Jordantron Promises To Turns Your iPad Into ‘The Most Epic Sounding Instrument Ever’

jordanatronWizdom Music has released Jordantron – a new iPad instrument that features the custom patches of Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess.

Jordantron is a giant sample collection, wrapped in its own playable instrument, so it can be used as an iPad instrument or as a MIDI sound module.

Jordantron also lets you play it with two MIDI keyboards, one controlling the blendable ‘ABCtron’, the other controlling the ‘Dtron’, which is usually dedicated to chord pads. VOICEBANKs can be loaded using MIDI Program Change, so the iPad screen never needs to be touched during performance.

According to Wizdom, Jordantron will turn your iPad into the ‘most epic sounding instrument ever.”

Here’s the official Jordanatron intro:

Features:

  • 57 sampled stereo instruments, 940MB of samples
  • 4 octave samples per voice, 6 playable octaves
  • Voices categorized by ‘velocity sensitive’, ‘leads’, ‘orchestral / choral’, ‘pads’ and ‘strings’
  • Velocity sensitivity on selected voices
  • Decay tails on selected voices
  • Octave shift keys to extend range of on-screen keyboard
  • ‘Half-speed’ tape mode
  • 12 programmable chord pads
  • Warm, lush stereo reverb
  • 32 ‘VOICEBANKs’ holding voice, reverb and ABC blend settings for instant retrieval
  • Giant ‘Jordan-style’ whole octave divebombs (configurable as whole tone or whole octave downshift)
  • Support for multiple simultaneous instruments via MIDI
    ‘Oscillotron’ waveform display

Jordantron is available now in the App Store for US $9.99.

If you’ve used Jordantron, let us know what you think of it!

37 thoughts on “Jordantron Promises To Turns Your iPad Into ‘The Most Epic Sounding Instrument Ever’”

  8. Rudess is good at self-marketing. And it is quite cool of him to share his coolest tones with the world at large. $10 isn’t a bad price, even if the interface is ugly. I’m a huge fan of the courier font, myself.

    Those are epic big tones, and maybe you just want those to be at your fingertips. However, unless you are in one of the thousands of Dream Theater cover bands, don’t let Jordan dictate what is cool. Folks, you CAN and SHOULD create your own “famous” tones. As long as your ideas are cool, I’m happy to hear them with your low-dollar tones.

  9. What “made the magic happen” was years of practice, time at Julliard and the base talent to have become one of Emerson’s premiere descendants. Yes, he can feel overly self-promoting, but you can’t casually dis him and then go gaga over the release of NOS Moog Modulars. We’ll always need those who set standards for virtuosity, so we’ll be motivated to woodshed a little more. I’m not wild over DT, but Jordan ably holds down one of the chairs reserved for serious players, as do people like Derek Sherinian. I’d play few of his sounds ’cause some are gorgeous, but I’d have to tweak them to suit my less prog tastes. Its well worth the price, even as just a sound expander.

    I also think its insane to PLAY an iPad. Its just too delicate, IMO. Its bad enough to have to beat on a hardware instrument. Its just SOP at my house to kiss the butt of any gear that runs $400 and way up per instance. An iPad makes a pretty good sound module or utility device, but every time I see someone finger-tapping a pad, I cringe and mentally review my controller setups. 😛

  10. Not a fan of his kind of music. But at least Jordan Rudess is not on food stamps. It is great and he knows how to market himself. His fans, I am sure, love his apps.

  11. The picture of him photoshopped as a wizard at the beginning of the video shows that he knows EXACTLY who he is selling himself as 😉 Not a prog fan (at all) but as stated before he is a veritable keyboard wizard, and i guess he’s chosen to take that status literally. Anyway, our kind need more virtuoso figures, Even if it has to be crazy uncle jordan trying to put on a magic show.

  14. Rudess’s apps aren’t the coolest looking, TC-11 and Audulus get my votes for that.

    But Rudess (Wizdom) does consistently create apps that are stable, that make intelligent use of the capabilities of the iPad and that are useful tools for musicians. That right their puts them ahead of half the apps out there.

    The interface isn’t beautiful on this one, but $10 for a sound module with close to a gig of samples is a steal. And the way it supports two MIDI controllers is smart.

    I do like that he doesn’t take himself too seriously and isn’t above dressing up in a goofy wizard hat. If you’re old enough to remember the seventies, this may remind you of the wizard guy used by Sequential to market their Prophet synths.

    I thought he did a good job of demoing the app, though I would have liked to have seen him use it with two keyboards. I would be interested in buying this, but I’d really like to hear more of the patch library first. It would also be smart for them to share a sound cloud playlist with samples of Rudess playing all the different patches! Jordan or somebody at Wizdom, can you do that?

  15. Never mind the app – the whole wizard thing is simply laughable and so distasteful it has me stunned with amazement. Who in their right mind sees this and gets excited? Same people that shop for things like wooden toe rings, crocs, fedoras, and think that dying their hair green makes then edgy, I guess.

    1. The classic Sequential Circuits Prophet synthesizers were marketed almost exactly the same way, so maybe you shouldn’t be ‘stunned with amazement’. He’s just having some fun!

  16. I was never really a fan of Dream Theater. But I have a lot of respect for the guy. I kinda wonder if he crosses a few lines in releasing some sample library stuff that has licensing rules for the original samples, but released here as “his.” If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then go read Omnisphere’s licensing rules… But anyway, I digress.
    So it’s not for me. I’m sure a lot of people will jump on it though. The idea of getting your idol’s patches is a cool scenario.
    Now only if Peter Gabriel would do the same…

  17. His apps get dropped rather than updated. He moves on to the next money making opportunity. Samplewiiz for example. This leaves the iOS community resentful and distrustful. And Fungo … Don’t speak about iPads! You obviously don’t know about them. And how much more reliable they are than a classic synth and all of its idiosyncrasies! Anyhow, this guy leaves me suspicious. It must be a wizard thing.

    1. Mr Rudess is doing apps for money, not out of love of the platform. He is desperately chasing windows surface and dabbled in android too.

      There is no loyalty or commitment from his side toward his users, hence updates being very few and even father between.

      Using his name, he publishes apps and relies on his fan base to purchase them.

      Serious iOS musicians do not use his apps, only people who like novelties actually buy his apps.

      If you read this Jordan, highly advise you employ a decent designer to make your UI more pleasing to the eye and fingers.

      More functionality is also needed too:)

  19. That generous inviting hand gesture repeated 20 times is right out of
    “How to Impress: Marketing skills for the unskilled” video series I’m sure exists somewhere.

  20. Just purchased. Very nice sounds in many cases, some a bit similar, but with the subtlety of range that will allow for some nice work. I’m usually not a fan of the whiz series because they tend to be idiosyncratic and not that useful, but this is a good exception. Definitely worth the 10 bucks.

  21. I love the portability of the iPad as a synth you can just take anywhere, plug into whatever random master keyboard is available, and play your own sounds & software. And this app looks like great set of sounds with some interesting “live” features like the morphing (blending) the tones.

  22. You can’t really blame him (at least directly) for the interface, given it’s a near-exact replica of the similarly-named Mellotronics M3000 Mellotron app (and the recently-released Sopranotron by the same company). It appears that all 3 are all associated with Omenie Ltd

  23. Tried to stay awake all the way through the video but couldn’t. This is in contention for ‘The Most Dull Sounding Instrument Ever’. Just about every other synth on my iPad blows this away.

    1. Yes they will get snarky if a better app such as Nave or Thor can be had for “just a few dollars more”.

      There is now a standard, a high one. Peeps that read this site will be looking for a decent app that looks, sounds, feels and does good.

      Unfortunately all of Jordan’s apps to date fall into the gimmick or sound toy category

      For 99 cents one can get Figure and that does much more, sounds and looks a lot better at a tenth of this price of this

      1. Have to disagree – Figure can’t even really be played as an instrument, the sounds kinda suck and can’t be tweaked much, it doesn’t support MIDI and is really more of a toy than most of the Wizdom apps.

        Wisdom makes real, playable instruments.

        1. Maybe I should rephrase my statement:

          Figure is a more RELEVANT instrument for modern day musicians who make modern day electronica .

          You can do more with it because its aimed at more people. How many are actually gonna use these outdated sounds contained in the jordonatron???

          Figure is almost always in the top 20 music apps so I’m clearly not alone here

          1. gmacdaddy says: “Figure is a more RELEVANT instrument for modern day musicians who make modern day electronica ”

            Sure. But that’s a very narrow definition. In the same way, Jordantron might well be a perfect fit for modern musicians working in a different genre.

            gamacdaddy: “You can do more with [Figure] because its aimed at more people.”

            Smule’s Magic Piano is aimed at the widest possible audience – does that mean you can do more with it than an instrument that targets a smaller group?

            gmacdaddy: “How many are actually gonna use these outdated sounds contained in the jordonatron???”

            Not to get all Fungo McGurk on you, but music is more than the sounds you use, it’s the notes you play and how you play them. Music is, to borrow a phrase from Telex, just “organized noise.” Yes, the noise – especially in certain genres – is important, but organization is the thing. So you can’t “imagine” anyone using the sounds in Jordantron. I can.

            They’re Jordan’s sounds but I wouldn’t play them like Jordan: I can’t shoehorn as many notes into a measure as Jordan and I would place his “signature” sounds in an entirely different context. A Vako Orchestron, for example, has an entirely different feel in a Kraftwerk arrangement than the same sound used on a Foreigner record. The sounds in the Jordantron are not exclusive to Prog Rock any more than a filtered sawtooth wave is exclusive to “modern day electronica”.

            1. Good points Ian

              But apps like figure are more useful not just because they are geared toward a wider audience, they are also more “applike”, which is yet another factor.

              You know, like thumbjam? It’s an app, not a complex software, it relies on expressiveness. Whereas apps like Jordan makes try to be expressive but the prog rock sounds really put a lot off

  29. I would have preferred editable sound rather then samples. Jordan makes really good tones, and an app that gives the means of creating them would be awesome. For those that want a better graphics, remember that you don’t see music. What matters is the audio quality and i’m sure rudess supplies this greatly

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