So, you want to make music on your HTC Magic, Hero, Dream, G1, G2, MyTouch or whatever kind of newfangled gizmo they give you kids these days, right? Well the first thing to do is to go to the market and search for "Synthulator" by us, Glastonbridge. Once you've got it, click on the Synthulator button in your applications drawer, and away we go!

(Disclaimer: there are more bugs in Synthulator than there are features, and this is because it is an early beta version. Save your work often! Post your bug reports to synthulator.com's bugs forum!)

How to use

Press the joystick button to start and stop playback. Apart from that, the Synthulator UI consists of three main bits.

The Overview

That's the bit you saw when you started up, and you can get back to it by pressing the back button on your phone. It shows you the overall layout of your song. Each pattern square is worth 4 beats, and you can edit it by tapping the touchscreen. If you tap and hold, you can choose a different pattern number. Unlike other sequencing systems, these patterns can be swapped between different instruments, though this may change in a later version of Synthulator.

If you want to add another track, just press the Add New Track... label. Note that the Sampler only lets you play one note. If you want to play melodies, choose a TunedSampler. The mixer doesn't do anything. This will all be fixed one day...

The Sequence editor

When you've tapped a pattern square, you'll see the pattern editor. Patterns are played from left to right, and each shaded line marks a beat. Tap a square to have that note play for a quarter note. Tap the note next to it to have it continue for another quarter note, and so on. if you want to have one note stop and then start immediately after, tap it again and it will turn red to show that it will stop. Tap it a third time to get rid of it completely.

From this part of the Synthulator you can also get to the synthesizer which is playing the notes in your song. Press Menu, and choose "Synth".

The Synth editor

This doesn't do much unless you download something cool like the CMT Analogue plugin from the Android Market. Then you will see all the controls associated with your synth!

Loading and saving

By now you'll notice that there's also buttons to load and save your songs. They do work, but remember to ALWAYS click Okay when loading or saving.

If you want to save your tunes as MP3s, I'm working on a thing which'll let you do that. In the meantime, us at Castle Glastonbridge use one of these and one of these, plugged into the hifi...