Windows Phone Thoughts: A Virtual Music Studio in Your Pocket: Griff v1.0 Reviewed

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Monday, October 13, 2003

A Virtual Music Studio in Your Pocket: Griff v1.0 Reviewed

Posted by Tim Allen in "SOFTWARE" @ 09:00 AM


Factories
One interesting facet of the user interface is the use of 'factories'. This is a common design pattern in the software development world, and as the name suggests is used to create a new object, in this case a new section, pattern or note. This is accomplished by tapping on the factory icon and dragging the new section, pattern or note to the required position. What isn't so obvious is that an existing section, pattern or note is deleted by dragging it back to the factory, rather than the more expected pop-up menu Delete option.


Figure 5: Dragging a new section from the factory to the song.

As well as creating a blank pattern, the pattern factory can also create patterns based on a pre-defined template stored in the 'pattern bank'.


Figure 6: The pattern bank, showing the 'Current' tab for patterns created in this song.

Griff comes supplied with a variety of default pattern templates, but in addition any patterns you create are automatically stored in the bank. Oh and patterns dragged back to the factory aren't actually deleted, but remain in the pattern bank.

All this can initially be a bit confusing, but you soon get used to it, and factories are ultimately a very intuitive mechanism for re-using melodies, riffs and rhythms within a song and even between songs.

Mixer
You can create as many sections, patterns and notes as you like, but not much is going to happen until you've assigned an instrument or two. This is where the mixer screen comes in. Tap and hold to get a pop-up menu where you can add an instrument, which creates a new channel on the mixer and two new rows on the section screen. These rows are where you assign patterns to the instrument and store automated mixer parameter changes for it, respectively.


Figure 7: The Mixer screen, showing the instruments and effects loaded for the song.

The mixer provides the usual level, pan and effect send controls, and is generally laid out in a clear and easy-to-use fashion, except that you can't tell which effect is assigned to which row of knobs without tapping on them.

Instruments
Griff comes with two built-in instruments: mSyn, the obligatory virtual analogue subtractive synthesizer, and Sampler, which is not really an instrument in its own right, but, as the name suggests, a sampler with a range of reasonable default samples together with the ability to import and edit your own.


Figure 8: The lovely knobs for controlling the mSyn monophonic synth. Much fun to be had here.


Figure 9: The Sampler, with the built-in drumkit loaded.


Figure 10: Loading a sample set into the Sampler.

Just like the pattern templates mentioned previously, instrument settings can also be saved to enable easy re-use of any useful sounds you've created.


Figure 11: Loading an instrument preset.

Speaking of useful sounds, the quality of sound output by mSyn is absolutely superb. It has enough tweakable controls to generate everything from deep basses through to swishy, buzzy or squelchy leads. And all the knobs can be automated (see below).

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