Nanostudio screen dump

At school, I spent more time than was healthy trying to create a synth epic a la Vangelis using the music department’s (at the time quite advanced) Roland D20. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out.

The keyboard had cost over £1200, was a pain to use and really wasn’t that nice sounding.

Now, for £9 you can get an app that will do pretty much the same job ON YOUR PHONE!

Here’s one I made earlier.

Unkuwuffuw by electricchalk

Nanostudio, by Blipinteractive gives you a fantastic tool for creating song demos, riffs, loops and so on with what is pretty impressive sound quality. It actually has more in common with soft-synths like Reason than the machines I used to use. You have a 6 track sequencer (4 synth and 2 drum tracks) a polyphonic synth, a drum machine and a music editor. It will work on the iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad.

I was able to put thistune  together without too much problem.

Here’s a couple of video demos.

I was bowled over by the sound quality and functionality considering the device it’s on.

There are some shortcomings:

  • Screen size – makes playing some chords problematic. The iPad is probably it’s best home in this respect.
  • Song length is limited
  • Difficult to share your music – You need to install Nanosync on your PC or Mac and wirelessly download the mastered Wav file. A forthcoming update will allow direct upload of an .ogg file to Soundcloud
  • £9 is expensive as apps go (although, not compared to other music software)
  • It eats battery life like sweeties.

But there are loads of benefits for education

  • Allows access to digital music software for a bargain price (£9 for the app and £180 for an iPod Touch).
  • Useful for teaching about song structure, time signatures, melody, harmony etc etc
  • Retains a certain cool factor.
  • Encourages more student creativity. Write soundtracks for media studies projects or digital storytelling as an alternative to ripping off someone else’s music. Great for backing tracks beds and stings for podcasts.
  • …I’m no music teacher so there will be loads I’m not considering.