Saturday, October 31, 2009
This is the third music app in our iPhone Music Creation Review series. The last 2 apps I really enjoyed, Star6 and Xewton Music Studio, are must haves for pro musicians. GrooveMaker Techno is just one in a long series of different GrooveMaker apps.
They have an edition for the following genres; Techno, Trance, Club, Electro and House. This review applies to all of them, just the grooves are different.
DJs and music producers, keep on reading to learn how GrooveMaker for the iPhone can add value to your future productions!
GrooveMaker Techno – IK Multimedia US, LLC – 7,99 Euro
Groovy Patent
GrooveMaker has patented the way it creates grooves. Unlike the previous app reviewed here Xewton Music Studio, you are creating very impressive music in no time because of this technology. The composition process is different here, GrooveMaker creates random grooves, puts them under the 8 groove track pads and you start the mixing.
The app can create different grooves for different moods. Mild, percussive, instrumental and random. Now the cool thing comes in where you can empty, mute and lock pads. Locking pads gives the possibility to only fill the unlocked pads with new loops, so you can create a base sound and work on that. You can touch-drag pads and change their properties, like volume and pan. Also do this for selecting solo tracks to create nice intermezzos.


Loop the loop
Touching once the “Loops” button, you are presented with a list of available loops that you can add to the selected empty pads. The tempo can be changed manually but also by touching 3 times on the tempo button to increase it, with one step at the time.
Once you find a groove that you like you can save it for later to build your mix, with the “Groove Snap” button. This will place the selected groove in the 1st pad of the sequencer pad. Just go ahead with the process of creating another groove and snap it again.
Sequencial order
The most difficult (but not really) part of the app is the sequence part. You are presented 2 rows of sequential pads. The top row holds the grooves you saved earlier with the groove snap button. The bottom row is the place where these snapped grooves can be dragged onto, to create your final mix of maximum 15 grooves.
When your final mix is ready it can be exported to wave format and you can use this royalty free-music for whatever you like. It is yours!


Conclusion
I noticed that I re-use this app a lot of times, which is a good sign. It would be nice to see a live show off, between DJs with this app and their iPhone. Also note that there are different versions of this application for different music styles. Be sure that you check all the demo videos on their site, to help you learn the pro-tricks very fast with this great application.
Everyone’s an iPhone DJ with GrooveMaker!
Features - 5.0
Appearance – 5.0
Usability - 4.0
Value – 5.0
Overall: 4.8 stars out of 5

Robin Bollen
Note that the application is bought by iPhoneTunes.net for the review.