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BeatMakerPosted in Music on 14 Jul 2008 |
 Reviewed by Steve Litchfield |
  (12 votes, average: 4.17 out of 5)  Loading ... |
Editor’s rating:  
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Welcome to BeatMaker. Where the nice, modern, intuitive iPhone user interface is utterly abandoned in favour of the interface from hell. And the travesty is that there’s a very powerful music sequencer in here struggling to break out. Those who have invested the many hours needed to work which bits go together, which functions do what and which combinations of panel and ‘transport bar’ buttons can coexist will be rewarded with a valid (electronic) music creation tool.
But I have to start with the interface, it’s just so alien at first, at least to a new iPhone user. There isn’t a single standard UI control in the entire application. Tapping in the top left brings up a fairly obvious choice of the main areas within BeatMaker, but tapping in the bottom left pops up the confusing ‘Transport bar’. Nothing to do with lorries and trains, this is a reference to a bit of musician jargon dating back to the days of reel to reel tapes and ‘tape transport’, but both the terminology and the bar itself will be confusing at first. Essentially, it offers a way to play whatever you’ve set up in BeatMaker’s modules, but the recording operations (in terms of timing of your ad-hoc pad-played ‘notes’) are not obvious and you’ll be again thrust into plenty of trial and error.
The ‘Pads’ module gives you a set of sixteen percussive and melodic samples, each of which can be played over a metronome beat. You can load up different sets of samples if you like, from others online or from those you’ve imported or exported (as WAV or MIDI files), plus there are tools aplenty, from metronomes to tuners to a stereo mixer. At every stage though, you’re expected to know what to do and this, as we’ve seen, requires time and patience – don’t expect to produce anything really worthwhile from your first few hours with BeatMaker.
‘Sequencer’ is perhaps the most productive in terms of creating something useful, you can edit multiple ‘patterns’ of percussion and then string them together to create a backing track. Editing each pattern is fun if you’ve got good eyesight, some of the labels are small and the colour-coding hinders rather than helps. Even here BeatMaker’s sheer complexity and weird interface bamboozles though. An example: you ‘Edit’ a ‘Pattern’. Up come options for ‘Step editors’, ‘Step resolution’ and ‘Pattern edit’. You decide to tap on the first, to see what it does. Up pop yet more buttons, for ‘Velocity’, ‘Pan’, ‘Pitch’ and ‘Groove’. Eeek, you’re already out of your depth. You tap on ‘Groove’ in desperation, as this sounds interesting, but only manage to get a pop up button saying ‘Unlock move’. Doubtless all this makes imminent sense if you’re experienced at computer sequencing and if you’ve worked your way through the (separate, downloadable) user manual, but a quick and easy musical solution this is NOT.
‘FX’ presents a variety of studio EQ and compression filters, with such helpful labels as ‘LPF’, ‘Band pass’ and ‘Wet mix’. No, nothing to do with concrete. It’s hard to slate BeatMaker completely, which is why I’ve given it three stars. On the one hand, the depth of its functions, added together with the masses of downloadable samples and PC-side utilities to take your creations further, all veer it towards ‘best in class’ status in terms of music applications. But I just can’t forgive the downright hostile interface, one that seems determined to push everybody but the expert user as far away as possible.
