RoGame Software

BandMaster

BandMaster is like having a whole band in your pocket. You get bass, drums and piano, great sounding samples and several styles for each instrument. Song creation is a snap with the available templates. Now you can practice on your own schedule and get that solo down for real. Your songs are displayed in the song list from where you can launch the playback or edit views. The playback view displays your song's chords in a grid that scrolls down and highlights each measure as it is played. You determine the speed and number of chorusses as well as the style. If you like, you can also turn off any of the instruments. You can even have your band's logo as the background for the playback view. New songs are created with one of the many templates available. These include exercises and Blues as well as Jazz standard forms of different lengths. Once created songs can then be edited in the edit view. This view gives you full control over the chords in your song. You can add and delete measures, transpose the song or switch to a different time signature. Ifyou are curious to hear how BandMaster sounds, you can download the free preview app BandMaster Blues from the App Store.

The song list is the central view of BandMaster and serves as a kind of sandbox for all your active songs. They can be re-arranged in edit mode (tap the edit button- top right corner) and deleted as well. The "New" song button (bottom left) opens the songform edit view and subsequently the templates list which contains 26 base forms upon which you can build any new song. These templates contain Blues forms, several AABA, ABA and other forms to choose from as well as the chords to standards like Autumn Leaves, Bluesette and Giant Steps. A couple of exercises and more uncommon forms are included as well. All of these can be transposed, put into different meters and edited on a beat level in BandMaster's form editor. To see how easy that is, just watch the movie "The Songform Editor in BandMaster" below.

The composition view allows you to make changes on a beat level. A song can contain between 4 - 120 measure. Editing a songform is very fast and easy. BandMaster implements cut/copy/paste on a beat level and scrolling selections. Construction of an AABA form for example is thus a simple matter of entering 8 measures and copy-pasting those measures a number of times (see the movie "The Songform Editor in BandMaster" below). The editing of chord symbols involves no typing at all. Insertion and Paste operations are animated to clarify what goes where and chord name changes can be applied globally for a range of measures (i.e. it is possible to select a group of different chords and assign them the same root or chord symbol).

BandMaster uses three instrument channels for parallel playback. The three base instruments (bass, drums and piano) are assigned to these channels and consist of hundreds of individual samples. Starting with version 1.2 BandMaster supports the installation of additional Sound Libraries. These are pruchased separately and can be assigned on the fly and are saved in each song's settings. For a brief intro watch the movie "Sound Libraries in BandMaster" below.

The main part of the playback view is the scrolling chord grid. The chord grid always highlights the current measure during playback. The BPM editor handles speed settings in BPM and the number of chorusses to be played. The style editor offers several options for each instrument affecting the playback.

A metronome might still come in handy, but practicing with BandMaster is much more to the point and more importantly much more fun and productive. Maybe you need to get a better handle on that Blues in Ab or a brief warm-up with Giant Steps. With BandMaster on your iPhone or iPod touch just pop in those earphones and get going wherever you are. Soloing is an art, but only practice makes the master and for that one should have the right tools.

BandMaster Blues is a sneak preview of the application BandMaster and FREE. It contains 3 different Blues forms that can be transposed and played back at different tempi. BandMaster Blues also allows to adjust the volume of the 3 different instruments (bass, drums and piano) and has a global transposition setting for transposed instruments. Running this app on your iPhone or iPod touch allows you to get a good idea of BandMaster's sound quality and overall performance. Like BandMaster BandMaster Blues is localized into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and available from the App Store.

Movies

 

The Songform Editor in BandMaster

 

 

The first BandMaster Movie - a bit outdated, so make sure to watch the others as well