Music 3000

Here's where you combine your drums, bass, melody and vocals to create a complete track.

Having used music creation ‘suites’ such as E-Jay before, I was pretty sure what to expect of Music 3000, although my initial reactions were a little suspect. After taking a few of the lessons in the learning section accessible directly from the rather slick main menu, I felt I could have a go at putting together the first track of what would undoubtedly end up as a multi million selling album. Confused to begin with I smacked together a mix of garage beats, bass and pop melodies and vocals that seemed to mesh pretty well.

It took me a few more tracks before I really felt that my genius was being wasted and that the tunes I was ‘laying down’ had undoubtedly been created before in some form by a nine year old kid messing around in his bedroom, because of the set samples and tunes available to me. Unfortunately, I was probably right. Fortunately, there’s a lot more to Music 3000 than that.

Absolute control

The USB Sampler in all it's glory. Shame it's not out until July 4th (for £19.99 I'll have you know).

Music 3000 sees you being able to use the pre designed ‘riffs’ to put together a Lego block style track, but also you can design your own riffs, right down to the instrument you use to play it. Make it loop around a certain section, raise and lower the pitch, play for a long or a short time, add echoes and pretty much any audio filter you can imagine. Once you’ve made your own riffs, put a beat to it and made your own melody, you can put some of the pre recorded vocal samples to good use, adding flavour to the track, but if you purchase the USB Sampler add-on, available from the 4th July apparently, you’ll be able to use this ‘game’ to the full.

The sampler will allow you to sing your own vocals, which you can then add to your track, or even record sounds to use as instruments. The final icing on this sampler shaped cake is the ability to sing or whistle into the sampler to create melodies and riffs, if you’re struggling with the manual scoring. Of course this does mean that to use the product to the full you’ll need to shell out extra after the cash for the game, but you can sample from your favourite CDs if you wish without any add-on.

Interactive Musical Experience

If you so desire, you can mess around with the very instruments you're using to play the riffs.

I’d hesitate to call this product a game, considering it is basically a music creation tool, which does very much limit the audience. Unless you’re very serious about wanting to make your own music, or at least mess around with it, there’s not much in here to keep your attention for longer than it takes to play the sample tunes and trial out a few of your own.

I decided to go through a few more tutorial lessons, and one of them teaching you how to load and save music required 4MB free space on my poor little 8MB memory card. Some of the sample music takes up to 12MB of space, so again, anyone serious about making music will also probably need an extra memory card or two dedicated to their creations. All songs aren’t necessarily this big, especially if you use the prefabricated riffs and samples, which really only store the layout of the parts. A single minute creation of mine ended up at around 100KB, which is a lot more accessible to an average PS2 owner.

Commercial music

More menus to confuse or amuse.

The product is set up very nicely to allow you to sell music that you make with it, even using the default samples, so if you find you’ve made the next big hit, feed your audio cables through your PC and record the thing onto a CD. Naturally, it won’t be any easier to find a record label, but making the music will be a comparative cinch. The game comes with nine pre made tunes, to show you the ropes, and to allow you to mix them from the outset in the special mixing mode that puts you in charge of six decks, and concentrates on one song at a time. An extra hidden track is unlocked through input of a secret code, which is the same method for unlocking extra skins and even mouse cursors.

The pre-made songs are generally very good, with a couple that you may recognise. Yes, you can remix Paul Oakenfold’s Starry Eyed Surprise and Ready Steady Go if you so desire, but in terms of a music creation program, you’ll probably want to spend the time creating your own masterpieces.

MTV awaits

A lot of the sample animations and images for your music videos are focused on rabbits!

Of course, no great track would be passable on the airwaves without a truly trippy music video to accompany it. Fortunately, with Music 3000, once you’ve made your song, or even while you’re making it, you can put together a nice little music video with animations, still images and text all warping around using various effects, overlays and other complex stuff that’ll serve as a warning against epilepsy.

So generally, if you fancy yourself a Garage, Hip Hop, Indie, Metal, Pop or Trance master, there’s plenty of scope for you to create whatever you like, and this is probably the ‘game’ for you. If you don’t fancy making your own music, basically for your own amusement, there’s little here for you. The question, however, is whether you’ll be able to justify a £30 price tag, plus extras, for something that is basically a souped up version of a tracking program, which you can undoubtedly get on the PC for free.