Overview
Many iPhone apps can be described in a few sentences. Well before I’d finished reading the thirty page manual for BeatMaker, came the recognition that this was not one of those. With a depth of features rivaling many analog sequencers, electronic musicians of any skill level will find a use for this application. The UI is smooth and learning curve rather shallow, making the experience not only fun, but relatively painless to play with. Fulfilling the functions of sampling, sequencing, and outputting, this app will at the very least entertain.
Features
If you focus on the main aspects of this feature, the beginner will be okay. It’s when you start diggin in deep that you can get confused. There are sixteen drum pads in this view and depending on what you’ve assigned to any of them, you’ll get a different sound by striking. Enable the Record Function from the pull-out menu on the bottom left, and you’ll be good to go in terms of beat generation.
There are quite a few options in this mode such as Reverse, Mute, or Edit. In Edit you can either choose to change out the sounds of all the pads or actually play with the waveform of a particular sound. Additional features include pitch an tune, but I truly didn’t find these that useful, and if you are expecting to change the pitch of a note, you’ll be disappointed as this effect really only changes the the speed of the note played.
This is the easiest and, in my opinion, most fun feature of the app. Once you’ve built a beat you can bring it to life with these three effects. Many people might think that taking the clean beats out of the app and applying effects afterward would be a better solution to the production, but not me. The delay effect allows you to change the entire mood of a song, taking it from a brooding bass heavy lope to a sprinting break.
The bitcrusher makes for much fun, especially if you’re a lo-fi or glitch fan, as the broken sounds lend to older Atari-style sound. The Interface for these functions could not be much simpler, and a few seconds pulling up sliders and pressing buttons will make this control feature an easy favorite.
This is my least favorite part of the app, but for full disclosure, I hate sequencers in general, finding them the most dull and monotonous points in the electronic music creation. But here you are, laying down the bricks that you formed so nicely in both the FX and Pad views. There are options for deep tweaks, making it possible to humanize the sounds a little.
This is also the best use of the swipe function of the touch screen as you have to use it to track deeper into lines. In order to select sections of the song, you'll use multitouch to stretch the loop selection bar at the top from one measure to the next. Overall, this is easy to use on the surface, but for the expert electronic musician, this part of the app will be par for the course.
Breakdown
The Good:
Jumping right Into this app and making music isn’t hard at all. You’ll have it spitting out beats in the first ten minutes or so, and without a lot of effort you'll be able to upload them to your computer using BeatPack, the free software available at the Intua site.
The sound quality is incredible for twenty dollars, and the feature set rivals many outboard sequencers. Navigating between the screens is aesthetically pleasing, and intuitive. Dealing with surface level functionality is a breeze, and those familiar with sequencing software should feel right at home with this app.
The Bad:
There are glitches. A couple times when I had a section of a beat built and moved it into the FX section the apps would freeze with an effect enabled. This was especially true in the delay effect, leaving me listening to what sounded like a chainsaw until I quit the application. It’s also not entirely intuitive on getting rid of a certain sound in Pad Mode.
For example, you have a beat running with five or six different sounds going, it’s hard to know whether or not you’ve turned off a softly hit snare as there is no indicator on the pad itself. You have to actually get out of that mode and look into Pattern Mode, and then you’re dealing with the step sequencer which can get a little monotonous since you can’t trigger the beat while in this mode.
Verdict
After the initial novelty of this app wore off, I found myself getting increasingly annoyed by it’s limitations as a sampler and sequencer. It is far more interesting and useful as a beat generator than as a beat editor. Performing Simple Tweaks on your beats can become frustrating. It would be unfair to judge the app this way. It is an iPhone application, and not a fully functioning outboard sequencer, and comparing it thus would be a mistake.
It is very easy to get some interesting sounds out of it, and if you take advantage of the manual and the full potential of BeatPack, it is a very good low end sequencer at a ridiculously good price. This is without a doubt one of the top Music Generation Apps, and with some updates to clean it up, the future for this app looks bright. I would fully suggest to anyone contemplating purchasing this that they read the manual first. It will give you a good indicator of the amount of time you'll have to invest in learning the ins and outs of Beatmaker.
