BILL HOLLAND: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Gearwire. This is Bill Holland, and today we're looking at a tutorial/music basic creation program. Oh, theres the music from us from Sibelius.

GROOVY VOICE OVER: Hi there. Welcome to Groovy. To get started using Groovy, you need to log in! To log in, choose a name from the list. If your name isn't there, click on the New button.

BILL HOLLAND: Okay let's -- Whoa-aah!

GROOVY VOICE OVER: Type your name and click next.

BILL HOLLAND: I guess this is the mildly scary intro that they have here. I'll put GEARWIRE DRONE and click next.

GROOVY VOICE OVER: Select a character and click next.

BILL HOLLAND: That's I want to be Tor over here.

TOR: Let's go!

GROOVY VOICE OVER: Now you've logged in, you can either create or explore. You choose.

BILL HOLLAND: Let's take a look at explore first.

GROOVY VOICE OVER: Listen to the sound of the clarinet.

[CLARINET MUSIC PLAYING]

BILL HOLLAND: I mean really this is an exploratory program. It's for people who don't know about anything about music to learn music, mostly for kids obviously. I don't know really know what to expect to do here -- Oh, okay I hit it again.

GROOVY VOICE OVER: Listen to the sound of the violin.

[VIOLIN MUSIC PLAYING BACK]

BILL HOLLAND: And if you go to create, here's where you can actually do some cool stuff. One thing -- The reason I'm testing this is (a) Sibelius sent this to us so I figured out I might as well review it. Secondly, I have a feeling I might actually be able to use this to do something else, maybe make some bizarre samples. So, I was taking a look at this. You can create melodies. They have several melody patterns you can work with.

[BILL HOLLAND AUDITIONING VARIOUS MELODY PATTERNS]

So, we can take one of these and we actually drag these animals onto a like here, and you can change pitch, so I can make that play down here, and if I want to play that through, I just hit play here...

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS BACK SELECTED MELODIC PATTERN]

...bring this dude back, change the tempo if I want to, let's say I want 138, allegro.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS BACK SELECTED MELODIC PATTERN]

Let's bring that up a little bit. Just not a good place for a flute, and so we want to have a bass line in there.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS BACK BASS LINE PATTERNS]

Now, if you really want to have your kids learn how to actually work with this, say it's like that, I can hit new shape and hit that right there. There's a reason I'll bring that up, so let's hit staff readout, but we can't really change any of this. If you hit here, this will give you your basic bar look readout. So if I hit and click again, go back here. You can zoom in and out using this. Now, if I want to actually go in here and edit this, you're going to have to do that, this will change the instrument, in case you want to know. Now, let's see what happens when I click a new shape and I bring this in. Okay, there we go. And now I have full control over the notes.

Now I can choose or either use bars like these or these notes, so you actually learn notation. This is actually really good if you are a guitarist and you only play tabs or if you are someone who has just been screwing around music but never really bothered to learn how to read sheet music. It's a really good way to learn.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS BACK A FEW BARS WRITTEN USING GROOVY]

And you know, one thing that I was thinking that could be interesting that you could experiment with with this is if you're doing live video, you can actually probably work with this to incorporate with your music. I'm not really complelety sure what else you would do with it but it is pretty cool, and they have bonus things like animals, so you can write a whole song out of animals, you know, like that.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS BACK A FEW BARS WRITTEN USING GROOVY]

So all in all, I mean this is a good learning program for anybody who doesn't know anything about music. Not so much a music creation program, but yeah it's good for basic learning and how to do such things. I haven't quite figured this section out, so we'll go back to explore.

GROOVY VOICE OVER: Listen to the sound of the violin.

[VIOLIN MUSIC PLAYING BACK]

BILL HOLLAND: I believe they actually make you go through all these instruments or the rest of the section, but you can actually explore the whole program, and it walks you through all of the basics of music. Now, if you look at this, this is a different way to compose. I really don't understand this particular method of composing but I mean there it is. It's almost like Acid fro children.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS BACK A FEW BARS WRITTEN USING GROOVY]

So yeah, I mean again if you're a basic learner of music or if you have kids who want to learn music, this is a great program. Obviously not for the serious musician but it's kind of fun to play with. I had fun sitting here working and playing with it, so -- I mean if you want to learn how to do composition or anything like that, this might be a decent way if you're just trying to learn the basics.