Liquid Notes Brings ‘Music Intelligence’ To Your DAW

Liquid Notes is a new music production tool, which works both standalone or with your DAW, that assists you with chords, scales, and harmonic movement.

Liquid Notes analyzes your music harmonically, and then lets you rearrange it by substituting chords, altering their functions, adding tensions, building chord progressions, playing melody lines, improvising, and more. This lets you rapidly try out new ideas for your compositions.

Here’s a demo of Liquid Notes in action:

Features:

  • Multi-track control over chord types, functions, and tensions
  • Intelligent harmony progression management
  • LN Live corrects wrong notes as you are playing them
  • Growing selection of music templates in various styles
  • Plays through the software instruments of your preferred sequencer
  • Built-in synthesizers for sequencer-independent operation
  • Standalone application (stay independent from operating system and sequencer type): No VST, AU or RTAS required *
  • Works on Windows and Mac OS X
  • Connects to any sequencer (Cubase, Logic, Live, Pro Tools, Sonar, etc.)
  • Supports live performance

Liquid Notes is available now for US $149.

10 thoughts on “Liquid Notes Brings ‘Music Intelligence’ To Your DAW”

  1. I tried Liquid Notes a while ago and found the concept very interesting, although the process of having to run a separate application besides my DAW seemed a bit clumsy. I don’t know about the current situation of Liquid Notes (I guess I should try it again), but it would be really nice if the integration would work similar to Melodyne – inside my DAW.

    Also, when another webzine published first informations about Liquid Notes a while ago, I had a discussion with another reader who thought that this software would promote laziness and ignorance, since people would not have to learn music theory anymore. I still think that this is not true. Technology is there to help people by making complex matters more accessible. But still, you will always have an advantage if you do not only know WHAT a tool does but if you are also aware WHY und HOW it can do this. Knowledge is never obsolete, no matter what tools are at hand.

    1. Or simply as a DAW-independent AU/VST plugin. There are literally countless audio plugins available, but plugins that handle and alter MIDI seem to be a territory that commercial developers almost ignore 🙁

  4. Gents – First of all, many thanks for the comments and many thanks to the editors bringing up an article here.

    Indeed, having to run in standalone is not the best possible scenario but as a yet small company we had to enable compatibility with all DAWs rather than putting all eggs in a basket. However, we hear your voice loud and clear and are permanently working on making the interfacing between DAW and our application better. We’re also looking into integrating directly into a host DAW, and if there is an easy option to enable multi-track routing of a AU/VST plugin as that had been an issue so far.
    To that end, Live and Melodyne are very interesting partners for us, and we’re talking to them already. For now, we have an update in the pipe before EOY that will make the whole experience better again.

    We’re confident that within the past year we have made many steps in the right direction: there’s a Quick Guide that takes you through the software now, and connecting your DAW is dead-simple.

    Also, we don’t see Liquid Notes as promoting laziness or else. Rather, it is a tool that helps you explore more and do things faster, but one needs to have some basic understanding of music to use it to its fullest potential. It’s not a self-composing program, we don’t believe in that – after all, it’s your emotional senses that decide what makes good or bad music.

    Happy to learn more about your experience with Liquid Notes!

    cheers,
    Roland

    1. I respect your philosophy behind the software. There will be lots of good music made using this software that would have otherwise never existed…

      …but the opposite will also be true. And if someone with no knowledge of music theory has fun making music with your software, who’s to tell them they’re wrong? However, the “live mode” kinda scares me a bit…

      Nonetheless, take the good with the bad, or the bad with the good… or however that saying goes. When someone with time, talent, and creativity gets their hands on this, amazing things are sure to happen. For them and for us.

  5. Thank you! Take it as a first step only – we have lots of things to learn, and it is our utmost goal to involve as many as you as possible in this project to make it into something a unique piece of software. But I assure you once more that the last thing we want to create is some sort of robot .. that’s not our goal.

    Stay tuned, we’ll work hard to make Liquid Notes better!

  6. I have an app where the basic philosophy is essentially the same. One thing I have been able to rely on is that no matter what chord is suggested, as harmonically appropriate as it may be, has invariably been ignored in favour of a chord sequence of my own choosing.

  7. Interesting! I’d like to know more about it. You can alter the settings of Liquid Notes to force a different behavior when it comes to our software making suggestions, be it chords or harmony. After all, they are suggestions only, with only the live modus being a bit more “strict” (so to say) as alterations need to be applied in real-time and that forces us to put a certain logic behind it.

  8. One thing that is especially welcome about this overall approach is that it may help “up-the-game” of electronic music which is in a bit of a rut harmonically and rhythmically. At least from a harmonic perspective, it might help self-taught music producers to expand their harmonic palette.

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