Just last month Sugar Bytes released the astounding port of Turnado for iPad and today they bring us another direct port of their powerful Thesys sequencer! Once again all the features of the VST are here plus: Audiobus, JACK, VirtualMIDI and even a synth!

Thesys iTunes Description: Thesys is an extremely powerful and intuitive MIDI stepsequencer app, giving you control over just about all aspects of your favorite MIDI devices. Use Thesys to create varied and organic bass lines, screaming leads, pulsating chords, and organic pad sounds in the studio or on stage. For live musicians, Thesys provides an extremely versatile palette of performance options which can be triggered right from your MIDI keyboard: you can transpose, manipulate, twist up, mutate, and mangle your patterns without even getting near your iPad. No other MIDI sequencer plugin offers you the ease and power of Thesys. It is 100% MIDI compliant and therefore provides the ultimate MIDI sequencing solution. iPad Edition Features: Midifile Export

Integrated Synth

Audiobus Support (Sender)

Full Midi Support (Virtual, Network, Extern)

Midi Clock Sync (Master & Slave)

Action Section (Gatetime, Looper, Slowdown...)

Pattern Sequencer

Jack iOS Support

Zoom

I was playing with Thesys quite a lot this morning and I'm blown away by the amount of creative control offered here. Although it is designed for sequencing only 1 synth/app/misc. gear at a time, it does so with control over 8 assignable MIDI CC modulations, tons of performance controls for immediatly changing up your patterns, and even supports polyrhythmic sequencing. Polyrhythms are created when you have different sequence lengths playing against one another. This means that you could have a sequence of 8 notes, but a modulation sequence of 32, so that 1 bar pattern would evolve and change over the course of 4 bars. The performance controls can also be sequenced in an elaborate way that would be difficult to describe, so I advise you just hit the Random button on the side for a quick demo of how much can change in your patterns there.

Unfortunately like Turnado with great power comes great UI hurdles, and manipulating the tiny on-screen controls can be tricky. It's a trade off; they either give us all the goodies or gimp it for iOS. I think they made the right choice by offering us the complete package, and we'll just have to get used to using the Zoom function. The power of polyrhythmic sequencing is something we haven't seen before in iOS sequencers, and I'm very excited to explore this with iPad synths! Since Thesys has Audiobus support (as an Input) you get the Audiobus connection panel controls to start or stop your sequences from inside other apps!

There are no iPad specific demo videos yet, but here is a tutorial for the PC/Mac version to help get you going.