Mobile phone apps that allow you to create music generally range from the ridiculous to the mundane. On first glance, Normalware’s BeBot, with a singing and dancing robot right on the interface, looks to be another one of the lot. Spend a few minutes with it, though, and you’ll find that it’s a more serious tool than you ever imagined.
In truth, BeBot is a full-featured four-voice musical synthesizer that can create an incredible array of sounds I never thought I’d hear out of the current generation of cell phone devices. Using your fingers on the multi-touch interface, you can fashion amazing tunes that might as well have been coming from an actual keyboard synthesizer.
Apart from capably playing four notes at the same time, it offers analog-sounding filters, plenty of effects (e.g. looping, overdrive), user-programmable scales, autotune and programmable presets. It basically creates a complex musical instrument hiding underneath an Apple-branded phone – a truly amazing feat.
Musicians and tinkerers alike can literally create an infinite number of voicing on the BeBot, allowing it to be used both for passing the time and serious music purposes. Barring the inability to save your recordings (yep, though I expect to come as an update soon) as well as share saved presets with other handsets, it’s quite possibly the single most complete music-creation app available on a mobile platform, bar none.
Seriously, it’s apps like BeBot that make it worthwhile to get an iPhone.
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