Sample Lab combines the power of a full featured sampler with a very sensitive input/triggering interface, making it ideal music making App for a traveling musician or even backstage at a local gig between sets. Sample Lab inventor Aaron Pride showed me how quickly you could build or modify a track, using the intuitive GUI he designed. Sample Lab comes with a library of 100 samples, but readily allows you to import WAV, MP3 or iTunes audio files. There are two main work spaces: the Main Sequencer page with eight sampler tracks and the Beat Trigger page. Sample Lab is another top of class iPad App, which offers a flexible and powerful audio toolset for the recording musician or composer. By far, the best play along learning aid I’ve seen to date with a very intuitive interface. The App is free, and songs are $8 purchased three at a time. As the song plays, you see your choice of either the actual music notation or the tab version. You can speed up or slow down the original part while keeping intonation steady.
Faders control the backing track’s drum and band parts, while a click is adjustable, too. Unlike other rehearsal products, the JammIt team has licensed the original masters, so you can play along with the actual recording.
JammIt is a ridiculously easy to use practice app for any guitar, bass, keyboard player, or drummer. My two picks for first runners up to Reactable are JammIt and Sample Lab. Definitely my #1 “must see” product of this year’s NAMM show!Ĭontinuing with the small (and inexpensive) is beautiful motif, I strolled around a whole new section of Hall E, where the start up companies are often found, where a section of the exhibit hall was devoted to Apps. For a guitar player like me, this is a really intuitive, powerful and fun way to relearn music making and create some original and unique sounds with a refreshing modular synthesis approach. However, they’ve just launched the iPad app version for $10. This kind of innovation comes at a price, though, as a full-blown system sells for $12,000. The full system is totally portable, breaking down into a gig bag and two soft carrying cases. DJs in London and Germany seem to be starting to use it, too.” Bjork used it on her most recent tour and two or three studios have now added it. “After we posted the first video on YouTube in 2007, interest really picked up to get the product to market. Speaking with Josep Viladomat at the booth, he said, “We wanted to create a better and more intuitive way to make music… using a keyboard is typing!” Marcos Alonso, one of the team that helped to develop Reactable, mentioned that this was their first trip to LA, and that word was getting out to more people about the product. Rather than try to explain just how it works, you can follow the link at the end of this story to the company’s website which has a number of helpful videos that will quickly explain the possibilities offered to any musician by Reactable. Using a circular workspace, you simply place any of the five types of sound tools (they look like pieces in a board game) on the touch screen surface to create or modify a sound. Reactable started as a project in the labs of a research university in Barcelona, Spain a number of years ago. Imagine a space age instrument that combines sampling, digital effects, modular synthesis a la sound building blocks, and a giant multi touch “turntable” that creates a tactile sound sandbox, and you’ve got a truly innovative breakthrough in music-making. It’s actually a bit hard to describe in words. Perhaps none was as revolutionary as the twenty-minute demo I received from Reactable Live! This product’s inventors really thought outside the box.
When it comes to acoustic instruments and music making, there really are no new products, simply refinements and leaps ahead that improve existing tools and techniques.Īt the 2011 NAMM show the work of a whole new generation of creative music brains are on display and I’ll share just a few of the more innovative products and people in my third and final blog posting from Anaheim.Įverywhere I look, Apple’s iPad is in play as the user interface for many of the coolest products. More than ever, the NAMM show is becoming a mash up of the analog world – with its historic musical precedents made up of strings, reeds, mallets, speakers, mics and the best traditional music making elements – with the increasingly digital music world, where speed, portability, and innovation rule.