App Profile: Drum Loops & Metronome

James of Houston

Rating: 4/5

I like this app. There are a good variety of musical styles represented. I like the quality of the samples. With the paid version, I could see this being useful on a live gig for a solo performer. My suggestion is this: can you add a volume control slider? There are times when the beat needs to come up or turn down, and it is too cumbersome to try and do that with the side buttons on your device. A big, long-throw slider would be easy to adjust without breaking away from the instrument for too long. Also, the app would be more useful for me if you could set it up with the parameter controls on the top half of the page and the scrollable playlist on the bottom half of the page. That way, you could locate the next song more quickly without having to go back and forth between playlist and homepage. Thanks for listening.

aardvarknation

Rating: 3/5

When I found this app I thought that it would be good to practice the Handpan with different time signatures and tempos so I paid for it, but the way in which you jump from one beat to another is SO incredibly convoluted that it makes looking for another riff zero fun and therefore I often just stay in the beat I’m in. There is no fast way to preview a beat to see if you like it so you must make the journey into the world of page changes and screen taps to find that, wow, that beat’s lame, and then start again to find....you get it. A great improvement would be if, while your beat is playing you could, with one click open the pattern list (or better, upon picking your track it reverts to the pattern page) and tap your next beat without a break in play. However you are about four to five steps away from that with every loop change. You only get one bar, and two fill buttons which you have to physically depress (while you are trying to play along) They often sound electronic and so quantized. And most importantly it would be nice to be able to pick by time signature. This is an octopad living in a Vdrum world. Oh also saving favorites should just be a single tap while your pattern is playing, not the mini journey one must embark on, and it SHOULD save at the tempo you chose, not the pattern default. Let’s do this developers, you got this far, now let’s make this app usable. 🤗

Doctor Rhythm

Rating: 5/5

This app is basically a large collection of drum patterns like you might find as presets in a 1980s era drum machine. As with those machines, the patterns are sequenced drum samples rather than a looped recording of a live drummer. Keeping with the vintage drum machine aesthetic, the samples themselves don’t exactly shine, but wouldn’t sound out of place in an old machine. It seems like the samples were expanded to 4 kits (Standard, Rock, Jazz, Latin) and there’s a slider that controls the overall pitch. This goes a ways towards remedying my original complaint about the limited number of samples. Dropping the pitch adds weight and realism, whereas raising pitch gives a more electro feel. The overall package is adequate as a practice tool. The patterns are rather mechanical sounding and short (mostly 2 bars). The styles lean towards pop/rock and Latin. It’s not really for the EDM crowd. A small fraction of the patterns are immediately available. The remaining ones can be individually unlocked by watching ads to earn points redeemable for patterns. Fair enough I suppose, and the ads are mercifully brief. After an update, you can now listen to a track before committing to unlocking it. With these improvements, I raised my rating to 5-stars.