Coming straight outta North Yorkshire, Jump is a new-ish music composition program. It uses the crappy-sounding Windows XP internal sounds, and doesn't allow any MIDI or Audio recording. Instead, you program chord sequences, drum patterns and melodies. I've just been playing with it for an hour, and it's a bit like using one of those auto-chord, auto-rhythm keyboards, but far more involved. It's perfect if, like me, you can waste hours pissing about with weird noises and effects rather than actually writing a tune, let alone structuring a song. The demo version [download] doesn't let you save, or export your midi files. It's interesting, but I'm not sure I'd actually spend £69 on it. UPDATE: Turns out you can send the output from Jump to any MIDI instrument or software synth, if you're using a virtual MIDI cable like Maple. Which is cool, but I like the idea of using the crappy MIDI sounds - it's the digital version writing songs on an acoustic guitar.
Posted by Tom Whitwell. 
: 2:03 pm