iPhone App Reviews

FingerBeat

T.J. Brumfield | Jul 19, 2009 Music

User rating: (3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

I have the music talent of William Hung. And frankly I might be insulting William Hung with that comparison. But the Elionze Group have put together a music app simple enough for even me to make music, yet powerful enough to put together some great loops, exactly how you want them.

I’m talking about FingerBeat. At first I was expecting a fairly simple finger drum app. With some apps I download and play with from the App Store, I have to lower my expectations when it comes to features. I have to remind myself that this is a cheap app often made by a single developer, or a small team in a short period of time. FingerBeat is one of the rare apps I’ve downloaded over the past few weeks that really exceeded my expectations when it came to features.

I’m almost not even sure where to start, but lets go with kits. FingerBeat ships with eight pre-made kits including Electro Rock, Hip Hop, Dubstep, Techo, House, Trance, 8Bit and Glitch. 8Bit really was a nice touch. At the kit selection screen you can demo the kits with six different sample patterns for each kit. Even better, FingerBeat supports up to sixteen kits. You can fire up the kit editor and create your own.

In the kit editor, you can mix-and-match the existing pads from the original eight kits, or record whatever crazy sounds you can capture with your mic. For each of the pads, there is also a pitch editor.

In the pitch editor you can grab sliders for each pad to raise or lower pitch. You can adjust pitch independently for six different patterns at once. Adjust each pad to sound exactly how you want. If simple sliders aren’t your thing, swipe on over to a two-octave vertical keyboard and play the notes out to yours heart’s content.

Now you probably want to lay down some notes. On the main pad screen, hit play and then watch the metronome progress through a count of four. Press pads during each step of the metronome for what you want to play. A tempo slider lets you adjust how fast the metronome moves, and thusly how fast your loop will play. The pads are very low latency which is important. You’re trying to time your notes just perfectly. Some simple finger drums apps I’ve looked at have poor latency which hurts your ability to listen to what you’re doing and try to play along.

Hitting the pads is arguably the most fun method to play, but lets say you have zero rhythm. This app was designed so that anyone can use it. You don’t have to use the pads. Swipe over to a chart where you can simply outline a pattern. For each cycle of the four-count, any of the 8 notes/pads can be played up to 4 times. It is extremely easy to draw patterns here and then listen to how they sound. I was amazed how simple this was to use.

You can cycle through six different patterns here at once. And if you think repeating your pattern is a chore, there is a handy follow button. There is also a copy/paste fucntion that will take one pattern and drop it down on another pattern screen.  One button allows you to clear the screen and start anew.

Once you’ve laid down your pattern, you can open up the mixer and adjust volume and balance, again for each eight pads, and each six patterns.

Now that you’ve got your sound down perfectly, slide over to the skins. You can customize the look of the app with six premade skins, or import pictures. Now you’re ready to show off your creation to the world. Take your sound out and record, or even better, use your iPhone/iPod to perform live. Play your loop in the background, and sing/hum into your mic while sound goes out to an external speaker. William Hung, here I come.

This is a sharp-looking app, but more importantly, a well-designed app. Loads of features are well laid-out in an easy interface. FingerBeat has a nice website, a great demo video (which I’m embedding below) and a nice in-app instruction manual. What is really impressive is that this is the first app from the Elionze Group, and a 1.0 release at that. The polish is incredible for a first-release. I intend to keep my eyes on what these guys do in the future.

In all fairness, this isn’t a really massive audio workhorse like Fruity Loops (a PC app), but even the basic Fruity Loops Express is $49. At $3.99, FingerBeat is a very good deal. I highly recommend it.

Tags: $3.99, Entertainment, Music, T. J. Brumfield