ZOOZbeat

Who’d have thought that ‘musical instrument’ was a genre of application that would rise to the top in the world of mobile phone applications? Yet there’s a booming industry in tools for the budding musician. In fact, specifically for the budding composer, with ZooZBeat really being something to mess around with when short of ideas. The hardest part of writing modern music is coming up with the central ‘hook’ or ‘groove’ and ZooZBeat can help with both, letting you express yourself physically and visually, refining the melodies and rhythms of the looped section until you’ve got something to keep for working on later.

The key restriction in ZooZBeat is that the aforementioned ‘looped section’ is just four bars – which doesn’t sound like a lot. But when you’re simply after an idea or a feel, it’s a good starting point, when combined with the utility’s ability to let you add layers of instruments and to keep repeating the section while you experiment on top. After choosing one of the four basic styles (’Click’, ‘Hip-hop’, ‘Pop’ and ‘Techno’), you pick one of the set of up to six appropriate instruments (these change according to the style) and then tap away. According to how far above (or below) the blue line your taps are, notes will be generated in your chosen instrument.

For example, you might tap away creating a bass line, then add hi-hat and snare emphases, finally switching to synth and experimenting. I loved the way ‘Clear’ just clears the taps for the current instrument – so, after perfecting the other parts, you simply move on and can afford to mess up the next instrument over and over again without trashing the first ones. On the iPhone (with built-in mike), there’s even the option to add your own sung or spoken vocal ideas on top. At any stage you can save your current patterns into a song file of your choice – no, there’s no export to MP3 or similar, but then you’re not creating finished masterpieces – these are only going to be saved ideas that you’ll work on later on with your band or in your studio.

ZooZBeat is impressively slick in its implementation, with only a few criticisms worth mentioning. There’s an option for accelerometer control, wherein tilting and shaking the iPhone creates each ‘note’, but this is very imprecise and no more than a gimmick. Even on the guitar mode, where you’d expect strumming to be easier to create, the results felt just too random and you’re better off tapping the screen as usual.

I missed two things, too. One: an easier and quicker way back to the opening styles menu – at the moment you have to go through the ‘Load song’ system, which doesn’t feel intuitive. Two: a way of ZooZBeat automatically ’snapping’ my taps to some quantised beat – it’s very, very hard to get your finger taps perfectly aligned, aurally, and a snapping system to correct anything within, say, 1/4 of a beat would help a lot. Snapping to the beat would also mean that the limitation to 4 bars could be broken, since taps for notes wouldn’t have to be quite as accurate.

Not a perfect application by any means, but a crafty and innovative little tool that will help any bored musician find some kind of new inspiration.