mScribble review

mScribble by Panpipes Ho! is a fun little iPhone music app that translates your touch to notes from a synthesizer. Using mScribble is really simple and intuitive. You don’t need to be a music major and know about scales and chords to use this app. Just start the app, pick a music style and start touching the screen to experiment as you come up with your own melodies in real time. The app can be used wither the built in iPhone speaker or using headphones.

mScribble will play a bass line for you depending on which music style you choose (Renaissance Fair, Jazz Club, Dido’s Lament, and Big Feet) and you can play the synthesized sounds by tapping and dragging with one finger. You will also visually see where and how you drag your fingers with a trailing light of random colors on the screen.

The screen in mScribble is divided into 4 sections. The top is for high notes, low for low notes, the left is for lower volumes, and the right is for higher volumes. Tapping is only recognized for 1 finger at a time. Notes are very sensitive to movements, so even simple moving your finger in place a fraction of a milliliter can be good enough to create a variety of sounds. As the name suggests, mScribble you just scribble away, freely anywhere you like and create your own compositions. The app is seriously fun and rewarding to use, and surprisingly very easy to use as well. You can improvise and come up with a variety of songs at will

Although mScribble is great, there is room for improvement as well. First, it would be great if you could record the songs you create, and save them for later. Second, the genre of instruments that mScribble imitates is very limited to Jazz. It would be great if there were more instruments like the guitars, drums, flutes, or even a more varied type of synthesizers. Adding multi-touch support would also be a terrific addition. On a side note, it it is possible to do so, we couldn’t figure out how to go back to main screen and pick a new musical style, other thant by closing and re-openning the app. Finally although the graphics in the app are simple and easy to read, it would be good if the developers could hire a designer to come up with a slightly more polished user interface.

Overall, mScribble stands out in the App Store for being a truly uniqe and entertaining app that you can use for casually creating fun melodies on your iPhone. It might be a great app to have hooked up to your sound system at your next party for guests to play with.

AppSafari Rating: 4.5/5

AppSafari review of mScribble was written by Joe Seifi on February 17th, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Featured, Fun, Music. Page viewed 4927 times, 1 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.