Pocket Music (GBA)

Chances are, if you're really going to get the most out of Pocket Music, you fit one of these two categories:

(a) You want to have a fun little tool to make some music for fun with, knowing full well that the songs never leave your GBA. You just want a moderately easy way to make your own tunes.

(b) You use other tools to produce higher-quality music, and you want to use Pocket Music as a sketchpad to do some composing on the go. When you get to your normal production area, you can take a look at your riffs in Pocket Music and just re-create everything.

I fit the second category, and that's why I'm really able to appreciate Pocket Music for what it is...a highly capable 6-track tool for composing basic song ideas and nothing more. This is simply not a tool that you'd ever actually record from. The sound quality simply is not good enough, and the levels are too low, for you to take anything you make here and actually record it. So if that's what you want this for, then you're likely to be disappointed.

The built in samples themselves are quite diverse, so you'll find all sorts of sounds to work with...including a ton of different guitar sounds, bass sounds, percussion sounds, impressive synth sounds, eletronic blips and blops, some basic vocal samples, etc. You can take these samples into the Riff Editor and do the actual composing. The Riff Editor is a simple "piano-roll" step-sequencer with 6 octaves...so you'll have no problem putting together the melodies you want to put together very quickly.

In fact, if you aren't really interested in composing your own melodies and riffs at first, Pocket Music includes a ton of various riffs that are pre-made and ready for you to insert in your songs. They're all separated into categories and you could spend tons of time just messing with these, without ever even making your own riffs.

Once you've got a riff chosen and ready, you can take that into the playlist and place the riff where you want it to go in the song on one of the 6 available tracks. It's really quite an easy process once you get used to it.

So to summarize, you're able to make songs on this thing...without a doubt. The overall sound quality isn't good enough to record, but it's good enough for you to have more than enough sounds to create a diverse assortment of songs. But if you're looking for a tool that you can create songs with and then record, you're out of luck.

One last recommendation: regardless of how experienced you are with music production, make sure you read the manual for this. You'll miss out on a lot of not-so-obvious features if you negelct to read the manual. So even if you're like me and you usually just toss the manual out, READ THIS ONE. Also, open up some of the demo songs when you first get pop it in your GBA just to get an eye for how the songs are put together before you make your own creations.