Moog already brought their Moogerfooger effects to a powerful, patchable desktop edition. Now, it’s the iPad’s and iPhone’s turn, making these perfectly pocketable effects for your mobile rig. And that continues a legacy Moog app developers started some 13 years ago with Filtatron.
In 2010, Filtatron was a breakthrough moment for iPhone apps, in news that exclusively broke on CDM. (Hilariously, I ran it on an iPod touch, which means somewhere I still have access to the thing. Look at my youthful baby hands from 2010!) That app was also loosely influenced by the Moogerfooger hardware. And it remains a brilliant idea – filter with LFO, amp drive with feedback, a cute little loopable, syncable sampler, and X/Y pads for tweaking. (In fact, you could make the argument that the more skeuomorphic current Moogerfoogers lose a bit of the iOS-first feel of that original app.)
What a difference 13 years makes. The Moogerfooger effects have the advantage of greater mobile processing power, putting them on par not only with their desktop versions but even to a greater extent with the original hardware. And now the big advantage is, you can run these in any host you want – which also means those recording and sampling features you can easily acquire elsewhere, in a more flexible manner.
Great video coverage from The GarageBand Guide:
Beyond the obvious, you get some nice extras:
- CV interconnectivity / patching, just like on the desktop recreations
- New iOS-native UI (which I think is even more of a pleasure to use than the plug-ins – this one is just made for touch, as that first Filtatron recognized)
- Full preset library
- Yep, AUv3 support – hello, Logic Pro and Cubasis and AUM!
Now is a great time to grab these, because they’re on sale at US$9.99 each of $39.99 for the full set. That means if it’s on-the-go usage you’re after, the iOS version might be a better buy for you than the pricier desktop release.
Either way, it’s great to have these effects at our disposal, for a fraction of the cost of buying just one unit of hardware. And they’re really great effects, full of clever design ideas.
Add that to everything else you can get on iOS, from brilliant Eventide effects to creative iOS-only granular instruments and whatnot, and it’s one heck of a platform for live use and improvisation.
The full set:
That CV interconnectivity, explained (relevant to both desktop and iOS). And really, looking to carve out some time to play with this more on desktop, which remains my own primary production environment:
You knew someone had to do this. Hey, I’m sad I don’t have the hardware – hang onto it if you’ve got it! But the software does sound great!
Congrats to Geert Bevin, Moog app engineer and long-time friend of the site. But this isn’t even my favorite Geertnews from the weekend so – hang tight.
Filtatron, we’ll always love you.
