Melodica presents a 16 by 10 surface where the length represents the 4 bars of a 4/4 beat and the height is a set of 10 notes that all harmonize well together. Anyone familiar with arppegiators or sequencers will find themselves at home using the software’s interface.

But, can Melodica be one of those apps you could use as much for fun as you can in your home studio? And is it easy enough for non-pros to use and enjoy?

As far as sample quality goes, Melodica can certainly hold it’s own in a home studio setup. That being said, there really is only one sound preset, which limits Melodica, and kills it’s expandability. On a similar note, Melodica only offers three tempo settings, slow normal and fast. Without any option to specify exactly what BPM to play at, there’s no way Melodica could be used for recording.

Melodica will be most appealing to people that want to create interesting melodies quickly and simply. The lightbox interface is really beautiful and while it may take non-pros a few beats to figure out the set up, the demo video below does a great job of showing the app in action.

There’s a  melody saving and loading system which will save one instance of your melody. This is nice, but a more interesting option would be to be the ability to record several iterations of the melody as the user makes changes during the process.

I think if the creators of Melodica took time to incorporate some richer features they could really have a superb app. The ability to export or or at least share your melodies with other users is the killer feature that would take this app to the next level. We’d also like to create longer tunes.

Although it won’t hold it’s own in a studio environment (and for a buck we weren’t really expecting it too), Melodica is great for creating little melodic tunes on the go. The light show is a nice feature that’s an extra layer to the simplified melody maker.

Watch the Melodica video:

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category: Instrument Simulation, Music