Music to Your Ears: Rockstar Introduces Beaterator

Does Guitar Hero leave you flat? Have you got the Rock Band blues? If so, perhaps what you really need is a new kind of musical gaming experience.

From the unlikely pairing of Rockstar Games, the publisher/developer behind the Grand Theft Auto series, and Grammy Award-winning producer Timbaland comes Beaterator, a mobile music-making application set to drop for the Sony PSP on September 29th. (And before you ask, yes an iPhone iteration is also in the works!) Not some run-of-the-mill rhythm game, Beaterator contains hundreds of original loops from Timbaland himself and an intuitive tracker interface that allows burgeoning beatsmiths to make songs on the fly.

More importantly, the title allows and encourages players to create their own loops and, along the way, teaches children (and adults) the fundamentals of song-crafting by removing the sense of intimidation that so often deters novices from dabbling in music creation. To demonstrate the software’s intuitive nature, Rockstar enlisted the help of Max and Clay, a pair of Brooklyn-area youths. Sick beats soon followed.