iPad User Magazine - UK (2019-04)

Insteadof

instruments

youhavetrees

andsnakes

andtheodd

mythical

creature

APP STOREAPPSMakemusic in SoundForest

Make music

with SoundForest

Putthefunbackinto makingmusicwith thisincrediblyunusualapp

ITWILLTAKE

10 minutes

YOUWILLLEARN

Howtobuild

soundsandpitch

changesintomusic

YOU’LLNEED

The SoundForest app

If you go down to the woods

today you’re in for a musical

treat. In SoundForest, every

living thing is musical. It’s a cross

between a game and a musical composition

app, and provides four distinct groups of

sounds available across four different

natural environments: the titular

SoundForest itself, the ElectroJungle,

the SynthSavana and the EchoOcean.

At heart, SoundForest is a simplified

multitrack sequencer, but instead of

instruments you have trees and snakes and

the odd mythical creature. There are 160 in all,

each shown as a stylised icon. You can preview

any icon’s sound by tapping on it. If you like

what you hear, you can add the sound to your

scene by tapping on the appropriate place.

There are six tracks, each of which has 16

possible positions, and if you run out of room

you can swipe left to add another blank scene.

Positioning doesn’t matter for percussive

sounds, but anything with a tone is dependent

on where you put it: if it’s towards the top it’ll

be higher, and if near the bottom it’ll be lower.

Fun in sound

As we’ll discover, the emphasis here is on fun,

not serious music creation: for that there’s

GarageBand or one of the many brilliant

third-party composition apps in the App Store.

What SoundForest offers is something more

primal, the joy of making music from whatever

comes to hand. Carrie Marshall

SoundForest is more about the joy of making music than

the mechanics of it. It’s a lot of fun.