GeoShred Control

Update: apparently everything I said below was wrong. So I’m giving them 5 stars and dropping it. The design of the UI for this instrument is very poor. I want to give productive feedback, so I’ve detailed what I think could be improved below: 1. Although the design lacks skeuomorphism (which I think is a good thing), it goes to the opposite extreme: there’s no symbol or metaphor for the user to intuitively recognize. For instance, the “explodey thing” animation that happens on touch input is disruptive. I spent a long time looking at it wondering what it means other than a button press. Does the rotation do something? Do the colors mean anything? If not, why are they there? There are many other examples but this one is the most interesting one. 2. Using the “explodey thing” animation as further example, the animation framerates are low. Like so low it causes a disruption in cognition for me. It makes me wonder if my iPad Pro is having latency issues. All in all the interface is a case study in what not to do. I advise the developer to take time to study the elements of good UX. A complete redesign is very much in order.

Happy to say I didn’t need Pro to do what I wanted, namely having a decent approximation of an isometric midi controller. Two notes cannot be played in the same row so that’s a slight limitation on chords. Overall there’s a lot of confusing interface elements but I can just cycle through presets until something is ok. Most of the features don’t work with the software I’m sending the MIDI to, but I understand why and it’s not GeoShred’s fault.

I bought GeoShred Control primarily to check out full GeoShred and what I wanted to be my primary use case (to start): recording MIDI tracks into Garage Band on the same iPad (using a third party app called Midiflow to create virtual ports). Control definitely shows you the performance and operation of the app, you just have to use a synthesizer with it to get sounds out. As it turns out, control of GB iOS looks a bit buggy - but not the fault of GeoShred. I have contacted support about 3 times pre and post purchase and it is extremely responsive. One of the developers actually recorded a video showing him testing out my bug case and showing it's a bug in how GarageBand is handling MPE. I went ahead and upgraded to GeoShred Pro so I could get the built in sounds and guitar modeling to play around with and build my interest in learning the isometric layout (I know a bit of keyboard but little of guitar). I think GeoShred Play might be a better intro to the app than Control unless you have a very specific use case in mind (as I did), but you can get to Pro from either. Appreciate their offering both, I wasn't gonna spring for a $25 app without getting a hands-on sense of whether I'd like using it.