Å+
On one little musical app
Today I wanted to describe how Å+ – my new hobby project was born. Some time ago I was looking around in App Store and felt that there are not so many band’s apps around. At that moment there were only one really good example: Björk’s Biophilia. And at the moment of writing this post there’s one another – John Lennon’s Bermuda tapes. Being a musician since the time I remember myself I felt that this is the area I want to spend some time in. And as it comes sometimes: the best way of learning something – is to create something new.
So I wanted to define something as simple as possible but being worth putting in the App Store as a new app. As many other music lovers I like to listen closely for particular instruments within the musical track and sometimes play it afterwards if it’s really awesome. I had one track on my laptop that was splitted to per-instrument-tracks and one day when I was on subway train I made a first demo that was able to switch on / switch off instruments within a track. It was quite entertaining and the same night I found out how to use built-in iOS effects. And at that time demo was looking like this:
Next thing to do was to find a band that would like an idea of publishing such an app. Without thinking too much I contacted my favourite Russian band Aquarium. And the person to reach was their indispensable band-leader Boris BG Grebenshikov to the insinuating voice of whom I was listening since age of 12. Morning next day I received a green light on further discussion of it and after describing future UI and features I received a new track from the upcoming album (a week before album was released). And than a good idea was to call for some help. Eventually these two gentlemen were eager to help for some inexplicable reasons.
Daniel has made this very flat iOS 7 look (he-he). And Pavel was helping out with defining effects for each track and some master effects. Here’s what we came up with eventually in a very simplified scheme:
And than I only had to polish CPU and memory consumption, adjust couple of effect’s parameters and end up on this.
Here’s link to the app once again: https://itunes.apple.com/se/app/a+/id799950189?ls=1&mt=8
It’s not a secret for me that the audience of this kind of apps can be estimated from above by the fan-base of the artist. But in some cases it can be quite a crowd. So, dear artists, after publishing your new awesome stuff on vinyl, Spotify and tons of other different places you can also express yourself in touch based good-looking sexy universe (and occasionally make some money). As for this app, I’ll keep you posted on it’s inevitable success ☺.
Cheers, Nick.
