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Project Overview
Drum’n’Bass heads and DJs looking to mashup old school jungle beats with an iPad or iPhone should get hooked up with a rhythmic new toy: Junglator for iOS is an interactive music app, which grants users the ability to mix Drum’n’Bass beats and loops on screen.
Organisation
Team
Studio Amplify is a small private company based in London and Bristol and founded by two brothers, Jonah Fox and Alex Fox, with a love for music who wanted to create something revolutionary in musical creation and performance.
Driven by the need for new musical experiences to refresh the music scene they have created several projects over the past 18 months which have focussed on re-imagining how music is created and performed. After releasing Junglator last year to very positive reviews, Amplify is now working on NOiZE which is a platform that allows musicians and users to build their own musical instruments. NOiZE which will be released later this year.
While they work very collaboratively between London and Bristol on the core concepts and programming, there is a degree of specialisation. Jonah [formally at Sony Playstation, MTV, Autonomy] heads up the audio engine side of things and Alex [OnStageDesign, We Are Tokyo] is the musical genius and design guru.
Project Brief
Junglator gives you a unique musical experience putting you in the shoes of a Drum’n’Bass DJ. Complete with effects for controlling breakdowns, drops, pitch and laser beeps as well as three backing tracks, Junglator makes for an easy-to-navigate interface that will have you throwing a jump-up party in your own home in no time.
By simply dragging your fingers over the drum and effect pads you can create complex flowing beats and rhythms. All the beats are automatically kept in time so you don’t have to worry about making a mistake giving you more time to create fun and intricate mashups.
Mixing in a new track easy too. Just select a track and Junglator will seamlessly mix the two together allowing you to create the perfect mashup. Due to the performative nature of the app each playthrough will be a unique experience which will keep you coming back to Junglator.
Project Need
Junglator was designed to allow the user to be immediately immersed in a musical DJ/Producer environment. The whole purpose of the app was to allow them to instantly be in a world where they could take control of the music, and express themselves intuitively, without the music at any moment sounding “wrong” or “bad”.
This control mechanism is unlike any other musical app on iOS, and offers a never seen before blend of control and ease of use, which gives anyone the power to Jam Jungle beats as though they were a real producer, and in a way that they feel in control and engaged [ i.e. it’s not just a “press a button” and sit back type of app]
Too many music creation apps on mobile devices are either very complex and only suited to experts with lots of time, or are just simple toys with little depth. Junglator manages to bridge this gap and offer something with depth without a high barrier to entry that is also immediate fun.
User Experience
The user operation is via mainly the drum pads in the central region and the FX pads on the left and right. These play instantly and the user is able to “play” with different rhythms, combinations and sequences by simple movement of their fingers. Because the music changes almost instantly with every gesture, the user feels connected as though it were a real physical instrument. And because we automatically synchronise all the music, it never goes out of time and never sounds bad. This last point was extremely important, as it would shatter the illusion of presence.
In terms of steps taken to achieve this, really the whole project was designed around this concept and took many days and weeks of research, development, building and also user testing, firstly with ourselves as knowledgeable experts affording a very fast feedback loop and secondly with a group of beta testers.
Project Marketing
Jungle and Drum’N’Bass is something of a niche these days, albeit with a very passionate following. We mostly marketed Junglator through a straight forward e-campaign of emails, building relationships with blogs, and pillars of the mobile music community.
We also found that YouTube video’s of the app in action were very effective, as was the very positive feedback from the community, for example:
DJ HOMBRE: “I found it great fun to use and missed my train stop (twice) on the same day as a result of involved finger-jabbing on the app!”
Mervyn Warren [5-times Grammy award winner]: "I Love This"
Project Privacy
There is no data stored about the user, so in a way we have implemented best practice privacy simply by having nothing to share!
Music & Performance
This category relates to applications that are themed around music and performance.
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