Better Know A Barcelona Startup: Conductr

This post was written in collaboration with the founders of Conductr, Julià Carboneras Girgas, Oriol Rosell and Albert Minguell Colome.

Music has been the pursuit of each generation to leave its stamp on the timeline of humanity. Each generation has advanced in music production capability using the best of the contemporary technology.

A couple of decades back, music was an end result of different analog components interacting with each other. Around 15 years back, computers were put to use to make music through programming components that behaved like analog components in the digital environment.

Then came Ableton, a software developed by musicians to enable themselves to efficiently arrange their instruments and scenes to produce music in a digital environment. Since then, the digital era has only boosted the music production landscape and electronic music has sought different avenues through multiple softwares, and hardware controllers.

The team behind Conductr team believes that the trend in the music production ecosystem is moving towards touch interfaces, which are reactive in real time, and easy to configure as compared to hardware controllers, which in their own ways still happen to be imitation of the analog era of music production and control.

The problem comes from the fact that almost all of the music made these days is made using computers. But computers were not originally designed to make music. The layout of the traditional typewriter keyboard isn’t music production friendly at all, it’s only painful to use to produce melodies.

Then came the controllers. These are hardware interfaces designed to interact with software components. But these controllers are costly, rigid, difficult to carry around, and require quite an effort and technical understanding to configure them and put them to regular use. And most importantly, much of the attention of the artist/producer/DJ is tethered to the controller and the much required audience interaction takes a backseat.

Conductr is the brainchild of founders Julià Carboneras Girgas, Oriol Rosell, Albert Minguell Colome, who are an interesting mix of musicians, engineers and content developers/curators who have all known each other for a long time and worked together on various projects.

Conductr is essentially an app that turns your iPad into a controller for Ableton Live (Ableton Live is the software most commonly used by music producers/DJ’s both in studio and live setting for producing and playing their music/sets). Conductr is portable, easy to configure, easy to personalize, and its basic version is available for free on the Apple App store. Users can however upgrade and add new modules to enhance their setup as per their skills and/or requirements.

The Barcelona startup has a strong user base located around the world with key markets such as Mexico, USA, Italy, Spain, Germany, Brazil, UK, and France. “We are glad to have such a varied geographical distribution among our user community. It motivates us to develop country specific strategies such as multiple language support and ambassadors to move closer to the users”, says CEO, Julià.

We believe it when we hear that ‘Conductr is an app made by musicians for musicians. “We do not want to replicate hardware on a touch-screen” Conductr CEO Julià Carboneras says. “We want to take maximum advantage of multi-touch technology to give musicians the kind of resources that they can’t get from hardware devices. Our freemium model will give more artists the opportunity to try our app and buy additional modules to fit their individual needs.”

You can check out their video here: