For those who can’t yet afford a Yamaha Tenori-on but can strangely afford an iPad, there are a few options for getting on a Tenori-on with a small amount of cash.
These are some first impressions of a few I’ve tried so far.
TonePad
This is an iPhone app and scales up to fit the iPad screen well enough.
It features a single block of notepads that are activated in the usual left to right fashion.
You can change the colours but not the sounds. Limited but has possible uses if you can do something with the sound output.
This was a free app, therefore no complaints.
Beatwave
A more advanced app than TonePad but with more advanced features that provides 4 layers in a single repeatable layer.
The app comes with 3 sound ‘banks’. Each bank sounds like its made up from more than once instrument (the usual selection of synths, samples, pads).
As well as saving your work, you can save blocks which can be called from a palette at any point, so while there is no song mode for assembling a series of blocks, it could be used in a performance context.
Other controls affect the sound; Tone – which should be ‘tune’ and does just that, tempo, layer sound levels and panning and a master reverb. For these settings dull numbering is ignored and replaced with a nice multicoloured slider – a nice touch I think.
A very good feature on this app is the Grid Morpher. Each layer can be configured to allow random generation of new and replacement notepads with 3 parameters to twiddle; strenght, speed and multiplyer.
This was a free app and pretty good.
Aurora HD
This is a real beast of an app and could be reviewed in depth over a long post later. I’ve spent hours on this already and just scratched the surface. This is also probably one of the most expensive apps currently available and it took me some time before buying. I’m glad I did, but I’d disagree with the developers that anyone can pick it up and use it well – initial results are very disappointing – perseverance is well rewarded, results not instant.
BeatWave for iPad
TonePad for iPhone on iPad