LND Games isn’t the first app developer to merge drawing and music-making in an iPad app for kids: Morton Subotnick’s Pitch Painter did it last year for example, while Tunetrace turned real drawings into music.
But we’re pretty excited about LND’s new iPad app Color Band, which was released at the end of June. It sits somewhere between an Etch-a-Sketch toy and Yamaha’s Tenori-On electronic instrument, with some Xbox Kinect-style motion detection thrown in for good measure.
That sounds geeky, but the app is anything but. At its simplest level, your child draws pictures on the screen by swiping or tapping their finger on the pixels. They can choose from more than 80 colours, with each one representing a different musical sound.
Once they’ve drawn their picture, they can play it – either by touching the screen, or by using the iPad’s front-facing camera to move their fingers in mid-air, and trigger the different sounds.
This demo video shows how it all works:
The drawings can also automatically play by themselves, which may be good for younger children, but can also turn Color Band into an electronic sequencer: create your patterns then watch them play.
Oh, and the app is hosted by a pink bunny mascot named Lalabee, although we have to confess it slightly terrifies us with its squeaky voice.
Color Band is a free download for iPad from Apple’s App Store. So how does its developer make money? From in-app purchases.
A basic instrument set and canvases to draw on are included in the free download, but you can buy additional instrument sounds as 69p sets: percussion, guitar, animal noises, loops and beats, miscellaneous sounds and a set to record your own voices and sounds.
You can also pay up to £2.49 for 20 additional canvases, and 69p for “colouring books” – instruments, animals and the letters A-F are the three on offer – which your child can then colour in and play.
We think the system is a fair one: you can have lots of fun for free, but the extra stuff is there for parents to buy if you like it: to unlock everything would cost you less than £10 at the time of writing.