AmenBeats vs 88 Synthwave

AmenBeats is a real drum machine built for kids — with a full studio hiding behind a grown-up gate. KID MODE: ONE SCREEN, BIG BUTTONS A focused instrument with big controls and a row of picture buttons for choosing beats. Open it and the row spins like a slot machine and lands on a groove, ready to play. Kids can: • Pick from playful beats — Boom Bap, Rock, Disco, Marchin', Shuffle, Techno, Reggae, Waltz — and eight legendary breaks • Tap the grid to add and remove drum hits, on a 4, 8, 12, or 16-step canvas • Bash the four drums live — Open Hat, Closed Hat, Snare, Kick — right from the grid • Flip power switches: SWING for groove, WILD to loosen it up, FILL! for a snare roll, DROP! to cut the beat out and slam it back • Speed up and slow down with big plus and minus buttons • Spin the wheel any time for a surprise beat SAVE A BEAT. SAVE THE WHOLE SHOW. Everything a kid plays is quietly recorded — the beat, the tempo changes, every live tap. One button saves the entire performance, however long it ran, and one tap plays it back exactly as it happened. Their beats and shows sit in their own list, ready to hear again. GROWN-UPS SET THE RULES Kid Setup tailors the app to each child: • Choose exactly which beats and famous breaks they can reach • Set the tempo range they can dial between • Cap the volume • Turn on mute and solo for older kids learning how a kit fits together • Set up more than one child, each with their own beats, limits, and saved work Kid Mode stays put. A six-digit parent PIN protects access to the studio. Set up your PIN before the first Kid session and save your private recovery code. Tap the lock to unlock; hold it for help. Your PIN and recovery code stay on that device. THE GROWN-UP STUDIO Behind the gate is a proper 16-step, 4-voice sequencer: • Eight study templates of the most sampled breaks ever recorded: the Amen break, the Funky Drummer, Apache, Think, Impeach, When the Levee Breaks, Cold Sweat, and the Big Beat • Tap any step through on, stomp (accent), and ghost — stomps add punch, ghost notes add the feel that makes a break breathe • Tempo from 40 to 220 BPM, swing, and per-voice mute and solo • Humanize and per-voice lay-back for a relaxed, human pocket • Save your grooves and chain them into a looping song, each pattern held for as many bars as you like MIDI AND ABLETON, SET UP BY A GROWN-UP The studio talks to real gear, and every bit of it is configured on the parent side — never in the child's reach: • Send MIDI on GM channel 10 so your pattern drives a drum rack in Ableton Live or any DAW • Export any pattern as a Standard MIDI clip and drag it straight into a session • Import a .mid clip back onto the grid • Sync tempo with Live and other Link-enabled apps over Ableton Link SAFE BY DESIGN No account. No sign-in. No ads. No in-app purchases. No analytics, no tracking, and no servers — AmenBeats collects nothing, and everything a child makes stays on the device. Every drum sound is synthesized as the app runs, so nothing is ever downloaded and the app stays tiny. It plays through the speaker even with the ring switch set to silent. Free.

88 Synthwave writes complete synthwave tracks and plays them on its own synths. Press write and you get the whole track: an intro, verses, builds with a riser and a snare roll, choruses with the hook lifted over a pumping mix, a breakdown, solo or bridge in the middle, a final chorus an octave up, and an ending. That can be the arp left running, a fade, or one hit and silence. Everything is synthesized, so there is nothing to download. An analog-style polysynth with up to five detuned oscillators per voice, where no two notes are quite in tune, plays the pads, saw leads, arps and basses. A four-operator FM engine plays the bells, electric piano, brass and sax. Four classic drum machines sit behind a gated-room reverb and a sidechain pump. The tracks come from chaos maths. A Lorenz attractor draws the melody and the hook's rhythm, and a logistic map picks which steps the arpeggiator plays and where the ghost notes fall. Chaos on its own is noise, so a small model filters it: it is rewarded for consonant intervals and learns as it writes. The CHAOS / TASTE slider decides how much say each one gets. There are eleven styles, and each one sets its own scale, drum machine, rack and effects: Outrun, Night Drive, Darksynth, Dreamwave, Disco, Synthpop, Cyberpunk, Horror Synth, Space Disco, Miami Nights and Vaporwave. Tick STYLE LOADS RACK and each style brings its own sound. The sound is half the record. There are four channels (bass, pads and stabs, arp and keys, lead), each with a preamp or amp, a tone stack and a speaker: a studio monitor, a guitar cabinet, a bass cabinet or a car door. Eight one-click racks set a whole sound at once. The effects are the production: sidechain pump, gated room, chorus, tape, bit crush, phaser, width and tape hiss, with a plate, a hall, a spring and a tempo-synced delay on the master. Every track is built from its seed. Write the seed down and you can have that exact track again, note for note. A seed from the browser version rebuilds the same track here. You can play over it, too. The pads are the notes of the track's key rather than a piano keyboard, so nothing you touch is wrong. The sixteen-step lane stays in key when the writer picks a new track, and it follows your host. Both play any of 22 voices through that voice's own channel and out on its MIDI channel. Turn on RADIO and it keeps playing, picking a new style, key, scale and tempo for every track. You also get: • 11 styles, 21 scales, 12 keys, tempo and density • 22 voices: pads, leads, brass, FM bells and keys, arps and basses • 4 drum machines, 14 channel voicings, 6 speakers, 8 racks and 8 effects • Seven-part mixer with a meter on every part • MIDI in, so your keyboard plays whichever voice you have selected • Export a MIDI file, a WAV mix, or stems, one WAV per part (in the app; in a host you record the audio there) • A note and a MIDI channel for every drum and every riser and impact • UI scale, so the panel is not tiny on a big iPad • Live spectrum and waveform, and the chaos engine drawn as it runs There are two Audio Units, an instrument and a MIDI processor. Each part sends on its own MIDI channel and every drum has its own note and channel, so one instance can drive a whole rack of synths. The MIDI version passes your keyboard through. Both follow your host's tempo and transport, and one install registers both. The app is free and nothing in it is held back. Using the Audio Units inside other apps is a one-time purchase, and each AUv3 session plays for two minutes first so you can try them properly. No account, no ads, no subscription. Works offline.