A demon­stra­tion of the Melodica app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. There are sim­i­lar apps out there — Tonepad, Synthtopia — but none of them are as sim­ple and pol­ished. That being said, there are a few fea­tures that could make Melodica stand out even more, such as the abil­i­ty to save com­po­si­tions on-the-fly and lay­er them under new ones, or the abil­i­ty to change the sam­ple sound, so I’m hop­ing they’ll be added in an update. Regardless, I’ve only had this app for a day, and I’ve been enjoy­ing it immense­ly.

Some tips for composing/performing songs in Melodica:

• The rests, or spaces between the notes, are impor­tant too. Don’t feel that you need to fill the board with notes. Just like in jazz, it’s impor­tant to hear that notes that aren’t played. Sometimes a melody is strong enough that a few spar­tan notes by them­selves are enough to estab­lish some­thing beau­ti­ful. Or you can places notes on every beat of a mea­sure, except the down­beat, which sub­tly implies “this silence is where the down­beat is sup­posed to be, even though no note is being played”.
• Don’t feel that you need to use bass notes to estab­lish a rhythm. You can switch it up with high notes as well, and have the base­line as the melody.
• Syncopation is pos­si­ble. If you imag­ine each of the 16 squares going across as quar­ter notes in four bars in 4/4 time, then you can estab­lish as rhythm by hav­ing a note at the begin­ning (count­ing as the “one”) of each bar, and the third note if you like. You can achieve a nice syn­co­pat­ed sound by putting a note on the sec­ond and fourth quar­ter note of a bar. But be care­ful; if you decide to remove cer­tain notes, don’t remove the rhythm before you remove the syn­co­pat­ed notes. Otherwise, the lis­ten­er eas­i­ly los­es a sense of where the down­beat is sup­posed to fall, it begins to sound like you’re mak­ing a mis­take, and the song eas­i­ly falls apart.
• Try to have a pur­pose, or an idea of where you want to go. Improvisation is total­ly one of the main advan­tages of Melodica, but you can still decide where you want to go dur­ing a song. If you can see the struc­ture then it’ll be eas­i­er to work up to that ahead of time. For exam­ple, if you want a song that starts qui­et, builds slow­ly to a cli­max, then crash­es dra­mat­i­cal­ly before re-estab­lish­ing a steady pace, then you can plan out which notes to add and take away that will quick­ly and effec­tive­ly achieve these changes.
• End your songs. Instead of just stop­ping, or clear­ing the board, fade out by tak­ing ele­ments away. And if you can, end your phras­es, which means remov­ing the notes from left to right as they’re being played. If you remove notes from right to left, it’ll sound like you stopped abrupt­ly in the mid­dle of a song. Sort of like hear­ing Westminster chimes with­out the last note, leav­ing the lis­ten­er to won­der where the res­o­lu­tion is.
• Use sev­er­al notes of the same pitch in a row spar­ing­ly. This is total­ly a per­son­al pref­er­ence, but I find I get tired of hear­ing these quick­ly.
• Songs sound bet­ter with con­trast. That means keep­ing some space between highs, mids, and lows. Or aban­don­ing the mid-range sec­tion alto­geth­er, since there isn’t much ver­ti­cal room to com­pose. This is because you can cre­ate the illu­sion of more lay­ers by hav­ing strong­ly defined parts of a song. Otherwise, it all sounds like one com­plex melody.