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Genre: Music Publisher: Rockstar Games Developer: Rockstar Leeds Players: 1

By RyanD (3rd Nov 2009)

This is not a game. It’s not a game at all. It’s a remarkably deep, feature-packed portable music creation tool of truly surprising power. Which must lead one to wonder, finally, why is it on (arguably) the wimpiest of all consoles, the PSP?

Rockstar Leeds (GTA: Chinatown Wars, Rockstar Games presents: Table Tennis, Manhunt 2, The Warriors, GTA: Liberty City Stories, GTA: Vice City Stories), although often overshadowed by their American counterparts, are developers with a truly formidable track record. With Beaterator, teaming up with renowned producer Timbaland (who’s not exactly to my taste, but-), they have produced a startling piece of music creation software, sophisticated enough to rival PC giants Fruity Loops, Acid, Adobe Audition, even Pro Tools, were it not for the painful limitations of the PSP interface and hardware.

At the front end, Beaterator is divided up into two discreet-yet-intertwined modes: Live Play and Studio. The former is, by far, the more immediate, straight-forward and instant-gratification-oriented side of Beaterator , so I’ll start with that.

In Live Play you can assign loops (either your own or some of the veritable shitloads provided by both Timbaland and Rockstar) to the four face buttons of the PSP, in several easily-selectable banks. Once that’s done, or once you’ve loaded a handy Rockstar-created sample set, then live loop-based performance couldn’t be simpler. Select a bank with the Analogue Stick, then kick a loop on or off with the corresponding face button. It’s a simple, seamlessly crafted little real time looper. As far as having a portable tool for basic mixing, throwing down ideas or simple live performances goes, this is as close as Beaterator gets.

You may even, if you wish, record and save your live performance, and take it into the other, darker side of Beaterator , the Studio. Be warned, however, this mode is strictly for those with either digital studio experience or a great deal of patience.



For the benefit of those four people still reading this, here’s a quick breakdown of the panoply features contained within Studio mode:

Studio Session: This is essentially a more technical version of Live Play, allowing live triggering of loops mapped to the four face buttons, across eight separate tracks, plus a Master Track that binds all loops mapped to each individual face button across all eight tracks, to be kicked in or out simultaneously. If you think that sounds a little bit complicated, you have no idea, until you reach:

Song Crafter: This is the hub of the Studio mode experience, and appears very much like most common loop-based multi-tracking software available today. Up to eight different loops may be individually painted across a timeline up to seven-and-a-half minutes long (sorry prog-rockers). Within this multi-track layout you may cut, copy and paste sections, set up Repeating Regions (essentially grouping a series of loops over a portion of the timeline for easier selection), import or export audio and MIDI files, and utilise two dedicated effects channels per track (including Compression, Distortion, Delay, Reverb, Chorus, Phaser, Flanger, and more) as well as dedicated effects on the Master channel. All effects are controllable either globally, or via spline-based envelopes over time. But if that’s not quite enough control for you, you are in luck.



Audio Loop Crafter: Allows you to mess with the speed or length of existing loops, and create your own from sampled audio (in uncompressed .WAV format, at either 22.05 or 44.1 kHz, 16-bit only (sorry massive audiophile nerds). The Loop Crafter also contains a handy Loop Slicer tool, for quickly isolating one or more loops from a larger audio track. Or, of course, you can go ahead and make your own loops, right inside Beaterator .

Drum Crafter: The Drum Crafter interface will be familiar to anyone who’s used a digital drum machine before. A selected number of bars, divided into 16ths, is presented, and you can designate the placement (and of course Velocity also) of your drum hits for each individual drum on a selected (fully customisable of course) kit. The Drum Crafter has the nice addition of allowing live editing and placement of hits while the loop is playing. So you can kick the loop off and lay down the hi hat track in real time, then do the kick drum live, then the snare, then back to the hi hat, and so on, all while the loop is still playing. Then, of course, there’s the instruments.



Melody Crafter: Very similar to the Drum Crafter, but with a few extra layers of brain frying complexity on top. Instead of a list of drums, the Melody Crafter displays a keyboard with it’s attached editable timeline. The Melody crafter accepts all of the stock (I simply must repeat, shitloads) samples for instruments, allows for polyphony, velocity, sustain, and even slides/bends. If you can master this thing, you deserve an honorary doctorate from the University of Menu Hell. But apparently there was a bet going on at Rockstar Leeds, to see who could fit the most functional virtual knobs on screen at once, and so we have the Synth Editor.

Synth Editor: Jesus Christ. It’s a synth. It’s a whole analogue-style synth, with thirty-one immediately tweakable knobs, that is NOT including the scroll-through list of filters and envelopes. It’s hard to say how ‘usable’ this thing really is, since it works a lot like an analogue synth. That is to say: you could be here all day. Freak.

Aaaaaaand what else? Oh yes, there’s also a complete Sound Editor, which lets you fade in, out, normalise, boost gain, cut gain, pitch shift, set sustain, time stretch, reverse audio, and probably a lot more too. And there’s a Sound recorder, of course. And a dedicated Vocal Recorder too. Nice.



That’s as much as I found anyway. Oh wait! Look! It does Visualisations too. Well bugger me.

So hopefully you’re convinced (or asleep) by now, that this little package is absolutely packed-from-arsehole-to-beak with every imaginable feature that a high-end music creation tool requires. What I haven’t mentioned yet, though, is what a bastard this thing is to use.

Much as it may well be technically possible to perform a heart-lung transplant with your DVD remote, or teach your dog to fill out your tax return, one can’t help but realise that there’s a much easier way to go about these things. By cramming this massive suite of fully-featured audio tools into the PSP, Rockstar have unfortunately led us ultimately into an endless web of frustration, with context-sensitive assignable sub-menus within sub-menus within sub-menus; with painful load and seek-times; with scrolling around the bloody screen again and again for the bloody knob-or-button that’s right bloody there; with no bloody right-click; with shitty PSP speakers. At every turn you are prompted to save; to view the extensive help library; to watch an informative tutorial video, because the guys that built this know that it’s a bastard to use. And, to their credit, they’ve done everything in their power to streamline the dizzying array of buttons and dials required to manipulate this unwieldy beast of a program, and make it as easy as it can be on the PSP, which isn’t very easy at all. They’ve done everything, I say, except for cutting anything out, of course.

If this product came out on the PC, for the same price, I’d grab it in a second. What you get for the price of a PSP game, compared to similarly featured PC products, is just astounding. But it’s on the stupid stupid stupid shitty old PSP. Balls to it, throw it out the stupid window. Because this was so nearly so good.

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