Recording - February 2016 - 40

UVI BeatHawk

By Dino J.A. Deane
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UVI is a Paris-based company with an extensive catalog of sounds and software for professional audio production. The UVI Sound Engine, which is the result of
over ten years of research and development, powers
some of the most sophisticated software instruments out
there today, including the multiple-award-winning MACHFIVE3 sampler instrument from MOTU. This same Sound
Engine is also at the heart of BeatHawk, UVI's first iOS
music production app, and it is a very impressive offering
indeed.
When musical ideas arise, you want to realize them
while inspiration is still on fire, but sometimes technology
does get in the way. With BeatHawk, UVI has done a magnificent job of balancing simplicity, functionality and depth.
It provides the user with professional sound quality, flexibility
and an extremely fast workflow, that won't get in the way,
whenever you choose to create. There is some serious real
time sonic sorcery going on here... let's take a look.
Getting around
The interface is divided into 3 screens: Main View,
Browser, and Song. The Main View has several subwindows. This makes navigation quite intuitive, as everything you need to access is never more than a single
touch away (see Figure 1).
In the Main View, there are 16 pads which
you can consider as 16 tracks. Each pad can
hold a single drum sample, a complete drum
kit, a multisampled instrument, or a time
stretchable loop. You can create up to 16 patterns per project; each pattern can have 16
parts and be from 1 to 16 bars long.
The top of the display features the Project
Window, showing the name of the current project; click on it to open a browser. To the left,
there is a menu button to access loading and
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RECORDING February 2016

saving of projects (projects can be loaded with or without a song), preferences (global, MIDI/audio, effects), an excellent user manual, and quick
help. To the right there's a button to access Song Mode, and a master volume slider. Under all that is a per-measure timeline of the current pattern,
and a horizontal red line that's actually a hidden CPU meter.
Along the left side of the 16 pads are 4 buttons to access how you
interact with the pads. PAD lets you select a pad to play, load, or
edit a sound. VOLUME gives you a 16-level velocity grid to add
dynamics to your playing. PITCH reveals a 2-octave piano keyboard
(shown in Figure 2) for chordal, melodic, or drum kit playing, with a
modulation slider and octave shift buttons (you can also use a MIDI
keyboard to great effect as the app responds to velocity over MIDI).
MUTE lets you mute and unmute tracks.
The ERASE button allows you to delete the entire sequence or specific hits of a selected track. SELECT allows you to call up a pad
silently (very useful while recording). REPEAT continually triggers a
pad at the current Quantize Grid Rate (from 64th-note triplets up to a
full bar), as long as you hold it down. (I've shown the Quantize
popup menu in Figure 5, which I'll get to in a moment.)
Along the bottom you have UNDO, REDO, QUANTIZE GRID,
GROOVE, TAP TEMPO (10 to 400 BPM), and your transport controls
(PLAY/STOP/RECORD).
Track and Pattern Edit
To the Right of the 16 pads is the TRACK / PATTERN Edit window. In
the Track Edit tab you can access the Browser (see Figure 3) to audition
and load sounds, adjust volume, panning, pitch, and set both highpass
and lowpass filters. You can send signal to both the global reverb and
the global delay (their settings are found in the Preferences). You can also
turn on One-Shot mode and create up to four Choke groups, where one
pad mutes others; closed and open hi-hats are a common example.
You also have an ADSR envelope per pad (also shown in Figure 2)
as well as the ability to RECORD into each pad and a simple editing
window where you can fine-tune sample start and end points (Figure
4). If you have loaded a factory loop (they're REX files), there is an
option to slice the loop across the keyboard for manual playing.
In the PATTERN Edit tab, you have a grid for your 16 patterns, you
can set / change the length of each pattern (when you extend a pattern it copies the data) and you have COPY, PASTE, and CLEAR buttons. Patterns in this grid will also remember the Mute status of each
of the 16 tracks for each pattern.
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - February 2016