These are very preliminary thoughts about this app and I haven't really played with it enough to uncover its full potential.
I bought this yesterday and it is a very impressive piece of programming and human interface. The ability to generate musical instrument tracks purely by singing into a microphone works very well.
I was correct though that you really need to be able to sing on key. The auto pitch certainly helps but If you can't sing on key for all the parts required, then your parts will be all over the place in terms of pitch. There's additional auto pitch controls here but I need to play with them more to really make this work as needed.
You also need to think ahead of the structure of your song since you are basically singing each part in real time. Having a song structure or chord chart in front of you might be very handy when laying down the individual tracks.
There are also more instruments then the demo shows. The video demo shows the power chords guitar, assorted drums and bass guitar, but there's also a lead guitar, saxaphone two synths and an organ patch.
There's full control over level and stereo placement of each instrument, which I believe needs to be set before recording a part. The metronome also has level and tempo controls.
You can also save and load and save individual parts, as well as email a recording for export.
FYI, I am using an iPod Touch 2G with a mic/headphones combo and it works very well, with no latency at all. You can sing along with any music already on your iPod.
All in all, this is a very impressive app and it seems to have enormous potential as a song writing tool.
Voice Band at the app store:
8 comments:
I bought this app the other day after seeing the impressive youtube clip of it in action. I agree with Pierre about needing to sing in key - it was all over the place when I tried it the first time!
On a related note I also have a ipod touch 2G but I don't use the apple headphone with inbuilt microphone.
I found a replacement microphone adapter that works much better with the ipod touch. It's a non apple product that consists of a 4 ring connector attached to a lead that ends in a microphone with a three ring connector input. This allows me to run proper headphones while I am using the microphone for music applications (for instance wivi band, I am T-Pain, GuitarFX Delux). I can also use a splitter at this point to send a signal to an amp or my PC so that I can record what I am playing.
If this program can export simple MIDI it would be useful.
I've just figured out something very useful about this app.
You don't need to use your voice as the input - you can use a musical instrument as an alternative. I've been playing around with a microphone attached to a ukulele and it gives a far better sound compared to the voice input (OK I admit my singing voice is not great but still I think the makers of this app could easily market it in a different direction - towards the iphone guitar amp market). Ive tried it with a keyboard but it doesn't work so well - perhaps there might be a way to integrate a midi input in a future update.
Do you know any PC software achieving the same "voice2guitar" feature?
Thanks a lot!
Hey Sigmund, that's a great idea! Quite brilliant!
Pierre
hi sigmund
do you have a link/name of product for your four ring mic adapter?
cheers
Anonymous, I live in Sweden and bought it from a shop here. I'm afraid I threw away the packaging and there's no name on the adapter itself but if you go to
http://www.teknikmagasinet.se/ and search for
"iPhone 3G ljudadapter" you will find it.
I had previously assumed that the only way to get a microphone working with the ipod touch was to use the apple headphones with mic but that is terrible if you are using a musical app that requires close access to the sound source (such as a guitar app) or blowing (such as wivi band). I guess this shows that probably any microphone with a 4 ring input may work.
thanks sigmund; i actually have the monster isonitalk; just interested in what other mic adpaters there are;
cheers
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