While the name might invoke a creepy psychic or hooded astrologer in the dark corners of a carnival tent, Numerology is actually an amazing digital simulation of a mainstay of the classic electronic music world, the step sequencer. While this musical approach might initially feel a bit esoteric, it’s rather easy to whip up some luscious, bubbling musical passages that build in density and complexity, with a truly incredible degree of control. Numerology is an amazing creative composition tool that doesn’t feel—or work—like anything else in the Mac audio universe. We mean that as a compliment.
Most music programs start with you plugging a MIDI keyboard into your computer and recording your playing, but Numerology takes a completely different approach. It’s designed to drive your existing Audio Units synths and effects with musical notes that you enter with your mouse, in one of four types of musical grids—kind of like arranging notes on a player-piano roll, with the horizontal axis representing time and the vertical axis denoting pitch. The primary level of organization is a Stack, which contains a combination of one of these musical-grid components, an Audio Units software synthesizer, and one or more AU audio-processing plug-ins.
Numerology can automatically modulate the Color knob of the U-He Runciter Audio Units filter, a trick most normal DAW software can't accomplish.
There are also a variety of controls for changing how individual notes occur: The repeat and divide sliders can hold or chop up a single note with some unexpected—and often astonishing—results, and everything works in real time as the sequence is playing, which really stimulates the creative juices. Once you’ve created a Stack that starts to sound like something, it’s time to dive deeply into the potent toolset in Numerology, which allows you to gradually change the pitch, duration, and overall timing of each individual note in the main note grid, with an almost overwhelming level of control and flexibility. The best way to really understand the art of this process is to watch the excellent tutorial videos on the Five12 website, which go a long way in clarifying the potential of the many types of control elements found in the app.
By making multiple Stacks, each with their own instruments, musical notes, and effects, you gradually layer sounds in a way that mimics the process of multitrack recording, except that everything is essentially synced up in time, if not harmony. There’s a mixer window that gives you full control over the sonic blending of Stacks. As with Propellerhead Software’s Reason, you can flip the Numerology Stacks around for full access to the virtual wiring between all the different modules. Numerology offers plenty of customization and control and delivers an exquisite degree of aural flexibility. There is also a Timeline interface for arranging presets of Stack configurations, in order to create a more standard song structure, triggering different configurations of Stacks in a specific order.
Unlike other music software, Numerology relies on the Audio Units plug-ins installed on your Mac and doesn’t really include any built-in audio synthesizers (no worries, as there are plenty of free AU plug-ins floating around). If you own Ableton Live, Apple’s Logic, or Steinberg’s Cubase MIDI recording packages, it’s also really easy to use Numerology to drive those soft synths, adding a great source of musical inspiration and control to those already capable programs.
Unique toolset. Works with all Audio Units instruments and effects. Universal binary.
No included Audio Units.
