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. Read on for more details and cliick the manual icon to download the BandMaster manual.

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.

This is where you’ll spend most of your time but fairly straight ahead. Most of the screen in this view is used to display the songform.  The songform is scrollable by dragging it up or down. Other than in the Edit View, you don’t have to use the numbers bar to scroll it. Numbers in this view as well as in the Edit View represent measures. Backslashes in BandMaster are a short notation saying “same as before”.
The toolbar in the Playback View has several buttons to display song-specific settings in addition to the play/stop button at the very left.  The play button itself turns into a stop button once tapped and immediately starts playback of the current song. During playback the songform scrolls itself while highlighting the current measure. You can scroll the view by hand during playback.

BandMaster's plugin architecture supports currently 2 kinds of add-on libraries to be installed, sound libraries and song libraries. Sound libraries provide additional instruments for the bass and the harmony instrument in BandMaster. Song libraries are a new feature in BandMaster 1.5 and allow access to over 1100 Jazz standards at this time.

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.

Movies

 

The Songform Editor in BandMaster