Menu Band brings the built-in instruments — the ones GarageBand uses — into your menu bar. A tiny piano sits at the right of your menu bar. Click any key to play, or type to play while Menu Band is the active app. Choose among three keyboard traditions: Menu Band's expansive Notepat map, the familiar AWSED piano layout, or MilkyTracker-style two-octave keyjazz. The on-screen map follows the real staggered geometry of your keyboard. Hold Command, Option, and Control combinations while playing to turn any note into major, minor, suspended, augmented, or diminished harmony — and morph between chord shapes without releasing the root. Plug in a hardware MIDI keyboard and Menu Band becomes its compact sound module. Or tune KPBJ, R8DIO, NTS 1, and NTS 2 into the separate CDJ Radio deck, scratch the live buffer, and sample a short slice onto the piano. Menu Band publishes a virtual MIDI source named "Menu Band": pick it as an input in any DAW and the keys you tap (or letters you type) play through your DAW's instruments. When no DAW is running, a built-in General MIDI synth covers hundreds of patches. More to play with: • Hold the backtick key to sample a sound from your microphone. • Drag in a MIDI file to play it back. • Bend pitch with a trackpad gesture. A political project: accessible music-making is as essential as time, network connectivity, and battery life. Menu Band is open source. Performance programming support by Esteban Uribe.
Music · iPhone, iPad · $9.99
