iPhone Music Apps

This blog has been a little quiet lately, because I have been studying iPhone App development. My goal is to make engaging music apps. I have since discovered that this requires delving into quite possibly the hardest area of the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad to work in. Somehow I always end up pursuing the hardest topics.

Anyway, one of my projects in development is currently a rhythm/beat tracker. I want to pack in as many features as I can, but I want to put in stuff that people will find useful. So I am putting out a call for people's "wish lists". It doesn't have to be only for tracker-style apps. Any music app ideas are welcomed.

If you could design a music app for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad, what features would you want?

Leave a comment or send me an email with your "dream app" features. I'm not making any promises, but I aim to please. Thanks!

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Gear/Site Review: Virtual Keyboard

Once in a while I came across a music app online that I think is worthwhile not as a tool, but as an amusement. The Virtual Keyboard is just such an application. The Virtual Keyboard is a web-based app that is (apparently) part of a teaching resource site for the Birmingham (UK) area. But this is the web, and if we can find it, we can play with it.

What Is It?
The Virtual Keyboard is exactly what it sounds like. Think of the cheap bargain bin synth at your local department store. Remove some of the features. That's the Virtual Keyboard. The keys are labeled with the note names, which really helps when it is used as a teaching tool.

What Is That Noise?
You get a whopping total of 9 dreadful (fun dreadful, not the bad kind) synth instruments. When you activate the keyboard (click on the screen), you can use your computer keyboard to play, or you can click on the keys with your mouse. Actually, the sounds aren't all bad. The double bass has a good low end, and shakes a few things on my desk when I hit a low D. It does require a brief delay to reload when you change instruments, so you won't be switching in mid-song with this.

Give Me A Beat
The Virtual Keyboard also contains 6 canned drum patterns selectable to accompany your master works. The drums are actually pretty good. Most are pretty synthy/dancy things, but there's a couple good psuedo-latin percussion patterns(Patterns 3 and 5), and a decent straight ahead rock beat that could actually be usable (Pattern 2). I'm not saying you'd want to sample it on your next track, but it's still pretty good for the context.

Chord Mode
There is a cool mode that you don't normally see in any synth. Chord mode allows you to build a chord one note at a time. You click on all the keys in the chord, then click "Play Chord" to hear what you just did, without the need for actually figuring out the fingering on your own. This is really useful(?), since the keyboard is technically polyphonic, but the notes don't always trigger at the same time. You'll get more rolling notes than chords if you try to play it properly.

You Get What You Pay For
There are, as you might guess, a few features that it lacks, since it was designed as a teaching tool. Volume is the big one. Most of the synths absolutely overpower the drum beats, at an almost laughable level. There is also no velocity sensitive mode, probably because your mouse and computer keyboard are on-off switches, so there's no way to specify the strength of the velocity. Also disappointing is the lack of a tempo control on the drum patterns. After these "lackings", there should be no surprise when I point out there is no record/playback mode, which I would think would be a great addition to this as a teaching tool. After all, hearing what you really played versus what you think you played is a major learning experience.

Final Thoughts
If you've got kids (or want to act like one), this is a great web app to goof around with, as long as your speaker volume is kept in check. The organ will likely drive you nuts, as will the saxophone, but the steel drum, double bass, and pan pipes are fun to groove with.

With zero learning curve, this is a nice teaching toy. The Virtual Keyboard is definitely worth a few minutes diversion before you get back to the world of your own music.

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Gear Review : TuxGuitar

As readers of Troll Cave Music will probably have picked up by now, I love guitars. I play guitar, but admittedly not very well. Part of it is that guitar is one of the absolute hardest instruments to replicate with computers. However, computers can help in some ways.

I have recently come across such a guitarist-assistance tool, TuxGuitar. TuxGuitar is a music transcription program, but it goes way beyond that. Best of all, it's open source and free.
Basic Overview
TuxGuitar is an open source application that boasts the following features:
* Tablature editor
* Score Viewer
* Multitrack display
* Autoscroll while playing
* Note duration management
* Various effects (bend, slide, vibrato, hammer-on/pull-off)
* Support for triplets (5,6,7,9,10,11,12)
* Repeat open and close
* Time signature management
* Tempo management
* Imports and exports gp3,gp4 and gp5 files

Translate for me, please!
I see TuxGuitar as a guitarist's electronic notebook, of sorts. You can write out your music as guitar tab and traditional score at the same time. It also boasts a wide variety of guitar effects that are missing from most non-guitar-oriented programs, like hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, bends, etc. All of these are easily accessible in the toolbar. To make transciption even easier, you can even add a fretboard image to the UI, and pick off the notes by their fretboard position. So there's 3 separate ways to enter the notation, and the program figures out the other two for you. You can also add chords, and it will include the Chord image above the transcription of the notes.

TuxGuitar also gives you the option of other instruments, including bass, drums, and other items like organs. Differences in the notation (Bass clef, for example) make native support for other instruments essential, especially if you want to make notation for the whole band. There's also the ability to add lyrics to the sheet, so you can generate pretty complete sheet music.

Drums do suffer, though, since they do not (yet) support traditional drum notation. Instead, percussion mode uses General MIDI note numbers to represent the drum "tab". This is OK if you're planning on using those directly into a MIDI-enabled drum module, but pretty useless when you print out the drum tab.

So I can see it, so what?
Transcription is a good foundation, but TuxGuitar goes one step further. It also has enabled a music player, so you can hear what the transcription sounds like. This is OK, except for the thin, horrible samples that are embedded in the program. The web site does give instructions on how you can reconfigure to use other programs for the playback. You could, for example, reroute the MIDI out into REAPER, Ableton Live, etc., if you really wanted to.

Windows? Mac? Linux?
Yes, yes, and yes. TuxGuitar is available for pretty much any OS you're running. And if not, there is also an online Java app so you really can use it just about anywhere.

Why Use TuxGuitar? Can't we do this in [random DAW]?
I've been asking myself the same question - if this is just a MIDI player, can't I do that in REAPER? Yes and no. I don't see myself ever using TuxGuitar to record a masterpiece. This is not a DAW, and doesn't pretend to be. It's a MIDI authoring and playback tool on steroids. The real strength, as I mentioned earlier, is a guitarist's notebook. You can transcribe your fragments and keep them safer than notepaper scribbles (which I always lose). Recording guitar audio is nice, but you don't always remember where/how you played a specific passage. With TuxGuitar, you can tab it out based on the fretboard without even knowing the notes themselves. (I think I just felt a collective shudder at the thought of people playing without knowing the notes. Relax. It does happen.) The other side of this coin is that you can use it to help translate traditional notation into guitar tab, so you can use it as musical middleware, if you will.

When you look at the TuxGuitar site, many users are posting their own full-blown compositions in TuxGuitar. Ambitious, and weak, since using the normal TuxGuitar playback reminds me of everything bad and wrong about the old days of .MID files back in the day.

Final Thoughts
TuxGuitar is a nice little tool that doesn't really presume to be more. Although it has some DAW-like features, the ability to create sheet music (and tab) of your work is a great win. I have countless random scraps of hand-written tab of a good riff here or there, and I lose them with great frequency. Being able to properly document what I'm working on (with all the bends, hammer-ons, etc) is a wonderful thing.

The best part? It's open source, zero cost gear, so no need to cost-justify it.

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