Hexpress musical instrument

CastleWrath

About this app

Hexpress is a collection of musical instruments for your phone. You can use it for learning, playing and composing music whenever you have the time - on train, while waiting in line and during boring meetings. Using headphones (non-bluetooth) is strongly recommended for louder and better sound quality, and to not disturb others around you. The application has simple, colorful and clean interface designed to be accessible to young children.

While each instrument behaves differently in some way, in general notes are played by touching shapes on the screen, and sound is shaped by tilting the phone left-right and up-down. Different instruments have different effect controls - fade in, reverb, tremolo...

Most of Hexpress instruments have unusual honeycomb note arrangement that's sometimes called "harmonic table note layout". It is identical Tonnetz layout, only rotated. It has many interesting properties compared to standard piano layout:

• effective utilization of device screen (3+ octaves range)
• note relations (intervals) are uniform across whole range; to transpose song to different key just play same patterns on different part of instrument
• most chord shapes are grouped tightly and they can be executed with single finger swipe
• in typical scale and melody runs, notes are alternated between fingers of two hands, so they can be played with speed and precision
• large intervals are as accessible as smaller intervals

Besides honeycomb layout there are also instruments with conventional fretboard, and a drum set for finger-drumming.

The app features a looper used to record repeating section. The looper is enabled from main screen and can be used in almost all instruments. Saving or exporting loops is not supported in app.

Instruments are not meant to be reconfigured within the app. One reason for this is that it gives you a chance to actually learn the instrument (you couldn't learn a guitar if the tuning was different each time). The other reason is that constraints and limitations actually encourage creativity and make it more accessible to younger users. I'd like to improve existing instruments' sounds and visuals based on your feedback, but there will most likely never be any settings/options to fiddle with.

The app is work in progress - interface, sounds and features are all subject to change. The app doesn't collect ANY information about user and cannot access internet. Microphone permission is optional and is used in single instrument for recording it's samples.

Hexpress is without ads, free and open-source. Your feedback is much appreciated.

Ratings and reviews

I'm very particular about what time I give to music creation apps on tiny devices. Most are not worth the time, are terrible ripoffs of other apps that don't work or worse. I couldn't tell you why I even tried it. I will tell you that I immediately spent the next hour in a deep creative space. I love it. Very easy to find yourself noodling having fun or seriously considering how to incorporate it in other work. Looking forward to more sounds etc...

Edit #2: Turns out it was just a pop up graphic saying "no game" from "LÖVE Games" after not giving it storage permission (which I think it also odd), that I thought was adware at first. | | Edit: An upgrade or something has made it so now the app is a totally different game than what Hexpress used to be. (Adware maybe??) Uninstalled. | | Can you make this compatible with MIDI devices? It would be really great to actually play some of these cool sounds on a physical keyboard.

Pretty decent music app. Like all apps like this one, there's lots of latency with Bluetooth. That makes the drums unplayable, if you want to get serious. You must use plug-in headphones, or a line out, to get near instant response. The wide choice of voices is great, as is the layout. Also, the notes are modulated by twisting the phone left or right. Nice!!!

What's new

BACK button no longer exits the app, now there's exit icon in bottom-left of selection screen to be more child-friendly.
Fixed popping noise in bass instruments.
Fixed guitar tuning, bridge was off by 1 note.
Improved fretboard appearance for guitar and bass.
Reduced app size a bit.