Afro Studio: Djembe & Dunun

Yaray

About this app

Created and designed by African rhythm professors, Afro Studio was conceived as an educational tool that embraces a unique pedagogical environment suitable for the study, composition and further incorporation of complex African rhythms and ensembles.

Anyone studying African rhythms knows that it can take a considerable amount of time until the body finally incorporate a given African ensemble including instruments like djembe, kenekeny, sagbang, dundun and shekere. In the process, many students write the rhythm, sing it, clap it, or even record it in order to speed up the embodiment of the musical structure.

To improve this learning process, Afro Studio allows to describe each African instrument pattern in a intuitively fashion without requiring any expertise on musical theory. Once created, a powerful playback feature allows to reproduce the ensemble at lower tempos for detailed analysis, or at higher rates to obtain the final feeling of the music. In both cases a moving cursor points the current beat in the graphic user interface, which also allow the user to modify the pattern in real time.

To have such a rich feature set in a mobile device is crucial for the practice of African music which rarely happens in an environment with a computer or other high-end processing hardware. Indeed, being able to take Afro Studio in your pocket right out to the fresh air where the rest of the drummers tend to be is the distinguishing feature we are offering.

Finally, the experienced musician can take advantage of Afro Studio to compose and get the feeling of complex musical structures and phrases to later play in the real ensemble. Also, since African drum rhythms are mainly transmitted by word of mouth, keeping them safe and stored in Afro Studio can help to mantain the tradition. I have been using this tool this way with great benefit and now I intend to share this with the rest of the African music community. Hope you can enjoy it too :)

Ratings and reviews

Awesome training tool! I like the easy tempo adjustment, equalizer, and ability to turn on and off specific instruments. Use many freely available tunes. Make up your own tune in minutes and modify as you go. We share via the internet easily so our entire group can practice various parts and be ready when we get together. The program accelerates learning and facilitates sharing and collaboration. Essential tool for drumming musicians at a bargain price!

Not bad. It does what I want - to compose rhythms, save them and play them back. There's a bug: when you have a rhythm playing you can tap your device's back button which closes the app - but the rhythm keeps playing. If you reopen the app there's no stop button. In fact you can play a new rhythm with the old one still playing! The solution is to shut the app down completely and restart it. I'm going to keep using it and test it out further.

You have to get rid of lite version to install this full version. Great Ap!

What’s new

Afro Studio is back.

This update brings the app up to date with today's phones after a long time away. Recording works again, playback keeps going when you switch apps, and the Equalizer sliders respond the way they should. Tempo now reads in beats per minute instead of an internal number, and the Help pages have been redrawn to match what you actually see on screen.

Everything you saved is still there, exactly as you left it.