Afro Studio
Study, compose and reproduce African drums and complex rhythms with Afro Studio!
Created and designed by African rhythm professors, Afro Studio was conceived as an educational tool that embraces a unique pedagogical environment suitable for the study, composition and further incorporation of complex African rhythms and ensembles.Anyone studying African rhythms knows that it can take a considerable amount of time until the body finally incorporate a given African ensemble including instruments like djembe, kenekeny, sagbang, dundun and shekere. In the process, many students write the rhythm, sing it, clap it, or even record it in order to speed up the embodiment of the musical structure. To improve this learning process, Afro Studio allows to describe each African instrument pattern in a intuitively fashion without requiring any expertise on musical theory. Once created, a powerful playback feature allows to reproduce the ensemble at lower tempos for detailed analysis, or at higher rates to obtain the final feeling of the music. In both cases a moving cursor points the current beat in the graphic user interface, which also allow the user to modify the pattern in real time.To have such a rich feature set in a mobile device is crucial for the practice of African music which rarely happens in an environment with a computer or other high-end processing hardware. Indeed, being able to take Afro Studio in your pocket right out to the fresh air where the rest of the drummers tend to be is the distinguishing feature we are offering.Finally, the experienced musician can take advantage of Afro Studio to compose and get the feeling of complex musical structures and phrases to later play in the real ensemble. Also, since African drum rhythms are mainly transmitted by word of mouth, keeping them safe and stored in Afro Studio can help to mantain the tradition. I have been using this tool this way with great benefit and now I intend to share this with the rest of the African music community. Hope you can enjoy it too :)
Created and designed by African rhythm professors, Afro Studio was conceived as an educational tool that embraces a unique pedagogical environment suitable for the study, composition and further incorporation of complex African rhythms and ensembles.Anyone studying African rhythms knows that it can take a considerable amount of time until the body finally incorporate a given African ensemble including instruments like djembe, kenekeny, sagbang, dundun and shekere. In the process, many students write the rhythm, sing it, clap it, or even record it in order to speed up the embodiment of the musical structure. To improve this learning process, Afro Studio allows to describe each African instrument pattern in a intuitively fashion without requiring any expertise on musical theory. Once created, a powerful playback feature allows to reproduce the ensemble at lower tempos for detailed analysis, or at higher rates to obtain the final feeling of the music. In both cases a moving cursor points the current beat in the graphic user interface, which also allow the user to modify the pattern in real time.To have such a rich feature set in a mobile device is crucial for the practice of African music which rarely happens in an environment with a computer or other high-end processing hardware. Indeed, being able to take Afro Studio in your pocket right out to the fresh air where the rest of the drummers tend to be is the distinguishing feature we are offering.Finally, the experienced musician can take advantage of Afro Studio to compose and get the feeling of complex musical structures and phrases to later play in the real ensemble. Also, since African drum rhythms are mainly transmitted by word of mouth, keeping them safe and stored in Afro Studio can help to mantain the tradition. I have been using this tool this way with great benefit and now I intend to share this with the rest of the African music community. Hope you can enjoy it too :)
Read trusted reviews from application customers
Having so much fun I've been playing djembe for many years and still love it!
This app makes exceptional creations and u can even export your creations. Brilliant app!!!
Really good practice app
Not bad. It does what I want - to compose rhythms, save them and play them back. There's a bug: when you have a rhythm playing you can tap your device's back button which closes the app - but the rhythm keeps playing. If you reopen the app there's no stop button. In fact you can play a new rhythm with the old one still playing! The solution is to shut the app down completely and restart it. I'm going to keep using it and test it out further.
I do not like the way to save the audio with this app. I just want to simply save the pattern to my folder on my SD Card in WAV format please. Can update your app. Thanks in advance.
What an incredible app! I purchased an android tablet just so i could get this one app! Im hoping that the creator will either choose to add latin percussion instruments to a future update, or create a latin studio app for conga players like myself. Thank you for tge time and effort that went into creating this incredible tool.
Awesome training tool! I like the easy tempo adjustment, equalizer, and ability to turn on and off specific instruments. Use many freely available tunes. Make up your own tune in minutes and modify as you go. We share via the internet easily so our entire group can practice various parts and be ready when we get together. The program accelerates learning and facilitates sharing and collaboration. Essential tool for drumming musicians at a bargain price!
You have to get rid of lite version to install this full version. Great Ap!
The only app I found so far that handles writing down, saving, and playing multi-part African rhythms well. Being able to load rhythms written down by others is also nice. The list-of-rhythms UI is basic, but functional enough (probably won't work well if the list of rhythms gets large; a search capability would be useful). The rhythm editing UI is good and pretty intuitive, at least for my purposes so far. The sound library could be expanded (if you have multiple parts for the same kind of drum, you can't tell them apart) - that's probably the first thing I'd like to see improved. Overall, a great app, hope it continues to be developed!
Brilliant. Bought it in minutes. A great tool for musicians. A wider variety of meters would be appreciated though the scope of this app is already vast and with a bit of clever thinking you can program almost any exercise you can imagine. 5/8 and 7/8 for the working of Indian style rhythms would make it perfect.