Oh, hello! How have you been? Can we interest you in some heavy beats and a rather noisy kitchen appliance?
OFFBEAT’s Synthwave Month update is live now! There are new sounds to experiment with, new clients to keep happy, and a few more ways to get those musical ideas out of your head and into your studio.
Let’s have a look, shall we?
Your collection of questionable musical objects continues to grow:
VHS Drum: For big, heavy beats. Subtlety can wait.
Arcade Synth: A surprisingly versatile FM-powered synth. Experiment, live a little.
Smoothie Maker: A somewhat raucous introduction to chorus and flanger techniques. We cannot promise a quiet breakfast.
Best get to work. Your career is riding high, and your clients’ requests remain perfectly reasonable....mostly.
Make a TV advert for an anti-sleep device, indulge in some vaporwave with DJ Sludgepump, and bring a good vibe to Lilith’s haunted family dinner.
Fancy a more hands on approach? Plug in a MIDI keyboard and use channels 1-4 to control the instruments connected to your sequencer. You can also play instruments using your computer keyboard, with note quantisation keeping everything in-key. For now, both controls work in real time and don’t record notes into the sequencer. They’re a key stepping stone towards real-time sequencing, though.
Manual grid placement: Put instruments exactly where you want them when taking them out of storage.
More notebook content: Including some elementary chord theory.
Phrygian mode: A new scale full of threatening overtones. Lovely.
Improved error handling: To help prevent pesky desync bugs and track down their causes.
Since OFFBEAT launched, we’ve been releasing substantial updates every month, each with a whole new chapter of gameplay. It’s been a lot of fun, but it’s also been quite demanding for our little team of three.
We also want to give some of your most-requested features the attention they deserve. There’s plenty we’d like to improve alongside adding more jobs and musical objects to your studio.
December’s update will focus on features rather than a new chapter. We’re aiming to bring you:
Real-time sequencer editing
Variable time signatures
Updates to the song editing interface
A few bonus Christmassy things
These are the features we’re working towards, and we’ll keep you posted as the update takes shape.
Monthly chapter releases will resume from mid-January.
We’re spreading out the remaining Early Access updates to keep a steady flow of new things coming as we work towards OFFBEAT’s full release, without leaving too long a quiet spell at the end. This also gives us time to test each update before it lands in your studio.
Here’s what’s coming up:
December - Festivities & QoL
January - Techno
February - Ambient
March - Chiptune
Plenty more jobs, sounds, and questionable musical experiments to look forward to, so don't you worry! Best keep that studio tidy. And that's everything! Wheeeeew, that was a doozy of an update, huh? If you’ve made it this far, you’ve earned a little treat. Give those patch-note-reading eyes a break and put those ears of yours to WORK: we’ve got another music video for you:
Thank you for playing, sharing your creations, and letting us know what you’d like to see next. It all helps us make OFFBEAT better. Now, someone plug in that smoothie maker.