You may find this hard to believe, but almost 60% of the traffic I get on this site goes to one article…my review of Electrum, the drum synth app. I didn’t even give it that great of a review, but apparently Android musicians are STARVING for music apps, so I’m more than willing to give you a look at all of Android’s musicmaking apps.
RD3 Groovebox by Mikrosonic is the other noteworthy sequencer/synth app for Android, and has been available for about six months already. If you were to download it now, you’d be getting version 1.1.1, the second major iteration since it was released.
It’s a dead simple app to pick up and use, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t sophisticated. It’s just very efficiently arranged. The interface is made up of three screens: Beats, Bassline, and Mixer. Let’s take a look at each…
Beats
The drum track isn’t a synth but is a beat sequencer with 8 different classic beatbox sample sets. The sample kits include Roland’s 606, 808, 909, and CR-78, the Oberheim DMX, the Korg KR-55, Casio RZ1, and the classic Linn. Each drumkit has six samples which vary slightly between them, but generally include kick, snare, two high hats, rimshot and then some other one which could be anything from a clap, to a conga, to a tom or cowbell. It’s not super versatile in terms of sample variety, but it’s more than enough of a selection of popular drum machines to play with, and you can mix the levels from that screen.
Setting up sequences is ridiculously easy. Along the bottom of the screen is a 4 step/4 bar phrase, and you simply select the sample you want to sequence, and the sequencer along the bottom switches to that sample. If you have played with any step sequencers, it’s a setup you should instantly recognize.
Bassline
The bass track is pretty much a virtual Roland TB-303. It’s got the same square/saw oscillator and some of the filter knobs. An awesome part of RD3 is that it supports multi-touch so you can tweak multiple knobs for the full filtration effect.
Sequencing the bass can be done in two ways: step by step, or by “following.” The first way involves selecting a step, and then assigning a note to it. It’s a little awkward, but once you know what to do, it instantly becomes second nature. You poke the step, you poke the note, and then you can select the octave, and pick if you want it accented or held. “Follow” mode is pretty much like having it on record, and you can play your bass phrase more or less live, and then assign octave and accent in step mode.
Mixer
You can record four different drum patterns and four different bass patterns, and then choose how you’d like them to play in the master screen. For example, you can just pick the patterns as they’re playing, have them played in order, or have them played randomly.
Also from this screen, you can select the volume of the bassline and the beats, and even apply distortion to the bass to make it sound more aggressive (or more like the classic Acid House bass, if you’re so inclined.) Finally, the master “play” button (labeled “run”) and tempo selector are located here.
Once you’re done laying out all your sequences, you can save the song and export it as a .wav file. When you export it, you’re presented with sharing options such as bluetooth, email, SMS and whatever other methods of sharing you may have installed. On my Galaxy S phone, for example this includes things like AllShare and Yahoo! email. There’s also an option to share via SoundCloud, but every time I’ve tried this so far it doesn’t work.
This video is me playing around with RD3, but I can’t actually hear what I’m doing because it’s running directly into the camera, so it’s no masterpiece, but you at least get a good idea of how easy it is to use.
Bottom line: Solid Music-creation Android apps are few, ones this good are even fewer. It’s a must-have.
We still have a long way to go until Android has a significant number of music creation apps for creative types to choose from. It’s only a matter of time, sure…but things right now are a bit scant, so when a new music app comes along, I don’t hesitate to pick it up and give it a run through.
SequencePad (Skyarts), a 4-track general MIDI sequencer is available for ¥250 in the Android Market right now. If you work with MIDI, it makes a decent song sketchpad and supposedly exports sequences as .mid files which, as you know, can be edited in any number of desktop music suite, I personally use Logic Studio and FruityLoops.
However, I cannot guarantee that this app actually does export .mid files, because the simple fact is:
IT’S THE CRASHIEST APP I’VE EVER USED, and I never got far enough to find out if I could save as .mid.
Now I don’t think I’m unjustified in calling this app “crashy as fuck”, but SequencePad doesn’t just force close a lot (I can understand it to a point, it happens…that is something I’m used to), but this app would just turn my screen black and go completely unresponsive for 3-5 minutes. I had to fully reboot my phone three times in the course of reviewing it, and the worst part about it is that this fatal crash occurs when you want to exit the app. You’re not provided with a quit or close button, so you can either try to hit “back” or “home” and the result is the same: total unresponsiveness.
That’s not to say the app isn’t worth picking up, though. I mean, you really don’t have much of a choice if you’re an Android-using musician. You get every app at this point, support the developers, submit useful bug reports, and hope for updates.
On to what SequencePad can actually do.
The main sequence screen
There are a couple of very dumb things about the sequencing screen. Each vertical line is a note in the scale and each horizontal line is one beat. The red dots are notes that I’ve placed. Down the right hand side, you see the numbers 1-4, and in the lower right hand corner, an arrow pointing down? That’s SequencePad’s way of fitting in 8 beats. On the first screen, you’ve got your first half, and then you click the down arrow to switch to the second half of the phrase on the second screen.
That’s not the dumb part.
The dumb part is that you can’t put a note on the ONE beat at the very top!!! you have to start either on the upbeat or on the TWO. See how the screen actually has space for five beats? yeah…it doesn’t make any fucking sense. You actually have to start playing the track to figure out where the downbeat is. And there’s no metronome function to simply and clearly show you where to start.
If you like general MIDI and its familiar palette of 128 sounds and sixteen assignable drumkit slots, you’re fully covered.
Ah, Bird Tweet. The most useless MIDI sound ever.
There are four tracks of general MIDI instruments which can be either “tones” or “rhythm.” The red number one in the picture above means i’m on track 1, and the purple button with the tools to the right of it lets me switch between sounds. To switch tracks, you just push the number button in the middle and choose your track.
The compositional aspect of this app is intuitive and should feel familiar to experienced musicians. You can listen to a track individually, or with the rest of them at the same time, and you can alter the tempo with the metronome button. The only thing I haven’t figured out (besides how to export .mid files) is how to sustain a note. As far as I can tell, this app only allows one note at a time per four tracks. That is, you can’t plonk down four tracks worth of sustained piano notes complete with overlaps. If you can, I still haven’t figured out how.
This might be because the instructions are in pure Zero Wing Engrish.
“Edit Phrase Screen: When it touches the measure eye part, the demiquaver can be added. When it touches an existing note, it is possible to erase it. However, harmony cannot be used.”
Okay, I sort of get what it’s saying, and let me respond by posing this question:
How perpetual notes? User cannot creation tone which have timbre and echoing over formerly stricken sound, and resulting phrase have redolence of Sierra On-Line vintage King’s Quest MIDI beeps. Please to instruct.
Because I spent many years as a poor musician, my area of gear expertise isn’t with high quality instruments, it’s with bargain equipment (think Zoom, M-Audio, Casio, et al.), pawn shop finds, and things best classified as “musical toys.”
I keep up with the latest toy musical instruments, and delight in their exploitation. Circuit bending brightens my day, and I’m always looking out for the next Stylophone. I got the Korg DS-10 on the day it came out, I have two copies of Traxxpad for PSP, and I consider the iPhone/iPod Touch to be a full-fledged music platform.
I guess i’m a pretty discerning customer in the “Don’t Expect Much” category.
Electrum was made by Niko Twenty and is available for $3.99 in the Android Market. What you get is a 16-step sequencer somewhat like the ol’ TR-808 in design, and each sequence is built with six samples. You can put together up to 32 different sequences and create full songs. The cool part is that you can export your creations as single sequence loops or as a full song. The dumps are 16 bit wav files (mono).
A blurry, late night shot of Electrum's interface
I had originally intended to put in a couple of quick sequences that I whipped up on the “rock kit,” but I’m having some trouble doing that, so I’ll just say that there’s also 808, 909, Orchestral, Hip Hop, and Human Beatbox kits and 6 free downloadable packs. While it’s pretty light on features, the only thing it’s really lacking is the ability to import your own sample set. (See Comments) I always find myself wishing for a sound recording sampler app so I can make my own Richard James kit of nutty noise captured on the phone’s mic. But I guess I have to wait.
If you’ve ever used BeatMaker on iPhone, don’t expect that level of quality. However, BeatMaker costs 20 fricking dollars and Electrum costs only 4. At one fifth the price of BeatMaker, you get much more than one fifth of the functionality with Electrum. Complaints are few. It does get crashy at times, it has dumped some broken .wavs for some reason, and the UI in Sequence mode looks like it’s unfinished. But it’s a work in progress and junk musicians should applaud Niko Twenty.
This is definitely one of the best music apps we have on the Android Platform, and I’m currently working on a little jam built with beats from BeatMaker, a guitar track from Ubisoft’s Jam Sessions for Nintendo DS, and some Theremin wangling from Bebot on iPhone.
