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Hey HN! We're Tristan & Greg from Chops https://www.getchops.app/ . Chops is an iOS music making app that lets you make beats with your voice. We're currently running a closed TestFlight beta, and are planning to launch soon.
Tristan and I are both musically inclined without being professional musicians. Our Voice Memos apps are filled with bits of song ideas that we recorded as inspiration struck. An issue we've seen with recording these snippets is that 1) you can't layer your voice easily without using a specialized looper app and 2) it always sounds... like your voice. We're not pro beatboxers, so our "voice drums" don't sound that great. Enter Chops.
We've designed a way to create drum tracks using your voice -- you "sing" the drums and then pick a drum sound (kick, snare, hi-hats, etc.). Check out the video on our page to get an idea of how it works.
We're super excited to push this idea much further, and to make music making more accessible, intuitive and fun. We feel that there should be a larger overlap between music "fans" -- this includes people that sing along to songs, that hum tunes, that make up songs for their families -- and "musicians" as the term is too commonly defined (e.g., people with a musical education, professional artists, etc.)
If you feel even a tiny bit musically inclined, we'd love to have you be part of this beta round!
Reach out to us hello@getchops.app for any questions or AMA here. Thanks a lot!
I've been wanting this for literally decades. I make mouth-click beats all the time, and it's easier and more tempo-accurate than what I can do with my fingers/hands. Does Chops support more than one "instrument" at a time? Typically I use one click for the kick, and then a different one for the snare. Can it act like a standard MIDI controller for external software/hardware?
That's... exactly the use case we were thinking about! We've been using Voice Memos to record song bits / mouth beats, and hopefully this is the better / smarter version of that.
Chops does support multiple instruments at a time -- right now, you can layer many drum and audio tracks (drum tracks play built in drum samples, while audio tracks are those that you record using your phone's microphone).
The app is MIDI-based, but it cannot trigger external software/hardware devices at this time. This is something that's on the roadmap!
Love the "make beats with your voice" tagline, it's simple and effective. The demo video on the landing page makes me think on an idea: why not allow recording a video of your face while you record your vocal beat? It seems people are using TikTok as a mean of physical expression (through dance, mostly) and maybe your app could grow a subculture through the same dynamics?
Curious to see the final version!
Totally a great point, and other apps in this space -- typically those that target a larger, non-"pro musician" audience -- do have more entertaining / fun engagement mechanisms, such as recording a video selfie while singing / karaok'ing, etc.
Really great idea, thanks a lot!
Reminds me of Mike Gao's Vocal Beater [1]. Too bad it doesn't seem like he's been keeping it updated recently. He's able to beatbox and it'll automatically recognize the instruments too.
Here's a demo of him using it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/OS7LeMHImBM?t=232
That's fascinating! We're 100% going into that direction, and the necessary algo work to do this reliably is not trivial.
Thank for the great pointers!
It would be better to do this when you launch. Right now it looks like just a signup page, and Show HN requires that there be something for people can try out: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
Hey dang, my sincere apologies about this!
The app is ready to test and we're reaching out to people who are signing up with TestFlight links i.e., everyone will get to try out the app.
But you're right of course that there's nothing to try on the launch page -- there's only a demo video.
We'll be more careful for future projects, and will only post again about this once we're live on the App Store.
Sorry again!
It's ok! You're welcome to post when people can try it out. I think it will have some appeal.
Signed up for the beta, seems super creative can't wait to try it. Cheers
Very cool! Will check out.
Thank you! Looking forward to your feedback!
Fun! :D