Ninja Tune Launches “Ninja Jamm” Open Mobile Remixing

What if you could do more than just consume music as a passive listener?

It’s a question that has fascinated musicians ever since the dawn of digital technology. Now, a very big label is releasing an app that provides an answer to that question. Ninja Tune – and, crucially, founder Matt Black of Coldcut – are going to mobile platforms with an app that does far more than simple remixing. It can let you radically transform some of Ninja’s artists, even going in a direction that might be considered instrumentalism. CDM contributor Matt Earp has been quiet in these parts in the last months partly because he was contributing to the project. He and the developers give us an exclusive look inside the process of making this app and what it means.

And don’t miss the making-of video; the final app as it ships is built in OpenFrameworks and libpd.

Venerable independent UK electronic music label Ninja Tune have launched Ninja Jamm, their first music remix app, in collaboration with London-based arts and technology firm Seeper. It’s been created (for now) for iOS and it’s filled with tunes and loops from Ninja artists. Seeper have produced the “making of” video above that tells the app’s story, and both organizations answered some of CDMs questions below. It’s live in the app store as you read this and free to download, so grab it while you finish the article!

Ninja Jamm is basically a smart but simple remix sequencer that users can load up with “tunepacks” from Ninja’s catalog – all purchasable through the app. These tunepacks are tracks broken apart into a 4×8 matrix of clips, 8 each for drums, bass, and two more (melody, keys, vox, FX) depending on the tune. Most clips come from the original tunes, but some extras have been added to round out the bill. Users can turn instruments on and off, swap between clips, glitch them out, add effects like reverb and crush in a number of different ways, trigger the “Coldcutter” for beat-repeat action, trigger and pitch-bend stabs and one-off samples, and even change the tempo of the track. “Jammers” can record what they’re doing as they mix and instantly upload the whole thing to SoundCloud when they’re done. It packs a fairly dizzying array of sonic options into a small screen, but you’d expect nothing less from creative director Matt Black, one half of Coldcut – Coldcut did give the world “Beats and Pieces” and are synonymous with the cut and paste aesthetic of large swaths of electronic music spanning their 25+ year career.

Matt Black and Romin Aliabadi‘s video takes us through the various functions of the app

It’s an ambitious project for a record label to make something this complex, and while Black is familiar with writing a line or two of code, he’s far from a iOS developer, and Ninja Tune is far from a software development house. Enter Evan Grant and Seeper – he and his team have done multi-touch interface, projection mapping, and interactive design for some of the biggest names in the world – BBC, MTV, Ted, Xbox – It seemed like a natural fit, but there were challenges. Grant: “We’ve worked with major music labels before and put sound design and music at the core of all our installation and event projects. We develop hardware and software all the time, but this is the first time we’ve released a public mobile app.” Apple’s design specs are rigorous even for the most experienced team. A video of a prototype of the app in the hands of Amon Tobin surfaced last summer, but concerns about stability and a desire to keep making it even better kept it from launching then. Still, hard work and a relentless desire to fix a bug list a mile long prevailed, and the team received approval from Apple a few weeks ago.

Matt Black on the app’s inception and what’s under the hood:

“The concept’s genesis is in software created for [Coldcut’s] 90s projects such as Tonetrakker, DJamm and the Let Us Play software. For the 1997 ‘Let Us Play’ album, Coldcut and Hex released a free CD-ROM including our first mixing software ideas like My Little Funkit and Playtime. These let the user swap between loops, fire samples, and randomly cut them up. In 1998 we made a more controllable 4 channel loop glitching engine for our live shows, called DJamm. We got a deal with Steinberg to release it, but we never finished it – though we did release the glitching shuffle algorithm as the Coldcutter VST plugin.

When we met Seeper I was just getting into creating software again, and the App Store/iPhone were changing the whole software business, opening it up to independent operators. Evan already knew the space well and Seeper seemed like great partners to collaborate with to do something. So I knocked up a demo using Ableton and a Launchpad for a mixer app, and at the same time long time Seeper collaborator Christian Curtis had created a MaxMSP patch which cut up loops and also had a brilliant waveform interaction mode. So we mixed those two together as the prototype. However, Max wasn’t the right choice for the final implementation, and eventually we found Ed Kelly, who heroically converted it to a PD patch, itself a work of art.”

“There were other contributors in there as well – Ariel Elkin of Arivibes lent a hand building out the store, which was surprisingly tricky. The lion’s share of the non-audio code was written Chris Bradley and Andy Wallen, the main hackers at Seeper, and they deserve special commendation for their unflagging efforts.”

Black and Grant gave CDM a run down on some of the app’s essential details:

When’s the launch?
Today! April 11th, 2013

How much is the app?
It’s free to download and comes with 1 free tunepack (Beats and Pieces 3). You can purchase single tunepacks for a launch price of £0.69/$0.99, or “EPs” of 4 tunepacks for £1.99.

What tunes and artists will be included at launch?