I’m gonna let you folks in on a little secret. When I was a kid, I dreamed of being in a metal band. That’s about all I did. I listened to Metallica, Black Sabbath, and Pantera albums, poured over metal head mags, and dicked around for hours on end with my guitar. But alas, my dreams of playing guitar in a metal band were dashed when I couldn’t get a real metal band off the ground, and going to Japan didn’t help. Metal bands here are about 25 years behind America, and dressing up like a girl isn’t limited to Poison cover bands. So I was pleasantly surprised when I tried out Voice Band for iPhone, and rocked the shit out of my lonely one-room apartment.
To be honest, when our fearless editor asked me to review Voice Band, I took one look at its goofy UI and almost told him to stick Voice Band where the sun don’t shine. I was a little taken aback when he didn’t seem to be bothered by the idea, but he made it clear that he really wanted to hear what I had to say about Voice Band. So after choking down my “OMG HOW COULD YOU USE THIS UGLY FONT?” rage, I tried to give Voice Band a fair shake. And I’m happy to say that if you give the tech a chance, you’ll be happy as well.
Voice Band’s a really fun app. While most people will probably just use it to make goofy songs, it could also be used to whip up a draft of a song you have floating around in your head. You can lay down a bunch of tracks using rhythm and lead guitars, bass, drums, two kinds of synthesizers, organs, saxophones, and vocals. You can adjust octaves and time signatures, and when you’ve laid down all the tracks you want, you can save your “Stairway to Heaven” and email it out as an mp3 to the rest of the world can hear it. It was a little hard to get the music-making process down at first. I’m a “dun-dun-dun” guy when I’m humming, but Voice Band seems to respond best to “ba-ba-ba”. They do make mention of this in the lengthy (read: so long no one’s ever gonna read it) help section. I would’ve never figured that out if I hadn’t watched the introduction video on the app’s website. Also included is the ability to pull up any song on your iPhone to listen along to (use headphones for best results), and you can plagiarize till the cows come home. It’s really easy to make pretty decent sounding songs once you get the hang of it.
But that does not excuse its UI. It’s God awful. The icon you see on your iPhone looks like Eddie Vedder with a spray-on tan and peroxided hair. The icons for the instruments in the app were designed by Word 97 graphic designers, I believe, and for Christ’s sake, what are you doing using a cartoony font like this in 2010? Who do you think you are, Apple? It’s like Comic Sans and Marker Felt both jizzed in a Dixie cup, swirled it around, and then threw it in your face. I’m advocating the creation of a good old fashion letter-writing campaign in order to put a stop to cartoony font use. And it needs to start with Voice Band. Because I’m betting you that a bunch of design snobs are passing Voice Band up because it looks like that homely girl you took to the Fall Formal in junior high school but ditched behind the gym so you could hang out with the cool kids by the punch bowl.
Overall, the app’s abilities are impressive, and if you would like to record your musical ideas even when you don’t have access to your instruments, Voice Band makes a good musical notepad. Pick it up in the App Store for $2.99. Just don’t let its UI get in the way of what could be the start of a beautiful relationship that will ultimately end with Voice Band sleeping with your girlfriend and refusing to give you back your lovingly curated collection of signed hipster indie-band guitar picks.
