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Music

Finally, Android Users Get an App for Making Studio-Quality Music

Coldcut's Ninja Jamm makes production more accessible and intuitive than ever.

Music making has changed dramatically since the advent of smartphones. Apps have not only altered how people create sounds, but who can create them, too. From casual tinkerers to pros, even kids playing with their parents' phones, the landscape is much more inclusive. And there are lots of apps to choose from, from visual-based types to apps from well known names. At least, that's true for iOS, anyway, which has them in abundance (but the same can't yet be said for Android).

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Looking to even out that playing field is Matt Black, one half (with Jonathan Moore) of the hugely influential electronic music duo, Coldcut. Today sees the release of the musical adventurer and sometime software dabbler's loop-based music app Ninja Jamm on Google's mobile platform.

Released back in 2013 on iOS, Ninja Jamm let users create remixes using "tunepacks" of artists on Moore and Black's Ninja Tune label, which they founded back in 1990. It included big names like Amon Tobin, Bonobo, and Coldcut's own music. Using intuitive touch, tilt, and gesture controls and a multitude of effects and sonic tricks (reverb, glitch) you could purchase different "tunepacks" which split songs into component parts or "stems"—the beats, bass, melodies, and vocals—so you could remix them however you chose using a sequence-based interface.

Screenshot of the Android app

For the Android release, things have changed a bit. Ninja Jamm has now become not just a remix tool, but a full-on music-making app. By using "samplepacks" categorised by genre—dubstep, hip hop, house, etc—rather than just artists' music, you can now use the programmed loops—created by sound design label Loopmaster—to master your own song which is your own copyright. The app has also integrated ideas submitted by the Ninja Jamm community.

Black was playing around with ideas for music-making apps, albeit for PCs, back in the late 90s when the internet was in its dial-up infancy—and handheld computers were science fiction. Coldcut's album Let Us Play! featured an additional CD-ROM which featured software like My Little Funkit and Playtime—sample-based music-mixing tools that let users create sounds using drum n' bass, house, and ambient beats in a more immediate and accessible way than getting to grips with professional music equipment. Black calls these "experiments," signposts that pointed the way for what could be done.

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Album cover for Let Us Play!

"It's always been a case of waiting for the technology to catch up," Black tells The Creators Project. "But now the technology is a lot more powerful and that's meant it's possible to get the music software a lot more on point. I think people making music is a beautiful thing—and as someone who enjoys music, and enjoys messing with music but couldn't play any instruments, I used technology to give myself a leg up. I think there's a lot of people out there like me, but they can get be put off by the barriers to making electronic music. Take Ableton, fantastic program, very powerful and pretty easy to use, but it is still pretty complicated too. It's quite an investment that you need to make before you can get into putting a track together. Personally, I want to use something that's more instant and I think there's other people out there that want that too."

Black believes there could be a big audience for the app on Android, because none of the more well known music-software companies and developers are releasing their software on the platform. That's partly due to a latency issue that Google has never resolved, meaning there's a significant delay when users touch the screen and the action kicks in (which Black and his coders spent a longtime finding a workaround for), and partly because of device fragmentation—which means there's thousands of devices to contend with, making it complicated and costly. Basically, there are a lot of disappointed Android users and a market there for well-made and accessible music apps.

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Screenshot of the Android app

As Ninja Jamm is an ever-evolving piece of software, with open-sourced code, the next phase for it is to be part of something called Mobile Orchestra. This idea involves the concept of using multiple apps that can all be plugged in together, which can then be synced and played simultaneously over WiFi so you and a bunch of friends can jam together using different apps, playing different instruments, on different devices—which will be something of a first.

To those that say these apps might somehow devalue music-making by making it too easy, Black acknowledges there are arguments both for and against that. But, for him and many others, he says, "We love sound and we love playing with sound and anyway to do that is fair." Black notes what Amon Tobin said about the app: "'I'm into anything that invites people in—and then if they like it they can dig deeper.' Ninja Jamm is a root to do that, and really that's what we're intending." Black's also integrating the app with Coldcut's long-awaited new album (their last was Sound Mirrors back in 2006). Black wouldn't reveal when exactly that would be, but he did say that when it is released the material will be available to remix on Ninja Jamm making it a fully interactive record.

Matt Black playing on the app

Musical experimentation has been a standard of Black's career so it's natural he'd want to share that interest and sense of discovery through the app. "You could say the toys of today are the tools of tomorrow, like drones—or computers, which were once just for hobbyists," he notes. One could say that the kids and hobbyists tinkering around with the app today might end up becoming the groundbreaking musicians of tomorrow.

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Download the free app on Google Play here. And on iOS here.

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