Every generation calls it something different. People who danced in the ’70s might call it disco, in the ’90s techno, and today, maybe dubstep or something similar. Either way, electronic music has been around ever since the synthesizer, but never in a truly portable version. Well, not unless you wanted to lug around a keyboard or something like that.
Now there’s Figure, an app that gives you all the power of your favorite beat machine in your pocket, allowing you to create your own music whenever or wherever you like. Let’s go underground and find out more about this funky app after the break.
Let the Rhythm Move You
Figure is all about letting you create your own music, specifically, your own beats. Now for the uninitiated, I’m talking about the type of music that you’d typically hear at a dance club on a Saturday night, pumping through the speakers so loud that the next morning you won’t be able to drink a glass of orange juice without hearing a dull ring in your ear. In other words, this app isn’t for everyone.
Each section has its own grouping of options, and they all grow bigger when touched.
But if you do like creating beats for yourself, maybe for impromptu hip-hop battles or just to put some bounce into your morning commute, then that’s what Figure is for. It’s one person, one set of headphones and one person controlling the beat — you.
Becoming the Music
There are so many options with Figure that it really does defy description. Along the top of the screen are three tabs: Drum, Bass and Lead. Each one of these tabs also has two modifiers on the bottom row of tabs named Pattern and Tweaks. Additionally, there are also general tabs on the bottom for Song, Mix and System. Each tab also has different presets available by swiping the name under the tabs, so if you want House music one day and Technologic the next, just swipe away.
You can start wherever you like, but to get a feel for how it works, it’s best just to hit the record button and get going. This is going to set a red bar in motion across the top of the app, which has hashmarks across it to indicate beat markers. Then you just tap the colored areas in each section to get things going.
It may not look like much, but the horizontal view lets you tap the beats away easier.
Admittedly, there’s a lot more to it than that. You can set predetermined settings by holding and spinning one of the dials above the colored touch fields, which will give you beats or sounds in turn with their specific melody. Or you can adjust the scale steps in a beat, how deep the range is and so on. This is one of those deals where experimentation is encouraged, and pretty much required to move forward.
Interactivity
The app is all about touching. You’re either spinning dials to advance or retard sounds, or tapping the screen itself to place a noise exactly where you want it. To make this a bit easier, you can tilt your iPhone to its side and the bright bars in the middle of the screen will fill up the entire display, allowing you to more easily access what you need to do.
There are instructions that help show you what you can do via your touch.
The dials and shapes all adjust based on your touch as well. Holding them down make them grow to a more visible size, then you turn or move your finger to adjust the number higher or lower. This also works with the Song portion of the app, where you can pick the tempo, key or tonality with a few tweaks. There really is infinite adjustability to this app, making sure that none of your beats will sound the same.
Lack of Export
So you’ve just created this banging beat and now you want to share it with your friends so they can all see how awesome you are. That’d be cool, right? Well it would be, but from what I could find both in the online manual and in the app, there is no option for sharing your creations. Nothing.
It's pretty, but you can't send your music anywhere.
That’s right, in this world where every other app requires you to sign in with Facebook or Twitter, Figure has no way to share what you’ve done. There’s no export option of any kind, meaning even if you wanted to sync it via iTunes you couldn’t, so ultimately whatever beats you make are for you and only you — and even then, only for short bursts at a time. If there’s a reason not to buy the app, this is it.
The Final Chord
Do you want this app? I bought it for myself because I figured it would be fun to putz around with and create my own beats. I’m not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, but the app makes it easy, so I gave it a shot. I won’t be appearing at any clubs anytime soon, but it is definitely a lot of fun to use, and that’s something.
But the fact that you can’t share any of your creations, plus that every few seconds you’re destroying what you’ve already built, means that this is a music creation app for the moment, not for the long term. It’s more like Angry Birds than Garageband, and if that’s what you’re looking for, great. But in my mind, I think if you want to create your own music, you probably want to play it again sometime too, right?