Spending time with BleepBox

Without a doubt BleepBox is one of the most interesting iPhone / iPod Touch music apps to surface in a while, and there have been a lot of apps. Today I decided to spend a bit of time inbetween clearing out junk to play with BleepBox, and boy was it fun.

The fact that everything in BleepBox is synthesized is brilliant. In fact, it reminds me a lot of older applications like Griff and Phoenix Studio although you could use a sampler as one of the griff plug ins.

There are ups and downs to having everything synthesized. It is good in that you have total control over your sound, but on the other hand it does take more time to get things the way you want them.

When BleepBox came out I was away and CDM ran a piece on both this app and Groovemaker which came out at around the same time. I found that an interesting read, and largely sympathise with Peter's views, but I guess one thing that keeps my in the sample camp is Bhajis Loops which always uses a sample to build every instrument but requires a lot of skill to use.

Back to BleepBox. As a version 1.0 I think this app is amazing. 4 synth parts, brilliant. I love the sounds it makes and the tweakability of it. I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface so far, but after I was using it today I had to listen to John Foxx as I was so synthed up.

I can't wait to see what stuff comes next. I know what I'd like to see. A keyboard for the synth parts and a song editor together with support for wave file export and ioLibrary integration. There, not too much to ask for right!

Anyway, I love this app, and I really hope it grows. If you haven't tried it as yet give it a go. I found the workflow a little confusing to begin with, but it is worth the effort to get to know the app. You'll get a lot out of it.

BleepBox at the app store: