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Category: Music
Seller: Lexues, Inc.
Requirements: iPhone 2.0 software update
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod touch
File Size: 0.3MB
Version Reviewed: 1.0
Price: $4.99

BeatMaster is a simple application that aims to enhance your sense of rhythm and timing. Featuring a basic interface and simple tapping method, it does what it says on the tin.

There’s nothing special about BeatMaster. In some ways that can be a good thing—there’s nothing to distract you; no special features or brilliant concepts here, unfortunately. It simply allows you to tap along to a constant beat to see how accurate you can be in keeping time. It’s a lot harder than you’d think, too. It’s very strict, and I’ve yet to get a perfect score.

Alongside college and technology, music plays a substantial role in my life. I play in various orchestras, and so consistent timing is quite important. I’ve been using BeatMaster on and off for the past week, and while I can’t say I’ve noticed a considerable improvement, I think it’s slowly helping. It could be a lot more effective, but at the moment it’s still missing some key features.

The first thing I noticed about this application was its logo. You have to admit, it’s not going to win many design awards. It bears no resemblance to the application at all. There’s no sign of anything music related, or even, say, a metronome. It simply reads “Tap Me,” which, while it may lead some people to literally tap the icon, it’s not quite relevant to the application itself.

Once you’ve opened the application, the interface is pretty basic. You’re presented with an option between an 8 or 16 beat tempo. The 16 beat option changes the rhythm of what you’re tapping, making it a little more interesting. After you’ve chosen the style, you have a few options regarding the speed. You can either choose an Italian word, or a “beats per minute (BPM)” value. The two are related, so if you select, for example, the word “Andante,” then the value of 92BPM is automatically selected, since they are the same speed. Once you’re all set up, you can either choose training or scoring. There’s hardly anything between the two apart from the fact that scoring mode keeps a track of your current results in a graph that you can view once you’re finished. The graph is very basic, and the statistics of your results are not detailed.

So, as I’m sure you can tell, BeatMaster is similar to an interactive metronome. It sounds every beat of a bar of any speed you choose, while you tap the first beat of the four in each bar. Simple. BeatMaster does this well, with a decent application. But there are some features that could really improve the experience, and make it a lot more useful as a teaching tool too.

Firstly, there’s no memory. There’s no way to recall previous results to see how you’ve improved over time. Without this, you can’t be sure whether you have become better, or how quickly you actually are improving. Secondly, once you’ve played around with this once or twice, you become quite bored. Nothing changes between each time, other than the speed if you decide to alter it. The developers could add some varying rhythms and maybe feature more interesting sounds than the constant beeping that becomes annoying very quickly. Introducing jazz rhythms, or popular syncopated rhythms would be more interesting to play around with and to learn the beat. If this was presented alongside a jazzy backing track to tap along to, it would be great fun.

So, there you go. It’s a good start, with a great idea and basic platform. If it stays as it is, it may become an application that just sits on your iPhone that you rarely play with. With a few simple changes, and a nicely designed icon, this could be a brilliant application that would be both fun and educational for anyone interested in music, either on a personal or professional level. Nice idea, but a little way to go to make it excellent.