Aviary's Free Online Music Creation Apps

It truly is amazing these days the kinds of software apps that are available, for FREE, over the Internet.  I remember playing around with audio sequencers and audio recording programs back in the eighties and nineties and thinking just how cool they were back then.  Those programs used to cost quite a bit of money, and yet they hold nary a candle to what you can now accomplish with a browser and a live Internet connection.  Take for example this week’s free music education app suggestion, Aviary.  More than just a simple sequencer, Aviary is a suite of online tools consisting of image and vector editors and two very easy to use music and audio editors.  

The first of these free music creation tools is known as Roc, aptly named because it is Aviary’s drum sequencing application.  A user in Roc can choose from dozens of different sound groups, from drums to actual tonal instruments.  Once loaded the user sees a large grid.  The grid essentially carves the page up into eight blocks of music, each block corresponding to a single beat in four four time.  The user can turn on sounds by clicking on the nodes inside each beat, allowing very complex (and cool sounding) patterns to be created almost without effort.  The two measures are looped over and over again, and changes are heard instantly.  Once the pattern is the way you want it you can save the loop out as an MP3 or WAV file and then use it in the other of Aviary’s audio tools, Myna.

Myna is a standard loop based sequencer, very similar to Garage Band or almost any other digital audio workstation program such as Reason or Cubase.  Like these other programs you can import external audio files and layer them into your composition, repeating them as many times as you need to to arrive at your final finished song.  Also like other programs you can allow this music app to access your microphone, allowing you to record live audio as well.  When loading in external music Remix does warn you that it is intended for use with short loops of sound rather than long pieces of music, but for most amateurs and music students the abilities of Remix are more than adequate.  The app even allows you to add different special effects to the sound loops, although this selection of effects is rather limited.

If you are looking for a simple, easy to use music sequencing program in the same vein as garage band then Roc and Remix from Aviary are definitely worth taking a closer look at.  While not as full featured or speedy as stand alone digital audio workstation software programs they do offer a lot of opportunities for creation without having to spend a dime of your own money.