BeatMaker for iPhone

Those accustomed to thinking of iPhone and iPod touch applications as stripped-down mini-versions of desktop applications need only spend a half hour with BeatMaker, Intua's mobile music-creation application, to change their minds. With its multiple screens--including screens that offer 16 drum pads for triggering samples, song sequencer, effects (FX), waveform trimming, and an editing screen for adjusting velocity and groove--BeatMaker is anything but a bare-bones mobile application. BeatMaker is deep--though clearly still a work in progress.

BeatMaker looks nothing like your typical iPhone application. You're not going to find interface elements that resemble anything within Apple's default apps--even the keyboard is a custom job. Instead, you have a series of screens accessible from buttons on the program's Home page as well as from the Navigation bar that pops down from the top of the display when you tap the BeatMaker icon. Within that toolbar you find buttons for accessing the Pad, Sequencer, and FX views. Buttons on the Home page let you load kits (collections of samples mapped to the drum pads). At the bottom of the screen you tap yet another icon to produce the Transport bar, which contains Stop/Play, Record, Loop, and Metronome controls as well as readouts for BPM (beats per minute) and bars and beats.

BeatMaker's Pad view gives you controls for recording patterns, and changing volume and tempo of your recording.

You're likely to spend much of your time in the Pad view where you can trigger up to 16 samples (and up to five simultaneously) by tapping a four-by-four layout of virtual drum pads. Just tap the Load Kit button found on this screen, choose one of the pre-made kits, and start tapping to trigger the samples assigned to the pads. With the assistance of Intua's free (and beta) BeatPack application, you can create kits on your Mac or Windows PC using samples of your own and then import those kits to BeatMaker. The pads aren't completely responsive--there's a bit of latency between the time you tap a pad and when it sounds.

Within Pad view, you'll find controls for recording patterns, changing the global volume of the kit as well as the tempo of the recording. Tap an Edit button and you can change the pitch of each sample, but it's not very musical as doing so also changes its duration--increase the pitch and the sample plays faster, decrease pitch and the sample slows down. Additionally, you can select a sample and edit it as a waveform within a separate screen--dragging your finger across it to trim the front and back.

You assemble projects by stringing together patterns within the Song Sequencer.

Recording from the Pad view is a little cumbersome because you can only record one measure at a time (and a 4/4 measure at that as the program doesn't support other time signatures) and, as I said, latency can be a problem. You can ameliorate the latency issue somewhat by taking advantage of the program's overdub feature. Like a lot of beat sequencers, this one records in a loop, adding parts as you bang on the pads. So, you could create a pattern closer to being in time by tapping a pad with a bass drum mapped to it on beats 1 and 3 and then, on the next pass, tapping a snare pad on beats 2 and 4.

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