Beaterator
Timbaland lends his considerable talents to help Rockstar light a fire under music making on PSP.
Millions of us would kill to be dance music producers. But the leap from tapping out rhythms on the table to using sophisticated music software is tricky. Some musicians might noodle a new tune on a guitar or keyboard, but that’s a tall order for regular guys who love dance music but simply can’t play.
Beaterator for PSP could be the answer here. Rockstar Games (Grand Theft Auto, Midnight Club) has collaborated with Grammy-award winning singer/producer Timbaland to present a kind of dance-track sketch pad. Using thousands of samples, including 1700 created by Timbaland exclusively for Beaterator, anyone with a PSP can have a killer tune tripping along within minutes.
“Easy-to-use but powerful” is how Rockstar is pitching Beaterator, and on the strength of a recent demo we came away convinced. The entry point is a mode called Live Play, a purely videogame-style set up where the four PSP buttons plus direction keys are used to trigger eight banks of pre-loaded loops. You get seven genre templates, and there are two templates per genre, so 14 altogether covering everything from Drum and Bass, Breakbeat, Hip Hop, House and a few more.
In Live Play you don’t need to worry about how you’re handling things rhythmically because the ‘game’ keeps the pulse going automatically. This ensures everything is dance-worthy, although after a while you’ll wish you could be more creative. Just as well that you can… and how.
When you’re feeling slightly more adventurous you can enter the Beaterator Studio, where you can choose straightaway from the 1700 Timbaland samples and 1200 Rockstar-created efforts to create your own loops mapped onto the buttons and direction keys. This way you have your own colour-pallet of sounds to mess around with, while still having your hand held a little bit by Beaterator. If you start feeling out of your depth there are tutorial videos showing you what to do, step by step.
Finally, for those that have no fear, there is the Song Crafter mode – essentially full-on music creation, allowing for your own samples to be recorded (including vocals or live instruments via PSP Go / PSP 3000 built-in mic) then worked into loops, and any length of bars for each loop, allowing for heavy duty Goldie style compositions that can be exported as .wav files to share among your pals. Phew.
Song Crafter really is versatile, to the extent there are designated Drum Crafter and Melody Crafter, Synth Edit and other areas capable of accepting your own samples as we mentioned above, or being eternally modified until you get the sound just right.
Budding Timbalands can upload tracks to Rockstar website, although for legal reasons such tracks can only use in-game samples (to prevent a gazillion Billie Jean remixes!). Nonetheless this could become a terrific outlet for likeminded Rockstar fans to push their talent. Or even no talent, even better!
Not bad considering Beaterator began as a take-or-leave Flash gizmo on Rockstar’s official site. And once again hats off to the guys at Rockstar Leeds for sharing their love for the best things in life via silly computer games. Beaterator is released on 2 October exclusively for PSP. This could be a system seller for PSP Go, let’s see.
