Sunday, 9 October 2011

BeatMaker 2 review and demo



Welcome to the innaugural Tip Of The Hat App review. A quick note, we know Steve Jobs has just died, and I was considering removing his cartoon likeness from the tip of the hat banner above, but I'm leaving it there, because we mean no disrespect, and personally, I'm quite sad he's gone, as are alot of folk, because he was the brain behind technology that I use every day and appreciate the genius of. So we cartoonize Steve with utmost respect, may his legacy live on forever.

Anyway, here we go. Beat Maker 2 came out a couple of weeks ago, you can still get a hold of the original Beat Maker if you're that way inclined, but this version is far superior. I owned the original for a long while before this version came out and the advances between the two are obvious. First of all the interface is far more user friendly, and in my oppinion just looks alot neater and makes more sense. If you've used apps like Nano Studio, FL Studio, Music Studio, (used to be called Xewton Music Studio, but they very wisely changed the name), or to a lesser extent Sun Vox, (which I only mention because I think it competes with these others as far as quality is concerened, but really Sun Vox is a bit of musical madness all it's own), then you'll know your way around already, and also notice that what those apps do well, (i.e. pads, sequencing, looping etc..), this app does equally well if not in some cases better, (especially as far as the pads are concerned, making a beat with beat maker 2 is super user friendly, as it should be, considering it's name). The original beat maker basically was all about the pads, and editing what you created with them, to a fairly extrodinary level of depth you'd have to say, but since then alot of other apps have done the same and extended on the idea of making music production a portable experience, (without the need for a Ukulele, arguably the best portable instrument in the world), and now Beat Maker has caught up and trumped them.

Almost all of these music apps make enormous claims that they sometimes can't live up to but I have to say I'm genuinely impressed with this one. It's not perfect, and it still won't beat a physical music making machine like say  Native Instruments MASCHINE, or KORG's lesser but still pretty great Kaossilator Pro , but for a tiny piece of software running on a phone or an ipod it's pretty incredible.
Where the original Beat Maker basically offered you pads and a whole lot of tweaking, Beat Maker 2 offers you pads, synthesizers, (aplenty), and FX busses, (three stackable effects with either traditional slider type tweaking or XY pad controls). The pads are similiar to the original but easier to use, you can load sample banks into eight sections of each set of pads you create, (there's plenty to choose from too, all nicely categorised and ready to go), or you can record or import your own samples and tweak them to your hearts content to create any kind of sound set that you like, (I've only played with this a little, but it was fun, stretching and changing recorded sounds and chopping them to make beats or strange loopable noise is heaven to me, and I wasn't dissapointed).
You can also assign specific effects such as pitch shifting, reversing samples, selective muting of specific pads, specific volume levels assigned to specific pads, selecting whether a pad is triggered as a one shot event or looped when held down, having specific samples fade in and out when triggered by a pad and selecting the velocity of a sample triggered by a specific pad. The detail you can go to is insane really, but all very easy to navigate around and fairly straight forward to play with. Below is an example of just one set of pads and a couple of synths used to create a fairly beat focussed little loopable thing, just so you can hear what I'm talking about.

BEAT by Keenly
Onto the synths, again; tons of sounds to choose from, and 4 pages of settings to play with to change your sound, as well as the ability to load and/or record samples to be played through the synth and the ability edit them at will. You've got all your typical faux analogue settings to play with like what kind of wave your dealing with, (saw, sine,sqaure, triangle), and settings for attack, decay, sustain, release, cutoff, resonance, etc, and low and high pass filtering, and there's a mod wheel, which is always good, (although external midi control would be the way to go if this is an option for you, the touch screen keyboard provided isn't too bad, I've got an irig midi on pre-order myself, or there's the midi-mobiliser two, or the Akai SYNTHSTATION25 ).
The effects busses can be used to effect either pads or synths, or both, you assign which effects bus effects what instrument through the mixing page, shown below
Each channel can be assigned a specific effects bus and the effects busses themselves are individual channels so you can increase or decrease the levels at which your effects are being applied. There are 10 effects to choose from, (autopan, bitcrusher, chorus, compressor, delay, overdrive, equalizer, flanger, filter and reverb), and these are all tweakable as stated earlier through the use of sliders or an XY pad with assignable effects for both the X and Y axis. The coolest thing about the FX busses is that you can record changes made to effects, I especially like the fact that recording effects changes using the XY pads results in effects sliders that move around by themselves, I think the fact that the developers went to the trouble of adding this is pretty cool, and recording effects changes brings alot of scope to what you can get out of any recorded sounds, either from outside of or inside the app itself. Tweaking is key to any electronic music making device or software and for me personally I think they've got it absolutely spot on here. If you go a little too crazy you can get a nice crackle to your sound unintentionally because the iphone/ipod is not a full blown computer, and you may be freaking it out a little, but the app does warn you when your pushing the hardware too far and you can monitor how things are going through the little info button in the top right hand corner.
The pattern editor in this app is pretty much exactly the same as the Nano studio pattern editor, so much so that it seems a little like concept theft, but Nano studio got their pattern editing spot on so I'm not complaining,(I also think Nano studio stands apart because of the Eden synth, and that if you can get a hold of both of these apps you definitely should).
You can move your notes and beats up and down, stretch them, cut them shorter, copy and past them, all the things you'd expect from a midi editor, and you can do these things fairly intuitively. There's a bit of a fiddly factor with such a small screen but you get used to it, and learn to love the zoom function because without it you'd have no chance of doing any editing at all.
Once you've created some music, (by the way, you can also import and mess with songs on your ipod/iphone in this app, which is great, just like sampling records, well, purists would say nothing like, but I it's close enough), you can export it via wifi file transfer, I had a bit of trouble getting this to work though, however you can also chuck your song on your devices paste board and paste it into other apps, one of which is bound to be good at file transfer, (although for such a high class app the difficulty in transfering your music out of it over wifi, as it promises you can do, is a bit of a let down). You can export to sound cloud however and download from there, I encourage you to sign up to sound cloud if you ever need to transfer music files for any reason because it's a great free service, you can pay for "premium" mode, but I don't see why you'd need to. Sound cloud transfer works fine and the resulting exported wav files sound clear as a bell, which is good, the audio from your ipod or iphone, even plugged into some other speaker or amp is not going to do justice to what this app can put out, I would however use it in a live setting without hesitation, but there's a definite higher clarity to your exported files, which you'd expect.
From my experience of music making apps, (and I'm a bit obsessed with them, so I have quite alot), I'd say this one is probably number one at the moment, they all have their indiviual charm but beatmaker 2 has more depth with less confusion, there's other apps out there that do the same things to some extent, or do one of the things that this app does really well, but this is probably the most comprehensive one. For slightly more user friendliness I'd go for iMaschine, but you couldn't use this live because of the unswitchoffable metronome and count in to recording, and you wouldn't get the same depth as you get here. The price is admittedly pretty steep, here in Australia this app is $20, but when you consider what you're getting for the price, the fact that it's almost the equivalent of what it's simulating, (i.e multiple midi and sample based instruments plugged into a mixer, with a laptop attached for pattern editing), $20 is not so bad.

BeatMaker 2 - INTUA

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