The Pursuit to Make Everyone a Musician
Music is undoubtedly an essential part of our lives; it’s an essential part of being human. But most of us can’t interact with it, beyond singing to the tune. To become a musician, to have a deeper understanding of the music you love, and to interact, remix, and cover your favorite songs makes music better, not just for you, but for everyone.
That’s why our goal is to Make Everyone a Musician. And yesterday, we came one step closer with the launch of Medly 2.0, our iPad music-making app, now a universal app for iPhone and iPad. Medly 2.0 also happens to be the biggest update we’ve ever released, not only in terms of what we added and changed, but in the attention we received from Apple: getting an Editor’s Choice feature in Canada, and having various front page features all around the world.
But it was a long journey, and a hard grind. Admittedly, what eventually became Medly started 4 years ago as a side project to learn iPad development, with an idea to create an app that lets you draw curved lines, circles, and other crazy shapes, that “magically” became music. The first product didn’t exactly work as we had originally envisioned, but it did let you “draw music”. And a little over a year later, we released the 2.0 of our draw music app, which largely looked the same but came closer to what a real music app should be.
Fast forward to when we launched the first version of Medly, originally slated to be a 3.0 of our draw music app. But due to various factors, we decided to release it as a new App with a new name in the App Store. Given that Medly was originally our draw music app, it did indeed let you draw curved lines up until just before launching Medly.
Dropping curved lines is an obviously good decision now, but at the time, a conflicted one. We always believed that our users loved our app because it wasn’t intimidating — it was simple, fun and charming. But the ability to draw curved lines just didn’t fit with making everyone a musician. In fact, it made music-making much harder. A simple example is drawing a line and trying to stay perfectly straight.
And so here we are, a Medly that’s strikingly different from it’s predecessors. And I can tell you now, it was no accident.
Designing Medly 2.0
Medly’s recent update is unarguably substantial, not because of its iPhone support, but because of the new design and tools that are strikingly different from its predecessor launched a year ago. And even though we’ve had multiple updates during the year, including a big one in the summer, we actually started designing Medly 2.0 shortly after launching the first version.
Back then, we were just tinkering with different iPhone designs and ideas. Originally, we started by trying to shoehorn Medly’s giant iPad interface into the small screen size of the iPhone. We quickly abandoned that idea because it just didn’t work. Eventually, after going through dozens of designs and iterations, it became apparent we had to do a substantial design change.
We decided to seize this opportunity and break away from the archaic decisions predicated on drawing music, and design something that would act as a framework to help reach our goal.
Originally, Medly used a linear timeline that layered tracks of notes on top of each other — a remnant of the draw music era. But we realized that the more modern paradigm of breaking a song into sections that span 1, 2 or 4 musical bars would make it easier to create music. Since sections are self contained, you can play them individually, move them around more easy, copy & paste them, and even create links between them. But those sections can still be played from beginning to end in a linear fashion.
This creates the framework that will carry Medly forward, as we add loops, new modes of recording, and more. But most vitally, it creates a cleaner look that’s consistent across all platforms.
What’s Next for Medly
Making music still has a huge learning curve, and the software someone uses will only take them so far. And even though the new Medly has taken a giant leap to help achieve our goal, we have yet to make everyone a musician.
We currently have a few competing ideas on how to best solve this problem, beyond saying “go read this large 500 page book on music theory, trust us, it’s good”. But that is indeed a topic for another day ;)
