First impressions
Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 11:18 pm
I'd like to say that I discovered ThumbJam 3 days ago and haven't been able to put it down since.
3 Weeks ago I began learning to play the keyboard, learning the major & minor scales in every key, understanding all the different church modes & exotic scales (liek the pentatonic, harmonic scales etc), and it is very satisfying learning to express your mood through a musical medium, however my issue is that at my current level of dexterity,
memory for the different intervals needed to play each scale correctly and my general prowess,
it is not possible for me to really write a full blown piece of music (being handicapped by a 25 note keyboard doesn't help, I could just shift up the keyboard and play all the different modes if I had a full keyboard).
Now that I have discovered ThumbJam, not only can I actually compose a piece of music using the limited knowledge of music theory that I have but I can pretty much perform it live with a multitude of instruments!
Having gotten this far, here are my thoughts and suggestions vis a vis increasing the intuitiveness of the interface and thus expressivity of all the instruments (I will try to avoid making suggestions people have already said)
Firstly, it would be great to be able to assign the accelerometer (X-axis, Y-axis etc) to controls of your choice beyond vibrato,tremolo & velocity(E.G: Sample attack, or toggling between retrigger/glissando mode, glide time interval, humanize, & toggling continuous glide mode), this would allow INCREDIBLY minute control of your performance.
Secondly, it would be really nice to be able to be able to toggle seeing the pitch bend limit in cents (instead of semitones),
Finally, being able to build a pallette where you can change key & scale simultaneously would be the bomb.
3 Weeks ago I began learning to play the keyboard, learning the major & minor scales in every key, understanding all the different church modes & exotic scales (liek the pentatonic, harmonic scales etc), and it is very satisfying learning to express your mood through a musical medium, however my issue is that at my current level of dexterity,
memory for the different intervals needed to play each scale correctly and my general prowess,
it is not possible for me to really write a full blown piece of music (being handicapped by a 25 note keyboard doesn't help, I could just shift up the keyboard and play all the different modes if I had a full keyboard).
Now that I have discovered ThumbJam, not only can I actually compose a piece of music using the limited knowledge of music theory that I have but I can pretty much perform it live with a multitude of instruments!
Having gotten this far, here are my thoughts and suggestions vis a vis increasing the intuitiveness of the interface and thus expressivity of all the instruments (I will try to avoid making suggestions people have already said)
Firstly, it would be great to be able to assign the accelerometer (X-axis, Y-axis etc) to controls of your choice beyond vibrato,tremolo & velocity(E.G: Sample attack, or toggling between retrigger/glissando mode, glide time interval, humanize, & toggling continuous glide mode), this would allow INCREDIBLY minute control of your performance.
Secondly, it would be really nice to be able to be able to toggle seeing the pitch bend limit in cents (instead of semitones),
Finally, being able to build a pallette where you can change key & scale simultaneously would be the bomb.