MTV Music Generator 3 -- This is the Remix
Making music, it turns out, is very much like filing out
a spread sheet. One drops samples -- boxes of varying sizes,
depending on their length -- into a grid of 24 channels.
Samples are color coded into drum, bass, riff, and vocal;
the precise choices have pretty names and can be selected
from menus, which can be stocked from libraries, and can be
added to mostly by placing other boxes in other grids.
After a while of moving boxes around, the screen resembles
fruit salad, and, well, with me, it sounds like fruit salad,
too.
Because selecting things from menus and placing them on a grid
is terribly boring, shadows are forever moving across the
background and across selected items like interference from
the video game next door. Menus have depth, slide back and
forth, regroup, light up, while little tron-esque highlight
effects zip along their corners. It's still fairly subdued,
by MTV standards; but unfortunately, the inconsistent meaning
of commands while navigating the hierarchy of libraries
("X" will select something in one window, but discard it in
another) ruins the interaction flow for anyone but the most
determined -- and if you're determined enough to get past
that, why would you be playing with toy software rather than
a real sequencer?
Reviewed by: Jutta Degener - 04/05
Ages: Teen
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