Hazy Daze

At last! Haze is out. This one has been a long, strange trip to say the least.

The vibe of this one is taking things slowly, an important thing to remember how to do these days. I've been making music with a "near-final" build of this since February. Since then, it's had over a hundred more near-final builds. Many features were added, removed, and combined over this time, and a lot of material recorded.

Ironically, this was also the fastest prototype from first line of code to first useful build. Haze is based on my personal music making chain and is designed around two major gestures: finding that loop that you want to go on forever, and then exploring it, phasing it, obscuring it, stretching it, and living in it. It has DNA from many of our products: the looping buffer from Sandman Pro, the spectral effects from SpecOps, the tape effects from lo-fi-af, the granulation from Silo, but reconfigured into something fresh, new, and intuitive. So, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it, but it took a while to figure out how to express that to others.

Well, here it is. If you're excited to try it, we recently moved things around to add a page to quickly download our latest installers. These also act as demos: https://uadrm.com/downloads Load up an old favorite recording and walk your way through it. Let us know what you think on socials.

We have a lot of plans for Haze 1.1 already, including a partner tool and a buffer browser, but let's not get ahead of ourselves this time. Battalion 1.5 is up next. As Josh mentioned in his most recent blog post, the design for the Patterns system finally works this time. MIDI Out and MIDI Rendering are done, and we're almost done with MIDI CC assignments. I hadn't originally planned on adding this since DAWs take care of a lot of mapping and automation, but there's now a large community of people using Battalion as a standalone instrument on iPad. We have a ton of performance improvements and some other surprises (including a big VCV update). As such, we're going to do another series of Battalion posts in November.

• Michael

PS Check out Josh's awesome photograph for Haze's credit page and manual. I think he perfectly captured the essence of Haze in an old film projector and a cloud of smoke.