MadPad lets you collect sounds from your world.
MadPad – $.99 iPhone, $2.99 iPad
MadPad is another brilliant music-making community-minded app from Smule. The tagline is “Remix Your Life,” and that’s a pretty good explanation of what it does. Using your iDevice’s camera and mic, you can collect twelve different short video clips. These clips are then displayed in a large grid on the screen, and you can tap them to play the sounds (and the video). You can slide up or down within each button to speed up or slow down the playback speed. Create loops, play over the loops, and then share your recording on YouTube or via email.
You can download sets that other people have created, mix their sound clips with your own, and share your own sets. I’ve had a lot of fun with this one, making drum sets from office sounds, my kids’ playroom, and even noises at a Chinese restaurant. Here’s a little video I made in my home office with the help of my daughters. Yeah, you can tell I’m not a drummer, but I’m trying:
MadPad is great for teaching your kids about the music in everyday life. It encourages them to think about the sounds they hear, to think about how they relate to rhythm and music, to wonder what they sound like if they’re played back rat-a-tat or interspersed with other sounds.
Jazz: Trump's Journey is a platformer game with a jazzy theme.
Jazz: Trump’s Journey – $2.99 universal app
One of these apps is not like the others: Jazz: Trump’s Journey. It’s not really about making music, but it’s a curious little side-scrolling platformer with a plotline about jazz in New Orleans in the early 20th century. Trump is a trumpet player, loosely based on Louis Armstrong, wanting to win a contest and trying to put together a band. But for whatever reason (never entirely explained) there are cops about, and then there’s the nasty white dude who wants to steal Trump’s trumpet player and win the heart of the girl. Like I said: loosely based. As you progress through the levels, you’ll meet other musicians, too: Bono the trombone player, Joe the banjo player, and so on.
The gameplay itself is pretty fun: you run back and forth, climbing ladders, collecting musical notes and photographs. You can use your trumpet to freeze time, which affects certain platforms and objects, even the cops (unless they’re wearing earplugs). There are a lot of puzzle aspects to the game, too: pushing blocks to the right places, figuring out the path to a door, timing your freeze power to position a platform in the right place. The controls can be a little funky at times: the left-right control is on the left corner, jump is on the right. Up and down only appear (on the left) when you’re climbing a ladder, and an “action” button appears on the right when appropriate. It may have been easier just to have a simple joystick control on the left instead of the appearing/disappearing controls.
The text of the story is a bit odd — probably some errors in translation, I’m guessing? — with some weird phrasings and misspellings that don’t really sound like a black jazz musician from the 1930s. The dialogue in the cut-scenes have similar issues. Overall, though, it’s a very challenging platformer game and it’s got a great soundtrack and a nice look to it. It’s certainly the best early-20th-century jazz-inspired trumpet-playing platformer I’ve ever come across.
ABC Music is another in Peapod Labs' fun line of ABC apps.
ABC Music – $2.99 universal app
Dan Donahoo mentioned Peapod Labs before in a piece about media literacy for preschoolers. They’ve got a series of ABC Explorers apps themed around different subject matter: sports, wildlife, vehicles. This one, ABC Music, works much like the others: you’re presented with a grid of squares, some with letters of the alphabet. Tapping on a square opens up a photograph of an instrument that starts with the appropriate letter. A row of little kids holding the letters pops up from the bottom, and the word is pronounced out loud. Tapping any of these letters will jump to that letter.
Each photo is also accompanied by a little pop-down in the top left corner. Some of these link to YouTube videos of the instrument in action: these videos are curated by the Peapod Labs folks, so they’re kid-appropriate, and you’ll get musicians from all over the world. Some of the pop-downs let you “play” the instrument — usually you rub your finger on the screen to color in the instrument, or fill in the photo of a musician, and the sound of the instrument is played while you’re coloring. Finally, you can press the exclamation point button to get a little factoid about the instrument (though these aren’t read out loud, so a pre-literate kid will need some help with those).
It’s a pretty fun app, with a host of different instruments from all around the world, and it’s fun to watch videos of them being played. My only beef with the app is that I’m not sure the non-English instrument names are pronounced correctly. I know for sure that the yue qin (a Chinese string instrument) is not pronounced “yoo kin.”
My daughter tries out Wild Chords with a borrowed guitar. Photo: Jonathan Liu
Wild Chords – free for iPad only, with in-app purchases
Many years ago I bought a used guitar from a friend, thinking I’d learn to play it. (I play piano and viola, so I can read music and am comfortable with stringed instruments.) But after plunking around a little bit, I just never really practiced and eventually sold the guitar. Maybe if I’d had Wild Chords I would have kept at it. Wild Chords is a fascinating idea, and if you have an iPad and a guitar, you should definitely check out the free portion of the app.
The story is that a bunch of animals have escaped from the zoo and are all over the city of Ovelin. Giuseppe has discovered that playing certain chords on the guitar will hypnotize the animals, and he can lead them Pied Piper–style out of the city. The app uses the iPad’s microphone to detect the sound of a guitar. It has a built-in tuner so you can check that it’s hearing all the strings properly. As Giuseppe walks down the street, you have to play the right chords at the right time to capture the animals: an open chord for the Ovelin bird, C minor for the sad alligator, E minor for the sad elephant, E major for the happy elephant, and so on.
Wild Chords: like Guitar Hero, but with a real guitar.
The app starts with the O chord — that is, all open strings. It’s a weird sound, to be sure, but it’s to get you used to the format of the game, and lets you practice the timing. Giuseppe walks down the street to a jaunty little tune, and there are Ovelin birds hovering over specific spots on the sidewalk. Strum the chord at the right time, and the bird follows Giuseppe. Miss, and the bird chirps and stays there. As you progress, the game adds additional chords, showing you what fingers to place on which frets, and you’ll start picking up additional animals, and having to shift between chords more and more quickly.
There are also some levels that feature birds on telephone wires: each wire represents one of the strings of the guitar, and the birds are labeled with a number representing what fret to press. Pluck that note at the right time, and the bird gets a little zap and goes to sleep. Miss, and the bird is angry and pops one of Giuseppe’s balloons. These levels help you learn a scale on the guitar. Early levels are very simple one-string exercises, but later levels will jump around on different strings.
Wild Chords probably won’t make you a guitar expert, but it’s a good start at basic training, a step up from playing Guitar Hero with the controller and moving toward using the real instrument, but not quite as complex as Rocksmith. What’s great about Wild Chords is the way it steps up the difficulty a little at a time, and tracks your progress so you can see how you’re doing. There are additional level packs available for a buck each, adding more chords to the mix.
I borrowed a friend’s guitar to try the app out, and it’s really cool to see how it works with the iPad. My daughter was fascinated, too, and although the guitar’s a little big for her to hold yet, she had fun playing the open-chord level, trying to get all the birds. Now I’m considering getting her a Loog guitar to play with — although with its 3 strings it won’t work with Wild Chords.
If you’ve always wanted to learn to play guitar and you’ve got an iPad, give Wild Chords a try and see what you think!
Disclosure: GeekDad received review codes for the paid apps in this column.
