One Delay After Another
Happy birthday to me! When we started this month-long Battalion celebration, I failed to note that the last week of May involved Memorial Day, my birthday, and the last day of the school year all in one week. Whoops! We're behind schedule on launching the public beta of our final reveal, but hey, why shouldn't we just tell you what's coming out very soon?
Battalion 1.5 will be released as a public beta in June. This is the big one, as it includes the most frequent user requests. First up, we have Patterns! Pattern changes can be automated, and the change can be instantaneous or quantized to tempo. There are 16 pattern slots, along with a set of tools to manage the patterns.
Next up, MIDI Out! Yes, Battalion's sequencer can now be used to sequence other instruments. We have a MIDI Out preset system (separate from the plugin/project preset) so that you can quickly load mappings for Ableton Drum Rack, Bitwig Drum Machine, various Elektron boxes, and more.
Along with the real-time sequencing on the MIDI Out page, we also have MIDI rendering! Select the render length, click one button, and suddenly you will have draggable MIDI files for all 8 tracks, along with a flattened MIDI file.
Last up is a big surprise: Battalion will include another plugin! Right now, we're calling it Drumcell as a reference to our friend Moe Espinosa who performs under the same name along with Belief Defect. Definitely check out his music if you haven't, especially if you love big, distorted kick drums. Drumcell is a single voice version of Battalion. No effects, sequencer, performance, etc. This is the plugin for you if you'd rather have a bunch of Battalion voices managed by your DAW's drum rack, or if you're creating your own custom DAW in Max (hi, John!). This will be free for all owners of Battalion.
It's been a fun month, and I don't want the party to be over quite yet. While working on the Drumcell credits page artwork, I wrote a script that creates grids of the Battalion drum icons. I ended up testing this grid out on a t-shirt, and things got a bit out-of-hand. I've placed a test order for a summer weight button-up shirt, a t-shirt, and a hoodie, all with the new design. If these end up looking as cool IRL as they do in the photos, we'll put them up on the site. We'll start with a few color themes (all based on the excellent Battalion skins and icons by Papernoise), but we'll be able to easily release more. These are cooler than our other design, which was "I Waited For Battalion 1.5 and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt".
The weather is beautiful here this weekend, so I'm going to go enjoy some time celebrating with my family. Now that we're in the habit of updating our blog, we have a lot more exciting news to share over the next few months, including at least four new plugins that we're hoping to release this year. Have a great weekend, everyone!
Best,
Michael
Here are some Printful preview images:
