Trained on your own kicks, snares and hi-hats, it records, quantises and exports without generating a note itself.
If you often find your ‘mouth drumming’ has more of groove than your programmed drums, you’re in luck.
Vochlea, the London company behind the voice-to-MIDI tool Dubler 2, has built DubBox, a standalone app for producers who sketch their beats out loud, turning vocal percussion into production-ready loops without a DAW in sight.
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You train DubBox on up to eight of your own vocal sounds per project, mapping each one to samples from the ten built-in kits or packs you’ve imported. On the Play screen you hear your voice blended with real drums as you perform, and since the triggering responds to velocity, a harder hit plays a harder drum. Record a take without a click and DubBox works out the BPM on its own, then pulls both the drums and your original vocal onto a clean grid.
The clever part is that those tightened takes still sound like you, with your voice time-stretched into place rather than swapped for a robotic re-trigger, so the feel stays put while the timing sharpens. You can edit each sample for gain, pitch, tone, drive and filter, set up choke groups, drag in your own sounds and scroll back through up to 20 takes. When it’s done you can export the vocal, the drums, a full mix or MIDI, ready for any DAW.
DubBox works alongside Dubler 2, a pitched and percussive voice controller for the whole studio. Rather than replacing Dubler 2, DubBox keeps things more narrow and deep, with drums only and all in one app.
“DubBox is a new instrument for a new player, the beatmaker whose beat is already in their mouth,” said Vochlea CEO George Wright.
Founded in 2017 by Wright and Daven Sanassy, the company has DubBox available now for Mac and Windows from vochlea.com.
