Useful and Fun, Though Limited
Lily was one of many purchases I made scouring the App Store for any music-making apps I can get my hands on, and having bought up all the pro stuff, I’m taking in apps from the outskirts.
Lily strikes me as a sort of primer app as far as music-making goes. The GUI is beautiful, and it’s really useful and fun for making polymetered phrases with the great-sounding in-app soundpacks. I would absolutely recommend it for young students of music to get their hands wet.
For professional use, however, it leaves some to be desired. First, you can’t change the tempo. It remains fixed at 110 BPM with no discernible means of adjustment. There is a “tempo” option in the sequencer menu, but this is an error; what is optional is the note *duration* rather than the tempo. Nonetheless, the very simple sequencer can be easily programmed to make multidimensional polyrhythmic sequences thanks to the ability to control the number of steps in a Lily loop.
The next problem is it appears that you can’t change the key; only the scale. The key is always rooted in C as far as I can tell, and to the best of my knowledge, there is no way to change that. However, the scale does lock and there is a decent variety to choose from so that you should never find your lines becoming vanilla.
Finally - and this is not a shortcoming on the developer’s part, merely an established standard - there is no MIDI input, Ableton Link, AuV3, or Audiobus support. All creations have to be exported, and if you have multiple channels, you may find yourself soloing each one and exporting them one by one only to mix them together elsewhere (GarageBand suffers the same limitation, but that’s an Apple app so the expectations are higher). Mind you, it’s a minor inconvenience for the privilege of building easy melodies.
Now none of these complaints come from anything other than a professional perspective and I’m spoiled by the best, so take it with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, for what it is, I still find Lily to be fun to use, easy, and useful for quick loops. Key and tempo transposition I can do in other programs, and while it would be nice to see these innovations incorporated into future versions, none of this will subtract from the experience of what Lily has to deliver. I might have given it a lukewarm rating, but Lily is a perfect gateway for music dabblers to take it to the next step, and for what it it’s, it’s just as good as perfect.
Lily strikes me as a sort of primer app as far as music-making goes. The GUI is beautiful, and it’s really useful and fun for making polymetered phrases with the great-sounding in-app soundpacks. I would absolutely recommend it for young students of music to get their hands wet.
For professional use, however, it leaves some to be desired. First, you can’t change the tempo. It remains fixed at 110 BPM with no discernible means of adjustment. There is a “tempo” option in the sequencer menu, but this is an error; what is optional is the note *duration* rather than the tempo. Nonetheless, the very simple sequencer can be easily programmed to make multidimensional polyrhythmic sequences thanks to the ability to control the number of steps in a Lily loop.
The next problem is it appears that you can’t change the key; only the scale. The key is always rooted in C as far as I can tell, and to the best of my knowledge, there is no way to change that. However, the scale does lock and there is a decent variety to choose from so that you should never find your lines becoming vanilla.
Finally - and this is not a shortcoming on the developer’s part, merely an established standard - there is no MIDI input, Ableton Link, AuV3, or Audiobus support. All creations have to be exported, and if you have multiple channels, you may find yourself soloing each one and exporting them one by one only to mix them together elsewhere (GarageBand suffers the same limitation, but that’s an Apple app so the expectations are higher). Mind you, it’s a minor inconvenience for the privilege of building easy melodies.
Now none of these complaints come from anything other than a professional perspective and I’m spoiled by the best, so take it with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, for what it is, I still find Lily to be fun to use, easy, and useful for quick loops. Key and tempo transposition I can do in other programs, and while it would be nice to see these innovations incorporated into future versions, none of this will subtract from the experience of what Lily has to deliver. I might have given it a lukewarm rating, but Lily is a perfect gateway for music dabblers to take it to the next step, and for what it it’s, it’s just as good as perfect.
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