It’s understandable, because how else could the app makers sustain their work by releasing their app in the open? Open source business models are still contentious.įurthermore, some limitations of iReal Pro are structural. Philosophical considerations aside, this means that its development is gated and that fixes and new features are up to the whims and fortunes of a single organization. Now that’s what I call a successful product!įor all its greatness, iReal Pro suffers from one big (but understandable) flaw: it is not open source. Because the app is flexible and easy to use, it has attracted a large community of users who have contributed the bulk of the leadsheets that are in active use today. It allows to specify a full chord progression and to play it back in a number of styles, from pop to jazz to latin. iReal Pro (source) MuseScore (via ireal-musicxml) OSMD (via ireal-musicxml) What’s the point?įor musicians, iReal Pro is an indispensable tool that captures the essence of practicing a tune. Click each thumbnail to see a larger image. In this post, I hope to summarize the challenges, lessons learned, as well as the context around this work.īut first, some pretty pictures! Following is the same iReal Pro leadsheet for Herbie Hancock’s Butterfly, as rendered by iReal Pro, then rendered by MuseScore and OpenSheetMusicDisplay (OSMD) after MusicXML conversion. Yesterday, I finally published an online demo of my iReal Pro to MusicXML converter (unimaginatively called ireal-musicxml), having spent around 300% of the time I had originally anticipated to reach the first release of this module. There are a lot ways you can improvise this using inexpensive iOS apps, but I do feel that backing track apps and rock drum generators are an area that could be developed even further.Further description of iReal Pro playback emulation I may just have to try out Tin Pan Rhythm - it always looked cool, but I hadn't thought about it for this purpose. You can use that to program drums, and then use SmartBass, loops, or whatever and have a backing track pretty quickly. OH! And the new update to GarageBand that has the Automated Drummer is a lot of fun. MIDI information is supposed to have numeric triggers for the type of instrument being played, so if it's GM compatible, it's nearly plug-and-play to have a fully functional backing track. Lots of presets, some editing capability, and the generated fills give it a very human feel.Īs mentioned above, if you want to get more specific about the tracks you play along with, you can find free MIDI files on the Web and then open them in an app like MIDI File Player ( ), Roland Sound Canvas, Caustic, or many DAW's (I use MultiTrackStudio). Rock Drum Machine is great if you want to just pick up and play along with drums. It works similar to the Digitech Trio pedal - you train it with a simple chord phrase and it generates accompaniment parts on bass and drums! Oh, and the TRIO costs $180, whereas this is just a few bucks for the full version. I haven't used it a ton, but thought it was certainly worth a shot. There are a few different ways to do this. Interesting suggestions (I had not even heard of Flow Guitar, though now I see why).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |