RT60 Songzap 2

The Home page (left) gives access to four main pages that are used to sketch out your production.

With Songzap’s new AI‑powered accompaniment generator, making demos has never been easier — or more fun!

I reviewed the first version of RT60’s brilliant Songzap back in SOS September 2022. Designed around the four‑track recorder paradigm, this neat, highly intuitive app also featured a superb onboard drum machine, extensive arrangement facilities and comprehensive import/export options. It sought to serve the creative needs of both non‑technical songwriters and recording traditionalists, and both boxes were well and truly ticked — with a simplicity that encouraged a creative focus, it made the process of creating pre‑production demos quick and easy, and the results could be exported to a DAW for further development.

Next Generation

Now, Songzap 2 has arrived, and while this new version retains its focus on being an easy‑to‑use pre‑production tool for performers and writers, there’s real innovation here too, in the form of automatic AI‑powered accompaniment — a machine‑learning‑based engine that analyses the chords and rhythm of a performer’s audio recording, and then provides sympathetic beat, bass and pad groove accompaniments that make it quick to lay the foundations for entire songs.

The big new feature in Songzap 2: machine‑learning‑based analysis of your recording and auto‑accompaniment help you work quickly and keep the focus on your creative ideas.

Once the performer’s guide track has been captured, this new Songzap process takes mere seconds. After just a few taps you’re then presented with a trio of expertly curated accompaniments. The resulting tracks sound remarkably good, but they can be tailored to taste by making manual adjustments in the individual beat, bass and pad modules of the app. You can choose to ‘Songzap’ an entire song in one go (I could well see this product’s name becoming a verb in the same vein as Hoover or Auto‑Tune!), or take it segment by segment if you prefer to focus on the details. You can also chop and choose which live harmony instrument (eg. guitar or piano) feeds the AI engine in any segment of the song, which is handy if you’re using a number of live guide tracks as your source material.

The rest of the app bears a strong resemblance to v1 in terms of approach, layout and navigation, though there are plenty of improvements. As before, a home page provides access to four main pages: Groove, Arrange, Track, and Mix, which form the core user interface of the app, and allow effortless, intuitive operation. A menu accessed at the top right of the home page provides access to app information and tutorials, and allows you to create a new song, load saved projects or open the built‑in demo. There are also handy features to add notes or lyrics, and rename, delete or duplicate songs. Double‑tapping the title in any of the sub‑pages opens a corresponding tutorial, so you’re only ever two clicks at most away from a helping hand.

Across all four main windows, you’ll find a handy transport bar that provides a detailed song counter, a timer and arrangement info, along with the expected Play and Stop buttons. The playback bar allows you to quickly navigate to the start of the song, rewind to the beginning of the previous segment or skip forwards to the start of the next segment of the song.

Groovy New Features

The expanded Groove section incorporates the new AI‑based bass, pad and loop options, which can be used to accompany the beat module, but v2 soars above its predecessor in terms of programming capabilities too. The fully programmable beat module provides a choice of 13 kits and 16 nicely programmed patterns to get you started quickly, and the kick, snare and hi‑hat patterns can then be adjusted to taste. Any segment of the arrangement can easily be adapted to include rhythmic alternatives. The Groove section is also where you set the project tempo (bpm) using a simple slider, and there are 4/4, 3/4 and 12/8 time‑signature options, which will cover most users’ requirements. The 12/8 pattern can be adapted to create a shuffle or swung eighths feel too.

The kick and snare patterns are each manipulated using an X/Y matrix, in which the X axis determines the core of the groove and the Y axis the degree of syncopation. Tapping either drum icon locks the axis you’re working on, allowing you to fine‑tune one detail at a time. The hi‑hat control operates on only one plane, which returns increasingly complex patterns as you move from left to right. The hi‑hat sound can be switched out for a floor tom or a ride, and you can also program how often the crash cymbal appears (1, 2, 4, 8 bars, etc), making it easy to drive home the start of new song sections or segments.

It’s great to see that the beat section is still represented as a standard drum score — as well as being a great visual aid for those with an interest in learning more about notation (drum notation really isn’t hard to follow), it doubles up as a slick editing tool to add or remove individual notes/hits from the part.

You’re given the ability to tweak not just the bass sound, but aspects of the performance too.

There are a handful of tasty bass sample packs here, covering everything from picked, muted and electric basses to synths and an 808 sub bass. The complexity of the AI bass part can be altered in the module by using an X/Y matrix to increase pitch (X) and rhythmic (Y) complexity. The stroke length of the bass can be set anywhere from long legato notes to short sharp percussive notes using the ‘amp head’ slider. This control can also be toggled to add very cool musical transitions at the end of phrases, be that a triad (3), fifth (5), scale (7) or a chromatic run (12). The performance settings (cog icon) offer a novel way of setting the parameters of the AI bass part’s register using high and low bookends to limit or expand its range. On a deeper dive you’ll find a neat option to anchor the bass part in root position (bottom) or move the focal point to the third (top) or fifth (middle) of the chord. Another really cool feature of the bass module that helps to unify the groove is the ability to lock it to the rhythm of the kit by selecting the kick, snare or hi‑hat icons (or any combination thereof).

There is a good range of pad sounds available, along with some controls to shape them.The pad module offers an inspiring palette of sounds to audition, and there are seven performance presets to work from. The sample pack includes Hammond organ, strings, synth strings, Rhodes, piano and unisaw voices, as well as flute and choir Mellotron patches. These parts can be shifted into three different octaves, and a handy virtual chorus pedal can be added to widen the sound. The module also features the ability to adjust the pad’s attack and release envelope parameters.

Top Of The Charts

A Chord Chart Editor allows you to enter the key and chord progression of your song, and it also documents the Songzap engine’s AI analysis and provides a framework for the beat, bass and pad elements to ‘read’ from. Starting with really basic recordings, I invited Songzap to analyse songs with increasingly complex chord progressions — it was consistently excellent with its transcriptions. Some of the particularly complex sequences needed a little manual tweaking, though, and the Chord Chart Editor is where you make those refinements.

The Chord Chart Editor provides intuitive control over your progressions.There’s a drop‑down menu where you can add extensions to a chord, to turn it into a sixth, seventh or major seventh chord. You can also make chord inversions or add alternative bass notes to the chart by selecting them from the bass drop‑down menu. Any manual chord entries you make are major chords by default, but again these can be easily and quickly altered to minor, sus2, sus4, diminished or augmented chords, and the third can be removed to make it a power chord too.

Making Arrangements

Songzap has always featured a powerful arrange window that provides you with a roster of pre‑titled segments covering just about every eventuality you could imagine using in a song structure — things like count‑in, intro, verse, bridge, chorus and reprise, for example. The bar length of these segments can be altered and sections can easily be moved around, duplicated or erased.

A welcome addition in Songzap 2 is clip‑based arrangement, whereby the user can mute or unmute individual elements on the fly, or test the waters by selecting innovative combinations of AI modules and audio loops. It’s a great feature, and very handy for unlocking new creative directions. On first view, it may look like you can only choose to have all loop tracks on or off; there isn’t an individual control for each of them. But double‑press the pencil edit icon (above and to the right), and you’ll see an extended view that allows you to choose which loops are in use in which segment (pressing it once allows you to make quick arrangement changes). Then, going back to the Groove section, you can use the ‘copy data’ option to copy loops from one segment to another, for example from the verse to the outro. This is a handy way to select and loop different areas of the original audio recording, as you may wish to use other bits of the performance.

Back on Track

There are four audio tracks available in the main tracking window, three being mono and one stereo. By default, Songzap records the signal from your iOS device’s internal mic but any interface that’s compatible with your device can be used. To record, you simply select the record icon to arm a track and off you go. If you want to do a practice run first, you can switch to input monitor mode by holding the record icon until it turns orange.

You may wish to record just using a click instead using any Groove elements, and the metronome can be switched on or off here in the tracking window. It’s also possible to start recording from the timeline cursor, and this provides the welcome ability to finesse any finer points of the performance.

Once you’ve finished tracking, you can bounce down all the recorded tracks onto track 4, tape‑machine style, using the high‑speed dubbing function. You can also choose whether or not to incorporate your Groove tracks into that bounce. If you keep them separate by muting them, they’ll remain accessible for edits.

In the tracking window, you can also import a mono/stereo WAV file from iCloud. This could be a previous recording you wish to work on, or maybe even a voice note or quick sketch that you want to be the start of a new project. If bringing a recording into the project, though, I’d advise that you start with this before working on the groove. The bpm cannot be altered once you’ve recorded or imported audio in the project so doing things in order will prevent any sync problems. Note also that importing audio will overwrite anything already on track 4, which is also the dedicated stereo bounce track.

Mixdown & Exports

Export options include not only sharing a stereo mix online, but also multitrack and MIDI data to use in your ‘full fat’ DAW software.The Mixer section is straightforward and intuitive to use. In basic mode, you have access to volume, pan and reverb level settings, which will be plenty for many users at this stage, but switching to an advanced view gives you access to EQ and compression parameters, with the EQ comprising fixed high and low shelves to keep things simple. A second page accommodates the new bass and pad signals as well as the four loop tracks. The Mixer window also allows you to set the level of the metronome.

The section‑based architecture of Songzap is very handy, as it means you can enter the Mixer environment at any point to adjust and alter your Groove, track, and master levels separately from other sections, and having this ability at your fingertips is essential if you’re to set a balance that’s inspiring to perform to.

Once the pre‑production phase is wrapped up and you’ve finalised your mix there are various ways to share or archive the project. You can send a mix via email, social media or messaging apps, and/or export all song data to iCloud. The latter includes full‑resolution track and mix files, lyrics/notes, arrangement and MIDI data. There are also comprehensive options to export MIDI files (including song tempo and arrangement markers) and text/PDF files with lyrics/arrangement and notes. The track exports are dry, meaning that any reverb or EQ settings you’ve applied within SongZap aren’t rendered on the files, the idea being you can open them in your DAW where you’ll probably have access to many more, and probably better, processing and effects options. Having exported Songzap projects to a number of DAWs, I can say with confidence that the export process is both simple and flawless.

Conclusion

Songzap was already an excellent app that gave songwriters and performers fast access to simple yet productive creative tools. Songzap 2 builds on those foundations with powerful new features that make it so much more than what came before. ‘Songzapping’ recorded audio to add drums, bass and keys performances to an idea really can be a huge time saver, but the guys at RT60 have clearly thought hard about how best AI can serve creators rather than replace them — the way in which the automatic AI accompaniment reacts to the user’s own performance is nothing short of alchemy! Not only does it do the job of programming credible parts for you, but the wonderful interpretations it churns out generally help to further inspire and fuel creativity.

What’s more, Songzap not only allows the user to capture and develop pre‑production ideas quickly, as and when the flash of inspiration strikes, but it also gives them fast and easy access to extensive options for transporting those embryonic gems into a professional studio environment for further development. Useful? Yes. Productive? Extremely. Professional? Definitely. Fun? Absolutely!