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

Effects
Griff also comes with a number of built-in effects, including Delay, Reverb, Chorus and Flanger. All of these are presented on screens which are nothing less than works of art and an exercise in minimalist simplicity, providing just the bare essentials necessary to convert the raw instrument outputs into awe-inspiring towers of sound.


Figure 12: Just look at those gorgeous effect screens.

Plug-in Architecture
Similar to PC-based studios, Griff employs a plug-in architecture to enable further instruments and effects to be added. This is a crucial feature as it provides for virtually unlimited potential for creativity, assuming of course there is a ready supply of plug-ins.

And fortunately there is. In fact once you've registered your copy of Griff you can download two further virtual instruments for free from the developer's Web site: PocketVoid DX, an FM synthesizer, and PocketPluck, which emulates plucked string instruments. A variety of other plug-in instruments and effects can be purchased separately, greatly expanding the sounds you can make with Griff.

Parameter Automation
Almost any instrument or mixer control can be programmed to move through a pre-defined path during playback, making it easy to produce filter sweeps, pans, fades, effect changes, etc. This is done by sketching out graphically how you want any given parameter to change, providing a very flexible and easy to use mechanism which encourages experimentation.


Figure 13: The parameter automation screen, here panning the synth from right to left and back again.

Output
Griff's output is 16-bit CD quality stereo, and your masterwork can be exported in both audio (WAV) and MIDI formats. Strangely, there's also an XML import/export option, but I can't really fathom what you'd use it for unless you have another sequencer that can understand the same XML.


Figure 14: The various output options.

Gotchas

• The learning curve is reasonably steep due to things like the song-section-pattern relationship, factories and banks, alias vs replicate, etc.
  
• Patterns can only exist within a section, not across multiple sections, so you can't set up a bassline, for example, at the song level. It is actually possible to have parallel sections playing at the same time, but this isn't really practical as they overlap on screen so you can't see those underneath.
  
• Whilst it's possible to automate mixer and effect parameters at the section level, you can't do this for instrument parameters - they can only be automated within a pattern.
  
• I found that the pattern/section looping flag occasionally didn't work properly, sometimes refusing to loop even though set to do so. This could be fixed by simply unsetting and resetting it though.
  
• I'd like the zoom to work a bit quicker - this is a key feature as you spend a lot of time zooming in to edit details and back out for an overview, and I found it a bit slow.
  
• I couldn't actually delete a pattern from the 'Current' list in the bank - there is a 'Remove' menu option but it always seemed to be greyed-out, even if the pattern is no longer used in the song.
  

Where To Buy
The software can be purchased directly from the developer's Web site for £39.99 (approximately $65). A trial version is also available, together with some sample tunes to give you an idea of what it can do. There are various extra plug-in instruments and effects also available to purchase.

Specifications
This program will work on any Pocket PC or Pocket PC 2002 device, and takes up 2.6 Mb of storage RAM.

Conclusions
Griff produces a professional-quality sound, has a well-designed user interface and is extensible via its plug-in architecture. It is quite expensive for a Pocket PC application, especially as you have to buy most of the effects and instruments separately - in fact buying all of them would add another £85 ($135) on to the basic application price. However, you have to compare this to an equivalent PC-based setup, which is likely to be many times the cost.

So overall I highly recommend Griff if you're serious about making music on the go, and would even go so far as to say it's the best music creation tool for the Pocket PC so far. But could it replace your laptop virtual studio? Maybe not, as the sacrifices you have to make - screen real estate, lack of hardware controllers, etc - may be too great, but bringing things down in scale and removing unnecessary bells and whistles does have one huge advantage: it allows you to focus on creating the music itself, and isn't that the whole point?