Sometimes it's easy to forget, when you're checking Facebook on your iPhone or playing a game on your iPad, that both of these devices trace their origins back to something primarily designed for playing music. Of course, with the increased processing power, you can do much more than just listen. There are lot of fun instrument apps for iOS (quite a while back I reviewed SurfaceDJ and mScribble), apps that allow you to record and mix (as One Like Son did), and some designed to teach you music. One is just a game, but has a fun connection to jazz music.
In this Core Dump column, I'll share several music-based iOS apps that are worth checking out. Some of these are slightly longer than my regular Core Dump blurbs, so be sure to click through the next page for the rest of the reviews!
Pluto Learns Piano - $.99 iPhone, free for iPad (with optional in-app purchases)
Pluto is a little macaroni penguin who swims through the sea, collecting fish bubbles to play music. Pluto Learns Piano is a pretty cool way to learn notes on a staff: Pluto swims at a constant speed, and you control his depth in the water by sliding your finger up or down on the screen. Hit the light colored bubbles and the right note will play; hit a dark bubble and you'll hit a sour note. There are a few obstacles here and there that will take away Pluto's health — run into too many and you won't finish the song — but mostly it's about getting the right tune. It's a great visual representation of both the position on the musical staff and the rhythm of the piece.
There's also a section where you can play the songs on the piano. The keys light up in the right order, and you get bonuses for strings of correct notes. Earn stars for your performance (three stars for a perfect performance) and for practicing daily, and then spend stars (or real cash) to unlock additional songs. The catch is that it takes a long time to build up enough stars to unlock songs, so your kids may beg you to shell out the money. Pluto Learns Piano is a cool way to learn some of the basic concepts of reading music, whether you're a kid or an adult (though the cutesy appearance may appeal more to younger kids). I'm not sure why the iPad version is free but the iPhone version isn't — if you have an iPad, though, definitely try this one out.
Monkey Drum - free universal app (with in app currency)
Monkey Drum is an odd combination of two musical toys. The first is something I think of as "monkey see, monkey do." You get a big timpani drum (with a monkey) and you can play whatever rhythm you want on it. Tapping on different parts of the drum produces different sounds, and you can even tap the monkey's mouth to make a pop sound, whack it about the head, or spin it around. After you stop, the monkey will repeat the sequence you just played. Every so often bananas will drop down: feed those to the monkey and it fills up a heart meter. Get enough hearts and you get some coins which can be spent on additional instruments. (There's a panda, a boy monkey, and a girl monkey, but they all do the same thing.)
The second half of the app is the step sequencer. Here, you can create a sequence of tones that the three animals will play. What's cool about this one is that you can actually string together a bunch of sequences to play out a longer tune, rather than just a short loop. Plus, each of the three animals can be made to play a different instrument. Once you've got your sequence set, you can hit the green Play button and it does a little video of them playing out your tune together. Tunes can be saved and edited.
Again, no reason not to try this one out: it's free! Just be sure to turn off in-app purchases if you don't want your kids loading up on coins.
Magic Piano - free for iPhone (with in-app purchases)
Hitting the right keys not really your style? Then maybe Smule's Magic Piano will suit you better. In the vein of Guitar Hero or Tap Tap Revolution, you play music by tapping the screen in time to the little glowing dots as they move down the screen. You don't have to be exact: the app will play the right notes, but you'll score more points if you're at least somewhere in the vicinity of the dot. You can level up by achieving certain objectives: accumulating a number of points, getting perfect scores on songs, sharing performances with your friends, and so on.
You get a few songs for free and they seem to offer a a new song for free every so often. To get more, you'll have to spend "smoola," which you can earn by leveling up, or signing up for a lot of free offers, or just paying cash. So far I've just been doing what I can for free: I earned enough smoola to buy the Super Mario Brothers theme song, but I haven't earned much more since then.
There's a free play mode, where you can play on keyboards of different shapes and sizes: a weird spiral keyboard, a standard keyboard with adjustable size keys, and so on. One neat feature, similar to Smule's other apps like the Ocarina, is the ability to listen to other people performing all over the world. When you share a performance, it shows up on this globe, and if you like somebody's performance you can "love" it. I think the best part of Magic Piano is this ability to tap into a larger community. Sure, you're plinking out "Scarborough Fair" with two or three fingers and you're not really learning to play an instrument. But you're having fun, and other people can share in that experience with you.
Seline - $6.99 for iPad only, with in-app purchases
In 2010 some folks got together and created the iPad Orchestra, playing with an app called Seline HD. As far as I can tell, they've kind of vanished from the spotlight (along with the "what is the iPad good for, anyway?" questions), but Seline HD is still around, even better than before. It's an electronic instrument, laid out ergonomically and designed to encourage improvisation. And the newly redesigned look is pretty: you can't feel the faux leather pads and woodgrain, but it looks nicer than the old buttons-on-a-screen approach.
The app lets you pick a scale from a very long list, or you can customize your own. Basically the way it's set up, the large yellow buttons represent every other note of the scale, and the small white ones are the notes in between. The left and right hands alternate notes of the scale. So you can either play the scale with one hand by sliding across yellow and white buttons, or you can alternate hands, just using the large buttons. Depending on the scale chosen, this basically prevents you from hitting any "wrong" notes.
The controls take some getting used to, but there are a lot of subtleties to it: you can slide between buttons to pitch slide the notes; plus if you're touching the black pad area with the heel of your hand, you can also bend a note up and down. The circular pad in the middle lets you modify the velocity or filter. And there are a ton of different instruments, background sounds, looping abilities, rhythms, and more — a lot are included with the app (including the original Seline sounds) with even more available for purchase. You can save two instrument settings, A and B, and switch between the two presets easily.
The app can even enable MIDI (hardware, local, or network) or record a MIDI file ... although that's really beyond me at this point. I don't know if the iPad Orchestra will make a comeback, but if you're a musician who likes to experiment with funky digital instruments, Seline might be worth checking out. As for me, my kids spent a good chunk of a weekend morning just improvising on my iPad at full blast. They don't really care yet about analog or digital: as far as they're concerned, it is a real instrument.
Note: there is an iPhone version for $2.99, but it's the older style and I have not tried it out to know what the differences are.
MadPad - $.99 iPhone, $2.99 iPad
MadPad is another brilliant music-making community-minded app from Smule. The tagline is "Remix Your Life," and that's a pretty good explanation of what it does. Using your iDevice's camera and mic, you can collect twelve different short video clips. These clips are then displayed in a large grid on the screen, and you can tap them to play the sounds (and the video). You can slide up or down within each button to speed up or slow down the playback speed. Create loops, play over the loops, and then share your recording on YouTube or via email.
You can download sets that other people have created, mix their sound clips with your own, and share your own sets. I've had a lot of fun with this one, making drum sets from office sounds, my kids' playroom, and even noises at a Chinese restaurant. Here's a little video I made in my home office with the help of my daughters. Yeah, you can tell I'm not a drummer, but I'm trying:
MadPad is great for teaching your kids about the music in everyday life. It encourages them to think about the sounds they hear, to think about how they relate to rhythm and music, to wonder what they sound like if they're played back rat-a-tat or interspersed with other sounds.
Jazz: Trump's Journey - $2.99 universal app
One of these apps is not like the others: Jazz: Trump's Journey. It's not really about making music, but it's a curious little side-scrolling platformer with a plotline about jazz in New Orleans in the early 20th century. Trump is a trumpet player, loosely based on Louis Armstrong, wanting to win a contest and trying to put together a band. But for whatever reason (never entirely explained) there are cops about, and then there's the nasty white dude who wants to steal Trump's trumpet player and win the heart of the girl. Like I said: loosely based. As you progress through the levels, you'll meet other musicians, too: Bono the trombone player, Joe the banjo player, and so on.
The gameplay itself is pretty fun: you run back and forth, climbing ladders, collecting musical notes and photographs. You can use your trumpet to freeze time, which affects certain platforms and objects, even the cops (unless they're wearing earplugs). There are a lot of puzzle aspects to the game, too: pushing blocks to the right places, figuring out the path to a door, timing your freeze power to position a platform in the right place. The controls can be a little funky at times: the left-right control is on the left corner, jump is on the right. Up and down only appear (on the left) when you're climbing a ladder, and an "action" button appears on the right when appropriate. It may have been easier just to have a simple joystick control on the left instead of the appearing/disappearing controls.
The text of the story is a bit odd — probably some errors in translation, I'm guessing? — with some weird phrasings and misspellings that don't really sound like a black jazz musician from the 1930s. The dialogue in the cut-scenes have similar issues. Overall, though, it's a very challenging platformer game and it's got a great soundtrack and a nice look to it. It's certainly the best early-20th-century jazz-inspired trumpet-playing platformer I've ever come across.
ABC Music - $2.99 universal app
Dan Donahoo mentioned Peapod Labs before in a piece about media literacy for preschoolers. They've got a series of ABC Explorers apps themed around different subject matter: sports, wildlife, vehicles. This one, ABC Music, works much like the others: you're presented with a grid of squares, some with letters of the alphabet. Tapping on a square opens up a photograph of an instrument that starts with the appropriate letter. A row of little kids holding the letters pops up from the bottom, and the word is pronounced out loud. Tapping any of these letters will jump to that letter.
Each photo is also accompanied by a little pop-down in the top left corner. Some of these link to YouTube videos of the instrument in action: these videos are curated by the Peapod Labs folks, so they're kid-appropriate, and you'll get musicians from all over the world. Some of the pop-downs let you "play" the instrument — usually you rub your finger on the screen to color in the instrument, or fill in the photo of a musician, and the sound of the instrument is played while you're coloring. Finally, you can press the exclamation point button to get a little factoid about the instrument (though these aren't read out loud, so a pre-literate kid will need some help with those).
It's a pretty fun app, with a host of different instruments from all around the world, and it's fun to watch videos of them being played. My only beef with the app is that I'm not sure the non-English instrument names are pronounced correctly. I know for sure that the yue qin (a Chinese string instrument) is not pronounced "yoo kin."
Wild Chords - free for iPad only, with in-app purchases
Many years ago I bought a used guitar from a friend, thinking I'd learn to play it. (I play piano and viola, so I can read music and am comfortable with stringed instruments.) But after plunking around a little bit, I just never really practiced and eventually sold the guitar. Maybe if I'd had Wild Chords I would have kept at it. Wild Chords is a fascinating idea, and if you have an iPad and a guitar, you should definitely check out the free portion of the app.
The story is that a bunch of animals have escaped from the zoo and are all over the city of Ovelin. Giuseppe has discovered that playing certain chords on the guitar will hypnotize the animals, and he can lead them Pied Piper–style out of the city. The app uses the iPad's microphone to detect the sound of a guitar. It has a built-in tuner so you can check that it's hearing all the strings properly. As Giuseppe walks down the street, you have to play the right chords at the right time to capture the animals: an open chord for the Ovelin bird, C minor for the sad alligator, E minor for the sad elephant, E major for the happy elephant, and so on.
The app starts with the O chord — that is, all open strings. It's a weird sound, to be sure, but it's to get you used to the format of the game, and lets you practice the timing. Giuseppe walks down the street to a jaunty little tune, and there are Ovelin birds hovering over specific spots on the sidewalk. Strum the chord at the right time, and the bird follows Giuseppe. Miss, and the bird chirps and stays there. As you progress, the game adds additional chords, showing you what fingers to place on which frets, and you'll start picking up additional animals, and having to shift between chords more and more quickly.
There are also some levels that feature birds on telephone wires: each wire represents one of the strings of the guitar, and the birds are labeled with a number representing what fret to press. Pluck that note at the right time, and the bird gets a little zap and goes to sleep. Miss, and the bird is angry and pops one of Giuseppe's balloons. These levels help you learn a scale on the guitar. Early levels are very simple one-string exercises, but later levels will jump around on different strings.
Wild Chords probably won't make you a guitar expert, but it's a good start at basic training, a step up from playing Guitar Hero with the controller and moving toward using the real instrument, but not quite as complex as Rocksmith. What's great about Wild Chords is the way it steps up the difficulty a little at a time, and tracks your progress so you can see how you're doing. There are additional level packs available for a buck each, adding more chords to the mix.
I borrowed a friend's guitar to try the app out, and it's really cool to see how it works with the iPad. My daughter was fascinated, too, and although the guitar's a little big for her to hold yet, she had fun playing the open-chord level, trying to get all the birds. Now I'm considering getting her a Loog guitar to play with — although with its 3 strings it won't work with Wild Chords.
If you've always wanted to learn to play guitar and you've got an iPad, give Wild Chords a try and see what you think!
Disclosure: GeekDad received review codes for the paid apps in this column.
