Musicshake
By Ian Wilson
Wednesday. Jan 23, 11:58 AM
Truly music by and for the masses.

How many here had the MTV Music Generator and spent hours making songs out of pre-recorded snippets? Do you want to relive that experience with a community and be able to share all the music you make, even buy the rights for it and use it for anything you want?

Just head over to Musicshake (sorry Mozilla fans, you gotta use IE to download the program. They are working on integrating Firefox, though). Once downloaded, you have a ton of rather simple options. After choosing “start now” or “style” (“best demo” opens up one of the many songs that the company made with the program as a demo to show it off. Like that annoying demo button on most keyboards that plays “Jiggle Bell Rock”... except not annoying), you have a group of options on the right side under numbers. Click the numbers to “add part,” and then choose the “notes” for it. There are many sets of notes, each with 10 in them. These, obviously, control how the piece of music you select will sound when played. To the left are the “tracks.” Each track equals one instrument or vocal (the vocals are a mix of Korean and English that, most of the time, make me laugh and ruin the mood of the music. The sound effects are also kinda lacking). Each Instrument has several options, each one playing a different 10-note melody. Just to the right of this is where you change what that piece of music sounds like (distorted, clean, flanged, etc.). At the bottom, you can click “add track” to, well, add a track. Each of the vocals and the adlib solos have different options for placing, giving you anywhere from 20 to 30 options when you click the field to add a “block.” Drums work about the same way, but they have less options to choose from. Using all these elements together, you can make your very own song (sort of: since you are using the site’s music to make your song, it belongs to them until you buy the rights) that you can then save (either to the program or to your hard drive) and transfer to the site (to transfer, the song needs to be saved in the program) to share it with everyone. Every time someone listens to your song, it gets another hit.

This program is still in Beta, but I have had only a few errors here and there. Expect more in the future, most likely tracks and other such options. For the time being, this is a great way to get that music-making monkey (that is an awesome term) off your back without needing to know things like reading music (Dethklok you are not). Currently, I have a few songs on there under Aku_Ninja.

If you want to make good music without all the effort and hassle, head on over, download, create, and share.
www.musicshake.com

Ian Wilson

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