August 28th, 2006 by Justin Oberman
As an amateur musician / guitar player from a family of amateur musicians I guess you could say that I have been waiting for an application like this for a long long time. Yamaha’s Musicians Companion (really, I guess you could say Guitarists Companion) is one of the phone applications that just makes sense to musicians… why should I not have a chord reference, metronome and pitch pipe (for tuning) on my phone.
The project is only one of what Yanaha Wireless says will be a slew of mobile applications for musicians. The Musician’s Companion is available for a one-time $9.99 purchase, which via Bango can be charged directly to your monthly cell phone bill .
It was really easy to install, extremely easy to use and every musician I have showed it to has wanted it immediately… which was really easy to do because the program, being from Cascada Mobile, is equipped with Cascada’s extremely viral “tell a friend” feature which allows me to sing a SMS wap push to any of my friends for them to download.
My only complaint about the whole process was that nowhere did they say which phones supported the platform. The website shows Music Companion running on a Motorola Razr. I gambled and paid the 9.99 to try and download it on my N70. It worked. But Yamaha really should put a “supporting phones” info on the website.
What I also would have like to see on the application would be an actual tuner that showed you and guided you back to tuned bliss instead of just trying to tune to a pitch guide.
I have seen these for a PC so I know its possible
Other than that, a really cool and obvious feature. Get it and rock on!
Technorati Tags: cascada mobile, guitar, mobile, music, tell a friend, yamaha, yamaha wireless
August 28th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
Thanks for the positive review. Good idea about the digital tuner - I’d love to have one on my cell phone. We are considering a tuner, but the main problem is that there are not a lot of handsets out there that have audio recording capability, which is necessary for a tuner.
You are right that we have not made it clear which handsets/ carriers the Musician’s Companion is available on - we will make this info available. A couple of points on availability: 1. You cannot be charged for the app if your handset does not support it; 2. Availability is a moving target, we support additional handsets and carriers each month; 3. Handset/ carrier availability is the perhaps the biggest headache in any mobile content business since hundreds of new handsets are launched each year (and it takes time & money to port the app to each handset) and, particularly in the US, carriers often act as gatekeepers between content providers such as Yamaha and end consumers.
Ben Baker
Director of Business Development
Yamaha Wireless Content
bbaker@yamaha.com