Have you ever wanted to make music, but found most programs too daunting? Digital Leisure’s Mix Superstar for WiiWare is here to help… sort of.
Vitals
Mix Superstar
Developer: Digital Leisure
Release: Available Now for Wii
Don’t confuse Mix Superstar with a full blown Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). It doesn’t even attempt to present itself that way. Instead, what we have is a starting point at a very cheap price ($5) that could potentially help you decide whether to devote the time and money to go further down the rabbit hole.
Mix Superstar is not a sequencer. You won’t be writing music at the base level. Instead, you’ll be arranging songs using a library of over 1,000 pre-made loops (more if you pay extra).
Loops are divided by genre and instrument type. Out of the digital box, you’ll have access to Dance, Hip Hop, and Techno loops. Within the genres are types such as Drums, Bass, Synths, Vocals, and a few others. Genre’s are tempo locked. Technically, you can throw a hip hop sample into your dance mix. But considering all the dance loops are at 140 BPM and the hip hop loops are at 90 BPM (with no way to speed them up or slow them down), you’d have a heck of a time trying to make it sound natural.
Loops within the same genre are also in the same key. While definitely limiting, this serves to idiot-proof the experience. Most samples you put together from the same genre pack will fit together. The focus is not so much on creating your own composition, but teaching you how to create interesting arrangements.
You can’t change the length of a sample to end it early, which can make drum fills less custom than I would have liked. You can, however, adjust the volume and panning of each loop. You won’t be able to do full volume envelopes, but you’ll be able to emulate them well enough by increasing the volume of each sample until the climax. You’ll just have volume and panning at your disposal, though. Don’t expect to see any effects like Cutoff or Resonance.
Mix Superstar prides itself in its simplicity and rightfully so. Within a very short amount of time, you will know literally everything there is to know about the application thanks to the concise tutorial. The Wii Remote is no replacement for a mouse and is definitely more awkward than using PC music applications, but it works well enough to get by.
The interface is ugly, but functional. Besides the vibrant, clashing colors, everything on screen is giant. This is a two edged sword. On the plus side, this makes things easier to navigate with the Wii Remote. Unfortunately, this also severely limits the amount of things you can see at once. You’ll need to be zoomed out to get a comfortable sense of your mix, but doing so will render all your loop labels unreadable. Colors and symbols will let you know what type of loop you’re looking at, but whether it’s Dance Beat 1 or Hi Hat 3 can become difficult to discern as a result.
The actual quality of the Dance, Hip Hop, and Techno loops are a bit inconsistent. While some of the drums sound flat, other instruments occasionally sound distorted. Trumpet loops are one of the bigger offenders. Vocal loops range from hilariously 90’s to unusably bad. The demo Dance mix uses both. I could only bring myself to use the hilarious 90’s loops.
Listen to my 90’s chart topper, “Dancetastic!”
When you’re done with your mix, you can export it. This doesn’t mean you get a convenient file to put on an SD card. Instead, the mix will play in real time as it sends it to the Mix Superstar server. You can then type in a code on their site to download a wav file of your mix. It’s also suppose to email you, but no matter how many times I tried to have it send the link to the gmail account I use on a daily basis, it would never show up. And believe me when I say I checked the accuracy of the address entered more times than I care to admit.
Mix Superstar isn’t going to be for anybody who already has their feet wet in making music. It’s an Electronica 101 course, allowing you to build the most basic of arrangement skills with an accessible program full of royalty-free loops of passable quality at a reasonable price of five dollars.
This review was based on a WiiWare copy of the game provided by Digital Leisure.
Images courtesy Digital Leisure
Jesse Gregory is a writer for WingDamage and a talented music producer under his MainFinger label
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