Angel Beats

Note: Development on Angel Beats is currently on pause.  See this post for more information.

Why?

The promise of modern music software is that any ambitious individual can create hits in their bedroom with nothing more than a DAW on their laptop. Yet DAWs are incredibly overcomplicated while still failing to fulfil the basic needs of a songwriter. Melody, lyrics, and chords are the building blocks of songs, yet no DAW manages to integrate all three, with most failing to achieve even two. Instead, they present audio and MIDI as the whole of musical existence.

Even worse, there's no meaningful integration of all the different meta-levels involved in creating a song. There's no way to zoom out of an arrangement to see the song as a lead sheet. Or to zoom in to an instrument to see a reprogrammable audio graph. Instead, everything is crammed into one flat view with no visible structure or hierarchy. 

This isn't how it's supposed to be.

Roadmap

Angel Beats is currently in the prototyping phase. The vision is for it to be a fully integrated suite of music tools for anyone who wants to write, compose, and produce their own music. Right now it's just a multi-track MIDI sequencer, but I hope that even in this primitive state you can get a good idea of what it will become.

For the initial release, the goal has been to support breadth rather than depth of features, and then to decide on which to deepen based on user feedback. However, there are also long term goals that determine the overall direction. Here is the current roadmap:

• Beat-making: step sequencer, groove builder, sample finder
• Composing: multi-track editor, procedural generation, AI playback engine
• Arranging: cross-project database, pattern tagging, genre templates
• Producing: audio graph, preset organizer, visual synth builder
• Songwriting: lyric editor, song view, integrated autotune, virtual singers
• Performing: gamefied playalong mode, improvisation challenges, social sharing

Italicized features are in-development, and are ordered roughly by level of effort required. There are also more basic features like a save system and history that will be added before v1.0, as well as more advanced editing features for the piano roll and step sequencer.

What's in a name?

People have nicknames, formal names, and pet names. People change their names. Corporations change their names. And Tom Cruise changed his name because the scale of his ambition didn't fit the name he was born with.

I thought of Windows and Unix and how each new version is fundamentally identical to the previous. Unlike Unix, Plan 9, and Inferno which all merited their own names. I also looked at other DAW software and how the differences between version one and now were miniscule and largely imperceptible. And that's the opposite of what we're aiming for.

Angel Beats is an open-ended project, and the current roadmap represents years of work. That being the case, Angel Beats is a great name for what this software is but not for what it will be. Legendary Music Studio is a much better name for its future. And we're telling you our plans for the name because we explicitly connect to the future and from the future connect to the past.