This is an ongoing blog of web tools and technology related to worship, music and church. The idea is to give you good web points and resources that you can go to. Some of it is just me cruising the net, others are favorites of friends.
Enjoy what you see here. If you find an interesting, useful and technology related site or resource that deals with helping worship or musicians in general, please send us a note and we will check it out. Perhaps we can feature it here.
Thanks!
Enjoy! - Kim Gentes
Friday, July 15, 2011 at 7:37AM 
Sometimes all you want to do is make some pattern for rhythm that you can use as a loop pattern for other things. Or maybe you are working on a quick idea and aren't at home to put it down in your music creation software or access to your instrument. Or, perhaps you are just curious as to how you can see a rhythm track in a linear format. Beatlab is an online simple tool for building basic loop tracks, much in the same core way that anyone would compose a loop for electronic music, or even lay down a rhythm section with MIDI or loop software. But it is online, simple and free to use. There are user plugins for uploading your own sounds and a lot of features once you have the basic things down. You can even download your loop for use offline, which is kind of nice.
Beatlab isn't necessarily for hard core development of songs, but I like it as an inspirational pit stop on the creative internet highway. I stop by occasionally if I have a rhythm in my head and I want to flesh it out without pulling out all my musical gear. You can save your compositions too, so you don't lose online ones you've created. It uses your Facebook credentials to store context, but it is not heavy handed (like some Facebook apps are) as it always asks if you want to post things to Facebook before doing so. I like that courtesy. One note on the technology side of this site- like almost every music app online- it does use Flash. So it won't work on your iOS devices. Just pure web folks.
Anyways for the loopers, scratchers and tweekers of the electronic and rhythm worlds, BeatLab is like stopping at Wafflehouse- not exactly the kind of meal you'd do important dates at, but it has the basics when you need to use them. And heck- its free. Check it out.
Here is a very simple loop I created with it.
I noticed a lot of other users creating more beat loops for rap and such. I prefered a bit of an electronica loop myself, but you can create whatever you want. Go try it out.
in the rhythm of heaven
Kim Gentes
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