Description

Created and designed by African rhythm professors, Afro Studio wasconceived as an educational tool that embraces a unique pedagogicalenvironment suitable for the study, composition and furtherincorporation of complex African rhythms and ensembles. Anyonestudying African rhythms knows that it can take a considerableamount of time until the body finally incorporate a given Africanensemble 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 theembodiment of the musical structure. To improve this learningprocess, Afro Studio allows to describe each African instrumentpattern in a intuitively fashion without requiring any expertise onmusical theory. Once created, a powerful playback feature allows toreproduce the ensemble at lower tempos for detailed analysis, or athigher rates to obtain the final feeling of the music. In bothcases a moving cursor points the current beat in the graphic userinterface, which also allow the user to modify the pattern in realtime. To have such a rich feature set in a mobile device is crucialfor the practice of African music which rarely happens in anenvironment with a computer or other high-end processing hardware.Indeed, being able to take Afro Studio in your pocket right out tothe fresh air where the rest of the drummers tend to be is thedistinguishing feature we are offering. Finally, the experiencedmusician can take advantage of Afro Studio to compose and get thefeeling of complex musical structures and phrases to later play inthe real ensemble. Also, since African drum rhythms are mainlytransmitted by word of mouth, keeping them safe and stored in AfroStudio can help to mantain the tradition. I have been using thistool this way with great benefit and now I intend to share thiswith the rest of the African music community. Hope you can enjoy ittoo :) Lite Version: This free version of Afro Studio allows you toplay and compose simple ensembles. The full version does not have abar count limitation and allows to save the ensemble for furtherusage. Also, it includes special drum strokes not abailable in thelite version.