Hi Florian,
On Aug 31, 2010, at 23:33, F10r14n wrote:
In the meantime, noone seems to have answered my
questions *sob sob*
Florian
I'll paraphrase your earlier questions. You asked about how to play
chords for the acoustic guitar instrument selection (citing
difficulties getting your fingers down on all the notes of the chord
simultaneously), and you also asked about whether the music you played
in ThumbJam could be recorded, for instance, in an app like GigDaddy.
Although you didn't explicitly state this, I assume you're using
ThumbJam on an iPhone.
The quick answer is that ThumbJam lets you adjust the spacing of notes
on the screen for each of your selected instruments, and it also
allows you to change the octave range of your notes, as well as your
key, so you can control the span of notes and their spacing on the
screen for your performance. ThumbJam also lets you record your
performances in the app, and use them to create mixes -- so you could
record a chord sequence and play it in background as a loop, and then
record on top of that a different melody line with the same or
different instruments. You can also adjust the relative volume in a
mixer.
In ThumbJam, you can control the spacing of your instrument keys by
using the key controls along the left side of your screen, assuming
that you haven't toggled them off to hide them when you play. I
described the key controls and what they do in an earlier post, but to
repeat the information and give a more detailed answer for what you
ask (playing chords on an instrument whose default spacing for
different notes doesn't let you fit your fingers onto all the notes
you want at the same time), run your finger along the left side of
your iPhone screen about at the middle of the screen. You should hear
VoiceOver say "cipher underscore plus, button", "span", "cipher
underscore minus, button". Double tap the "cipher underscore minus,
button". This decreases the note range span of the instrument in the
vertical direction by fitting fewer notes between the bottom (lowest
note) and top (highest note) on the screen. Effectively, you've
increased the separation between notes, so that you can fit your
fingers (simultaneously) on multiple notes of a chord. You're probably
going to have to double tap the "cipher underscore minus, button"
three or four times, depending on the size of your fingers.
If you want to keep the spacing at this setting for chorded work, you
can use the next set of key controls just under the "span" controls to
move your key range up or down octaves. These are announced by
VoiceOver as "cipher underscore plus, button", "October", "cipher
underscore minus, button". (If you find this strange, and set your
rotor to "character" mode so you can read off the label letter by
letter, you'll find that the developer has used the abbreviation for
Octave as "O C T", and that VoiceOver has decided to help you out here
by reading "October".) Same principle works here: double tapping the
"cipher underscore minus, button" shifts your keys down an octave, and
double tapping the "cipher underscore plus, button" shifts keys up an
octave.
For those people who want to read the earlier post, the link to this
post in the Mail Archive for the macvisionaries list is:
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg28572.html
(Thumbjam iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad music app instructions)
You'll have to read down to the bottom to get my first post about the
controls layout, since I didn't cc: this to the macvisionaries list
(which also made it available to the Mail Archive for easy searching
and linking) until the next iteration of questions and reply made it
clear that people were going to ask about this app again.
Now, I use ThumbJam on my iPad, so here's where it turns out that the
key control layout differs from the iPhone setup, based on installing
Thumbjam on my iPod Touch. On the iPhone version, by the time you
come to the labeled controls for changing octave (or "October", as
VoiceOver would say), you've reached the bottom of the screen. On my
iPad, when I run my finger down the left side of the screen to listen
to the key controls, the "cipher underscore minus, button" for the
octave is only 60% down from the top of the screen -- slightly below
the vertical midway point. If I continue to run my finger down the
left side of the screen where the key controls are announced (when not
toggled off from the "Sound" menu -- button in the top left corner),
I hear "Rec underscore icon, button" and "metronome underscore off,
button". These buttons aren't present in the iPhone version of
ThumbJam because there's not enough space along the left side of the
screen to fit them in. Instead, I believe you have to go to the
"Loop" button at the top right corner and double tap. Do a two finger
flick up to read off the options. There will be some controls for
both loop recording, mixing, playback, and loading and clearing off
loops, as well as regular session recording (so you can have a track
looping in the background, I think, and play and record over this, and
the metronome controls can also be accessed here.)
OK, I don't know how this works on the iPhone, but here's what happens
on my iPad. I double tap the "rec underscore icon" button at the left
edge of the screen. If I do a two finger flick up to "read all", I
find that the top left corner now reads "Cancel Record, button" and
the top right corner now reads "Record from Mic, button", while just
after that, in the center of the screen, a short way down from the
instrument heading, is a message, "Touch to start instrument record".
(Actually, what I hear in sequence is "Sound", "Cancel Record,
button", the instrument name in the heading, "Record from Mic,
button", "Loop", "cipher underscore key, button", "Touch to start
instrument record", and then the other items from the "Key Controls"
menu along the left side of the screen. But if I touch the top left
and right corners directly, I hear the buttons to "Cancel Record" and
"Record from Mic".) If I leave VoiceOver on, (but first touch the
center of the screen -- maybe at the "Touch to start instrument
record" message, so focus is in the playing area, and not on the "Rec
underscore icon, button" among the key controls along the left side of
the screen), and do a double split tap on the screen, I'll hear the
message under my finger change to "Recording instrument", and if I now
check the top left corner I'll hear "Cancel Record, button", while the
top right corner has changed to "Finish Record".
So here's how I would record a loop on the iPad, where I can leave the
left side key controls up or hide them without interfering with my
playing:
1. Double tap the "Rec underscore icon, button" along the left side of
the screen, about a quarter of the way up from the bottom of the
screen. (On the iPhone, you would probably first hide your key
controls along the left side of the screen by double tapping the
"Sound" button at the top left corner of the screen, then run your
finger down to "Key Controls, button" and double tap to hide. Then
you would double tap the "Loop" button in the top right corner, and
then run your finger down to the "Record Loop" button and double tap
to start recording.)
2. Toggle VoiceOver off by triple clicking the home button.
3. Start playing and tap the top right corner of the screen when I'm
done to end the recording.
As soon as I tap the top right corner of the screen, what I've just
played will start playing and looping. While you could toggle
VoiceOver on again and double tap the corner, ThumbJam will be
recording silence over that interval, and the silent part will get
looped, too. Also, if you turn VoiceOver on while the music you
recorded is looping, you find that the area that had the messages like
"Touch to start instrument record" reports the number of beats per
minute -- which will not be correct if you leave a large, silent
passage at the end of your recording -- along with the instrument and
"unsaved". I don't have difficulty tapping the spot in the top right
corner to end the recording with VoiceOver off, but you can either use
reference points of your case, or simply put an elastic or cloth band,
or some of the non-sticky type of tape to mark the corner you want to
tap.
You can toggle VoiceOver on while the track is looping, double tap the
"Loop" menu in the top right corner to save the loop (run your finger
down past the "Record Loop, button" and the "Pause underscore icon,
button" which is the play/pause button to the "Save, button". Then
dismiss the "Loop" menu and double tap the "Sound" menu to optionally
switch to another instrument and/or bring up the key controls again to
make any adjustments for the next instrument you want to use for
playing against the looped track. This can be the same instrument --
maybe you recorded chords, and you now want to play a melody line
after first changing the note spacing with the key controls. When
you've chosen your configuration you can toggle VoiceOver off again
and start playing against the looping track. If you decide you want
to record a second track, go through the same steps to start recording
another loop. The "Loop" button brings up controls not just for
recording loops, but for playing/pausing the current loop, saving
loops or deleting the last loop (if you decide you want to record it
again), bringing up a mixer to adjust relative volume of all saved
loops, loading up loops that were previously saved, clearing off all
current loops if you want to end your present session (saved loops
stay in the program), or loading up previously created loops (which
are named by date and time of creation). The program is set to wait
for the loop to reach the end of its cycle before starting to record
the next loop, although you can likely override these settings. Each
new loop is identified by beats per minute, instrument name, and by a
time stamp name (if it has been saved -- otherwise it will be labeled
"unsaved". You can either save individual loops or loop sets, but I
think that with sets you can' t use individual tracks of the set if
they weren't separately saved.
There's also a session recording switch under the "Loop" menu and the
"Load, button" will let you load up not only previous loops, but
previous sessions, add them to the current set, edit to remove loops,
etc. just do a two finger flick up or down for "read all" to view
these options. I've fiddled a metronome under the "Loop" menu. You
can turn it on and It doesn't get recorded when you record your loops.
There are way many more features that I haven't tried, some of which
are options to use Thumbjam as a midi or OSC controller over Wi-Fi for
synths on your computer. I'm guessing there are list readers who
regular work with mixing, looping, and audio production apps both
iPhone related and otherwise who could provide a better summary, and
explore more than I have in direct response to your question. Maybe
one of them could play around with this app and file an evaluation and
report for Applevis. Most users are likely to use this o an iPhone,
and I don't have one, so I'm inferring the answers based on the way
this works on my iPad, and on my iPod Touch (which I actually don't
use for Thumbjam, since the iPad has a built-in Mic, but which I had
to load up in order to examine the control layout likely used for the
iPhone.) I'll just point out again that there's a "Help/News, button"
available under the "Prefs" menu in the bottom right corner that gives
a user guide and contact information that directs you to both the
developer's web site:
http://thumbjam.com
and also gives the email address for support questions:
support AT thumbjam.com
The web site has forums and detailed information links, such as to
their YouTube videos. Here's a link to one called "ThumbJam Looping
Demonstration" that demonstrates looping and recording:
http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=MAOGxLwEj3g&;
If you spend some time playing with this app, maybe you can report
back on your findings and tips to this list.
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
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