I recently downloaded the Tempo iPhone App for $0.99. It has quite a few features for a little 99 cent app. When you first launch the app you see this screen:

First impression is not that pretty of a UI. Color scheme isn’t my favorite, not soft on the eyes. But they do present you with all the basic functionality you’d expect out of a click generator. You can set your time signature, beat type, volume controls and setting the tempo either through tapping or explicitly setting the BPM. The tapping feature seems a little sensitive, but after a while you can get the tempo average to mellow out and give you a decently accurate setting.

The only other screen available is the settings screen:

The Animate Meter Change is kind of a worthless setting. Just turns off a very brief animation when switching time signatures. Play mode is pretty cool. Overlay mode allows you to play a song from your iTunes library and run the App on top of it. So you can tap out a time to a song in your library. That’s pretty darn handy. Sound set just changes the audio that’s played for the click. Digital is the best sound they have I think. The bummer with the drum kit sound set is they don’t offset high-hat and snare based on the time sig. Both high hat and snare just play together on every beat. That’s not really what you want when using a drum kit click track. Tuner feature is kind of nice, just plays the note tone. Maybe in a pinch it could be handy. Would be much better if it read tones from the mic of course.

The biggest annoyance with the app is stability. You can make it crash every time if you start the click track, then navigate into settings and change some setting. So they have some work to do on bugs. Practically I think the best uses I see for it now is tapping out tempos in your library and having a portable click track for rehearsals and laying down scratch ideas. Here’s the final score based on a 5 point score, 5 being the best and 1 being the worst.

Appearance: 3

Features: 4

Usability: 4

Price: 4

Stability: 2

Overall: 3.4 / 5

Microsoft is so cute, in that pathetic sort of way. They want so badly to be cool like their big brother Apple. I present to you….Songsmith.

[via blogtown.portlandmercury.com by way of James]

Fanband aims to allow bands to sell digital copies of their music directly to fans at gigs. Fans enter their email address and myspace user name, select the songs they ‘d like to purchase, pay and the songs are sent to their email address. An additional benefit for the band is now they have collected an email address and myspace account to build their fan base with. No internet access or credit card terminal is required. I see that as a benefit in some situations but it would be much better if it was able to work with card terminals so you could accept credit cards as well as cash.

I think this is a great idea but unfortunately it looks like a bit of a hack. First off it only works on Windows and the design, at least aesthetically, is pretty poor. It looks like a crappy modified Myspace page quite honestly. So while I think it’s a good idea and something a lot of bands would find useful, including mine, it needs a lot of work. The fact that they are charging $39.00 for this is laughable. Spend 5 minutes and you can capture an email database with someone’s desired songs in Zoho and distribute the songs yourself for free.

Anyone used this and disagree?

When working with loops and click tracks one thing you need to know and preferrably know quickly is the beats per minute(BPM) of the song. I use this widget constantly to quickly get the BPM of a song I’m listening to in iTunes.

All you need to do is install it, then play the song in iTunes you want the BPM for, open your dashboard and tap the drum set along with the song and it will display the BPM. Then you can click the +Music icon on the right to save that into the song data in iTunes. Quick and easy and as accurate as you are of a mouse clicker. The only down side I’ve found is that it can get pretty CPU intensive if left open for long durations along with iTunes. iTunes ends up eating up more and more CPU. So watch out for that and if that’s happening make sure to close the BPM widget after using.

You can download it here.

The UI on this is pretty slick, quite apple’ish in fact. $5 seems quite reasonable as well, they have 2 versions, the Hip-Hop Edition and Club Edition.

 
iDrum for iPhone from Art Gillespie on Vimeo.

[via Synthtopia]

Figure it’s time for some gear talk on here since I’m really excited about my new foot controller purchase. A couple years back I switched to Guitar Rig(GR) for my live rig. I never imagined I would be using a complete software rig ever in my life, but that was until I heard Guitar Rig. I used to be, still am I suppose, a collector of as many classic pedals as I could get my hands on. With my Matchless Hotbox being my pride and joy. All multi-effects pedal boards, amp simulators, software solutions I’d heard up until GR sounded sooo bad, I never even considered them. Then my brother begged me to start using GR on a few recording projects we were doing and I was really impressed. My huge complaint with multi-effects units and software apps has been that the sound is so obviously a digital signal, there’s no cabinet breathing, no warmth, no peaks that you can pick out. It’s just all washed and over compressed and just too cute and nice.

One thing GR lets you control in addition to any combination of amps and cabinets you wish is mic placement. I can’t tell you how important that is for sound and GR really hit it out of the park there. So once I realized that the amp/cabinet selections were actually really good, I then got to enjoy the wide selection of other effects. It’s super handy being able to get such a wide tone swing during a live gig. Not to mention the flexibility afforded by the other effects. But sound quality is of the utmost importance and I can honestly say that GR is the only software/multi-effects unit I’ve heard that makes me say “wow” (yes those are quotes around wow). And GR2 has made me even more pleased, but I’m upset that they continue to release major upgrades at a blistering pace, GR3 already is out. Ever heard of minor FREE updates Native Instruments???

So now onto my purchase. I originally bought GR 1 which came with a 4 button (not really banks) 1 expression pedal foot controller. 2 of those buttons are reserved for switching presets, so really you’re left with 2 buttons. That really made things tough, lots of preparation needed to be done on the presets making sure from song to song you could quickly get to each preset. Not an enjoyable situation. So I needed a bigger foot controller and found a Behringer FCB 1010 Midi Foot controller (actually a lot of them) on ebay for dirt cheap. 10 button, 2 expression pedals AND 2 dedicated preset/amp switches. So now I don’t have to use any of the 10 buttons for switching presets and the 2 expression pedals is huge. You always want volume control but many times I need tremolo speed or wah control or other such timings that can’t be tapped out. I can’t wait for it to arrive and get it all setup.