#fiddlewax

Working on Fiddlewax over the past 2 years has been an incredible experience. I’ve built dozens of experimental instruments to explore new ways of making music and packaged up the best ones as fine-tuned iOS apps.

But what really brought me here was a desire to help more people make music and not be intimidated by many of the trappings of traditional music education and instrumentation. Learning key signatures, practicing scales, and reading sheet music are all great skills, but they too often get in the way of talented would-be musicians' first steps.

Each medium for making things comes with its own set of constraints and opportunities. The digital realm is particularly unique, as it offers the ability to ship a product to hundreds of thousands of people around the world at nearly zero cost. 

Of course, the greatest constraint of digital things is that they are trapped inside hardware, and in the case of mobile apps, that hardware is very generic, flat, and small. So it seemed wise to embrace the fundamental nature of screen-based interaction, rather than make instruments that attempt to look or work like their tangible, affordance-rich cousins. 

But what apps lack in physical feedback they gain in their ability to dynamically change. Any note can be modified to fit within particular keys, scales, and timing grids in realtime. Instrument timbres and dynamics can be swapped or replaced with anything you can imagine. Riffs can be infinitely looped, merged, and layered as you play.

The culmination of my efforts was put into Firo (shorthand for Fiddlewax Pro). Firo is a digital “band in your hand” instrument where everything is accessible from a single screen so you can focus on creating music from any perspective. Start with drums, push-button chords, or structured notes, then add loops, improvise a solo in a pentatonic blues scale, add basic effects, or experiment with various tempos, sounds, and layouts. Save songs, hookup Firo to other apps via MIDI or Audiobus, and export files for use in other powerful music tools. It’s intentionally designed from end to end.

I’m super proud of Firo and all it can do; it’s not a cheap toy or a flashy trick. Firo is a digitally native musical instrument that enables anyone to create their own music, from scratch.

Fiddlewax hasn’t been just a side project for me; it’s been my full-time job for the past two years. And integral to running a successful business is keeping it afloat financially. While Firo has been a profitable app (with its glory days in the top iOS app rankings and tons of great reviews), the overall revenue isn’t quite enough to justify dedicated development.

That said, my desire to help more people make music is stronger than ever. So instead of flipping the business switch to off, I’m deciding to set the price to free on all Fiddlewax apps. If the $20 price tag got in the way of you trying out Firo before, I hope you’ll finally see for yourself what it’s all about.

Firo is FREE!

Firo (or Fiddlewax Pro in case you missed the name change) has come a long way over the past 9 months.

And after multiple rounds of feedback from musicians and a long series of app updates to dial things in, Firo has finally reached a level where it can fully deliver on its promise of being a go-to app for creating new music.

But as powerful as Firo is, the $20 price tag that has come with being a “pro” app has certainly limited the overall audience of potential iPad musicians. And that’s a serious bummer.

We also think Firo could be a great tool for education; it’s simple enough for anyone to play around, and it includes deeply integrated music theory that opens new doors as students learn. Of course the price tag also gets in the way there, too, since it can be difficult for teachers to use paid apps in their classroom (often requiring funding justification and logistical overhead). 

So to celebrate Firo’s new level and open it up more broadly to new musicians, we’ve decided to make Firo completely free through the end of July. This isn’t a light version or something watered down with ads; it’s the complete Firo experience for you to explore and create new songs.

Happy music making!

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Fiddlewax Pro is Now Firo

After a recent round of feedback from iOS music makers looking into how to improve Fiddlewax Pro, one issue kept coming back up -- the word “fiddle” in the name was confusing (many thinking that it was some kind of stringed instrument). Fiddlewax Pro is also a mouthful to say and not so easy to remember.

So we came up with something short, sweet, and to the point. Say hello to Firo!

Firo is just a shortened name for Fiddlewax Pro (the first and last two letters), but it’s also an opportunity to continue evolving the app without the explicit baggage of being a “pro” app.

The latest Firo update in the iOS App Store  also includes some big changes to how the app feels (brighter colors, cleaner interactions, and less clutter), while retaining all its previous speed and capabilities.

Fiddlewax Pro Update 2.2

Getting the music out of your head and into an instrument can be a tough challenge. Even if you can hear or sing the notes, the process of figuring out what fingerings or positions those notes correspond to can take time and interrupt your creative process.

Fortunately, Fiddlewax Pro just got an update that should make those troubles a thing of the past by adding "visual pitch detection" -- a simple way to highlight the corresponding notes on the keyboard as you sing along.

The update also includes MIDI Input (a highly requested feature from existing Fiddlewax users), as well as a new advanced quantization mode that lets you snap notes into different grid sizes as you progressively record each loop.

What's New in 2.2:

Realtime visual pitch detection lights up corresponding notes as you sing. Hold down the "keyboard mode/zoom" button to toggle it on and off (watch the video above to see visual pitch detection in action).

Move samples between loops by dragging its record button left/right to another loop. If you want to retain the original loop (i.e. copy instead of move), just hold down the original loops record button after you've move it ("undo" it).

Advanced quantization mode -- select between global quantization (default), and last recorded which lets you set the quantization for each loop recording as you go.

Virtual & Core MIDI Input! This one has been a long time in the making, and there are likely still a few kinks to work through (especially with hardware input), but give it a try and let me know if you run into anything so we can make it rock-solid for the next update.

Bug fix: iOS7 state saving was crashing (a strange error related to showing the text keyboard when naming a file).

Since posting the iPad Clothespin Piano a few months ago, I’ve received a lot of interesting questions about what other interfaces could be built using a similar approach.

So I took a day and stepped away from code to think about what basic materials and tools are needed to let you dig in and start creating 3D capacitive touchscreen interfaces.

You can see the full write-up and directions about how to create your own iPad Inventor’s Kit on Instructables. 

We all love playing with touchscreens, but some us (especially kids) can get sucked into the graphics and finger swipes for hours on end, thus totally forgetting about the richer physical ways of interacting with the real world.

Have no fear! The iPad Inventor’s Kit will come to the rescue and give you everything you (or your kids) need to start making new gadgets that go beyond your touchscreen to do awesome and exciting things!

And here are a few quick examples that each took less than a minute to build. Hopefully they’ll get your mind thinking about some crazy new interfaces to make with everyday materials already lying around your house.

Pencil + Aluminum Foil = Stylus

Wood block + Fingers on screen = Knob

Wooden stick + Finger = Ruler & Compass 

Sticky Tack + Key locations = Tactile cues

For all those creative types out there that made a resolution to create more music in the new year, we'd like to help.

We've heard from a lot of users that they often start out be trying Fiddlewax Blue (since it's free), then progress to Fiddlewax Yellow ($2.99), and finally go all in and use Fiddlewax Pro ($19.99).

So today we're introducing the Fiddlewax Pro Suite iOS bundle which combines both Fiddlewax Yellow and Fiddlewax Pro for the price of Pro alone.

And the great thing about bundles is the overall price takes into account what apps you've already purchased. That means that if you've already downloaded Yellow, you can get Pro at a discount. And if you jumped all the way to Pro without getting Yellow, you'll now get Yellow for free!

You can jump directly to the Fiddlewax Pro Suite in the App Store here.

OpenSentiment: Making Sense of User Feedback.

As a developer, feedback is important. Knowing what users want, what they struggle with, and what they love all play a big part in what gets developed (or debugged) next. 

But tag clouds and star ratings aren't enough -- the real insight comes from the text reviews and comments. So I created OpenSentiment, a simple text visualization that combines data from multiple sources and presents them together in a single display.

Numerical data from reviews and downloads provide helpful insight, but the real treasure trove lies in the softer, squishier, and more subjective comments and written reviews. Making sense of free text can be both tedious and difficult -- how do you compare words and phrases to draw higher-level conclusions about what's most important?

Furthermore, the data often comes from different places. For apps, there are App Store reviews, Twitter comments, forum posts, Facebook discussions, etc. All of which live in their own little isolated bubble.

OpenSentiment lets you combine lots of different streams of data into a single spreadsheet, then save it as a CSV (comma separated value) file and drag it into the browser to see how it all compares.

Central to OpenSentiment is a modified version of sentiment.js, which parses English free form text and calculates a number that roughly corresponds to how positive or negative the text is. Essentially, sentiment.js has a big table of words and maps a score to each one (positive numbers for complimentary words, and negative numbers for criticism). Additionally, it also checks for negation when a word such as "not" is found before the key word (for example, "not nice" is the opposite of "nice").

All interactive visualizations are built using the amazing d3.js library, which uses interactive svg graphics to dynamically present data. The main visualization is a double-ended word tree, which shows a common word in the center and common phrases that come before and after that word on either side. Clicking on any branch searches all text and finds matches that include those phrases, and then highlights and presents them below.

Fiddlewax Blue v1.4

The response to making Fiddlewax Blue free has been incredible, with 40 thousand downloads in the last week alone!  

So here's a quick update to address some of the feedback from users so far.

What's New in 1.4

Learning hints indicate notes in the active chord as you play.

Smoother analog chord and note transitions for more expressive sounds.

Improved audio routing (addresses issue when phone ringer is silenced).

Minor bug fixes.