to manipulate the shape, density, rhythm, variation and more by tweaking the dials. You can choose to play in a melody idea from the keyboard, with all keys jumping to the correct key set by Captain Chords, or alternatively, you could use the Smart Pencil and Paintbrush tools to input rhythms and MIDI notes. We’ll focus on Captain Melody here, as this has seen the most interesting updates. You can choose to use any of the 249 built-in sounds, which are surprisingly decent and usable, albeit with basic sound editing, or you can route the MIDI to an external VST. The package includes Captain Melody, Captain Chords, Captain Play and Captain Deep (Captain Hook and Captain Beat are coming soon), which are all bespoke songwriting tools that work as plug-ins or MIDI effects in your DAW, with inter-plug-in communication to keep them all in key.
Price $79 (Mac & Windows) Contact Mixed In KeyĪlthough we reviewed the first version of the Captain Plugins only 14 months ago, there have been many updates since, making this latest version a dramatic development over the initial concept.