Some thoughts after a live gig...
Hello everyone.
This past weekend I played a gig for a friend's mother's 70th birthday party. It was just me, my iPhone (hooked up to an amp) with iRealB, and my iPad (for the sheet music). I played for 4 hours (mostly jazz standards), and the results were great! I got nothing but compliments on the overall sound... people were astonished that my "rhythm section" lived in my phone... KUDOS :-)
iRealB did it's job flawlessly... no hiccoughs whatsoever... the tenor sax player, however (that'd be me) could use some more practice :-)
I do have some thoughts for future enhancements, however.
- iCloud syncing support... I know this has been talked about a lot, but let me add another vote for this... I use the MacOSX version to edit the tunes and set up my playlists... it could be absolutely FANTASTIC if this just showed up on my iPhone and iPad... Keeping track of what I edited where and when is painful.
- It would be great if I could change the tempo of a tune without restarting it. There were a couple of instances where I realized that I had the tempo set too slow, but I was well into the tune... stopping and restarting would have been very awkward.
- More variation within the styles. After playing several ballads, the inherent "patterniness" starts to become noticeable. I know this is a tough one, but one can dream :-)
- The ability to mark tempo changes... for instance, the ability to have a ritardando at the end of a tune. Standard music notation for this would be great!
- The ability to mark volume changes with either a crescendo/decrescendo mark, or p, mp, f type notation
- A style with brushes in the A part, and sticks in the B part... or some such combination (see also another post I made about being able to set styles for each section, IN, A, B, C, D, V, etc).
- Drum fills within each style to be used leading into sections... probably marked with a double bar.
- The ability to loop indefinitely for solos... that is... something like "loop until I tap the screen, and then play one more time through the head and take the coda". Sometimes you get inspired during a solo and 2 choruses isn't enough... :-)
- A "Trade 4's with the drummer" style similar to the one in... what's that other program called... on yea... BIAB :-)
- A 60's Herbie Hancock style... something that would go well with Watermelon Man or Cantelope Island :-)
- I know it's been requested quite a bit before, but the ability to mark rests (only for the 1st/last times, not solos). For instance... having a 2 bar rest to lead into the solo section would be awesome.
- I know it's also been requested to be able to have chords change on the 1/2 beat... A good example of wanting this is the intro and last section of "Stolen Moments".
I know that's a lot to take in, so I'll stop there.
Let me repeat... the above list is a wish list, not in any way a complaint. iRealB was absolutely wonderful on the gig. The fact that I had MY RHYTHM SECTION AND ALL MY MUSIC ON MY PHONE was miraculous. And the fact that it was 100% reliable is priceless. Thank you, Thank YOU, THANK YOU, so much for developing such a useful product.
- Mike.
