A drum machine for iPhone and iPad · coming soon
Nio is a drum machine you play like an instrument. Tap, hold, and drag a 3×3 grid of pads to build beats live — loops are captured from what you already played, slipped against the beat, and mixed with your fingers, all while the sequencer runs.
TAP A PAD TO LOOP IT · HOLD + DRAG ↕ TO SLIP, ↔ TO CHANGE RHYTHM · TAP AGAIN TO STOP. SOUND ON.
01 · Live Play
Every pad is a performance surface. Press the center and it’s loud; press the edge and it’s soft. No aftertouch tricks, no velocity menus — dynamics live in your aim.
Everything you play lands in a rolling history about eight bars long. Loop doesn’t arm a recording — it reaches back and captures what you just played, quantized to a loopable length. The take you wish you’d recorded is the one you get.
Tap Loop again and the newest playing is layered into the loop. When it’s right, Save parks the loop on the pad that owns its sound, ready to trigger, slip, and mix like everything else.
02 · Slip Beat
DRAG ↕ TO SLIP — A PIXEL IS ABOUT A MILLISECOND · DRAG ↔ FOR RHYTHM · DOUBLE-TAP FOR THE OFF-BEAT
Each looping pad draws its pattern as dots on a spiral — one revolution per bar, winding inward for longer patterns. When you slip the loop, the whole spiral rotates. You can see the groove lean before you hear it: in the demo up top, the backbeat snare is just a half-note rhythm slipped a full beat, its spiral sitting a quarter-turn round.
Hold a pad and drag vertically to nudge its loop earlier or later against the beat — continuously, not in grid steps. A few milliseconds of drag on the hats is the difference between a metronome and a pocket. It works on the looping pads in the demo up top, too.
Drag horizontally to step through repeat rhythms from whole notes to thirty-seconds, dotted and triplet variants included. The selector bar at the bottom of the screen mirrors the focused pad — and sets it, too.
A double tap snaps the slip to the current off-beat offset: instant push-pull hats, no precision dragging required.
03 · Mixer
In Mixer mode, holding a pad and dragging vertically sets its velocity; dragging horizontally pans it, with a snap-to-center dead zone so straight up the middle is easy to find. Double-tap to reset both.
Mixing happens while the sequencer runs and the loops keep playing. An active pad shows its mix as a circle — size is velocity, position is pan — so a glance at the grid is a glance at the balance.
Every pad keeps a stack of the patterns it has played. Undo pops back one pattern; redo restores it; badges show how deep each stack goes. Experiments are free.
kick
80% · C
snare
80% · C
hat
80% · C
DRAG ↕ FOR VELOCITY · DRAG ↔ FOR PAN · DOUBLE-TAP TO RESET
04 · Songs
The songs sidebar lists every song in your library. Tap one to switch — the outgoing song saves first, and the incoming one restores exactly like a relaunch. Swipe to rename, duplicate, or delete.
A .nio file is a few KB of JSON. Sounds are descriptors, not recordings, so a whole song AirDrops in an instant — and opening one from the Files app imports it straight into your library.
Loops exist to be forked. The file format keeps every pattern, slip, and mix setting intact, so the beat you send is the beat they can pick apart and build on.
verse-2.nio · 4 KB
{ "bpm": 118,
"pads": [
{ "patch": "kick", "rhythm": "1/4" },
{ "patch": "snare", "steps": [1.0, 3.0],
"slip": -0.02 },
{ "patch": "hat", "rhythm": "1/8·",
"pan": 0.3, "velocity": 0.7 },
… six more pads … ] }05 · Details
Drag the BPM readout anywhere from 60 to 180, or tap it three or more times to set the tempo by tapping. The transport keeps playing either way.
Tap a mode button to switch; hold it to visit — Slip a hat while holding Mixer, release, and you’re back where you were. Modes are instruments too.
The layout re-flows so the pads always fill the screen’s tight axis — buttons move out of the way, never the grid.
One switch mirrors the pad grid horizontally, so your dominant thumb gets the same reach.
Audio routes to your Bluetooth headphones when they’re connected — and to the iPhone’s loudest speaker path when they’re not.
Nio is Swedish for nine. A 3×3 grid is every pad two thumbs can reach without looking — the limit is the instrument. From the maker of Fyra, which is Swedish for four.