WaveMachine Labs, Inc. has created a one-of-a-kind app that literally transforms your voice into musical instruments. No more having to hum along to your favorite songs or poorly emulating that screaming guitar solo. Voice Band allows you to sing ‘bah’, ‘dah’, or any other nonsensical noise into your iPhone and create the real thing.
Voice Band Pros:
- Easy-to-navigate UI
- Tons of replay value
- Ability to share tracks online
- Fun alternative for the musically challenged
Voice Band Cons:
- Zilch!
Choose anything from Power Chords, Lead Guitar, Bass, Sax, Synthesizer, Organ, Kick/Snare, Hi-Hat, Crash or Mic and sing into your iPhone. You will immediately hear your tones altered. Reverb, Delay, Distortion, Volume and Octave can also be toggled. If you’d like to activate Auto Pitch instead of setting the Octave level, Voice Band makes it possible. You can even choose songs from your iPod through the app and “play” along!
We found ourselves playing with this for hours, bah-ing along to some of our favorite songs. Then we discovered you can actually record sessions, even sharing them with people online. WaveMachine Labs has really put a lot of effort into this musical contraption. They allow users to set Metronome Levels, Tempo, Time Signatures and even Panning from the left to right speaker. Under Settings, you can set the Auto Pitch Tuning levels, as well as Reverb/Delay size and Drum Threshold. Voice Band recommends you using headphones (preferably with a built-in mic), but you can do pretty well without them by holding your iDevice as if you were talking on the phone. A quiet environment is also suggested, so you may not be able to plow through that gut-wrenching drum solo on a busy street.
The great thing about Voice Band is it’s range of use. A person that knows nothing about music theory can have endless fun turning their voice into a saxophone, while an acclaimed musician can accurately lay out an entire track using the appropriate tools to do so. Keeping the proper key, however, can take some practice, and it proves to be a bit hard for people that are tone-deaf. WaveMachine Labs also does an outstanding job of not making an overwhelming interface with this app. It is extremely easy to jump right in and sing a face-melting solo, and the ability to record a track while simultaneously playing it from your iPod library is a lot of fun.
Of all the apps in the App Store that utilize the user’s voice, Voice Band stands above them all. It is a lot of fun transforming your voice into Auto-Tune with I Am T-Pain, or making yourself sound like Darth Vader with Voices, but nothing we’ve seen tops being able to create a band with your mouth. We would love to see, in time, more and more instruments added to the catalog. Even still, this doozy is undoubtedly a 5-Dimpler and very much worth the $2.99 jump in the App Store.
