iPhone App Directory

BeatPad 1.1 Review

BeatPad was one of the first pieces of musical software I purchased for the palm platform. I used it on my first palm, a IIIx which I personally upgraded to 8mb, but that's another story. At the time, I thought it was totally amazing, which in fact it is still, it has just got better and better. In many ways it hasn't changed very much, but from a different perspective it has changed vastly.

Essentially BeatPad is a simple sequencer for the palm. It has a single monophonic music sequence and a drum pattern editor. It arranges patterns into four banks, A through D, and each bank has 8 patterns in it.

In version 1.1 you can tell the app to move from one pattern to the next, but you can't give it specific instructions like "A1 four times, then A2 etc". I'm sure that this sort of thing will come in a later version. For now you can tell it to play the patterns in order, and that's fine. You can copy patterns too.

Within each pattern you can adjust parameters for each note in the pattern, such as velocity, duration, pitch etc, and you can choose instruments for your tracks too.

It isn't going to make you a pop star, but it is good fun with a very interesting interface, and combined with SoundPad it is a powerful combination.

http://www.minimusic.com/beatpad.html

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