Two Vermont startups aim to change that — one with a mobile app and another with a piece of desktop software distributed on Steam, the video game platform. One of the companies, ToneStone, is based in southern Vermont and the other, Vinyl Dreams, is in northern Vermont. Weirdly, both were started by bass players. ToneStone’s founder once played bass in the Boston rock band Tribe and later worked on the video games Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Vinyl Dreams’ founder is a former software company CEO who is also a trustee at the Berklee College of Music.
“Instagram unlocked photography for a mass audience, and TikTok has done that for video,” says ToneStone’s Greg LoPiccolo. “But music is lagging behind. Most of the [production] tools that you would use, like Logic or Ableton Live, are still at this pro level. They’re hard to use, and it’s challenging to learn an instrument.”
LoPiccolo says he wants to help people with little musical experience start by taking baby steps and then “give them some confidence and early creative wins,” with an assist from prerecorded snippets and clips they can draw from. “We want to step them up the skill curve,” he says. “I’m envisioning a world within five or 10 years where a lot of the energy today directed to video games is getting directed to musical composition and performance.”
Both companies dispense with the architecture of sheet music in favor of more simplified and colorful compositional interfaces. ToneStone’s is a grid to which you add elements like drum patterns, bass lines, and other instruments; Vinyl Dreams serves up something that looks like a circular mandala, with icons of different instruments at the center. (I had an easier time figuring out where to start with ToneStone.) You are given a kit of parts, essentially, that all work well together — instruments playing in the same key, the same genre, and tempo. With access to a kit that ToneStone calls “Take It Higher,” I could pretty quickly put together a four-bar section with drums, electric guitar, bass, and organ, that sounded a bit like the ‘70s group Boston vamping during band intros. On Vinyl Dreams, you can pull in bass lines created by Divinity Roxx, who has been a music director for Beyoncé.
Both ToneStone and Vinyl Dreams allow you to use a microphone to record vocals — or add an instrument that you might play the old-fashioned way, by blowing, picking, bowing, or plunking. LoPiccolo says that he has designed ToneStone with collaboration in mind: One person can create part of a song and then share it with someone else who might add to it.
Vinyl Dreams charges a weekly or monthly fee to use its mobile app, which debuted in January. ToneStone is entirely free at the moment, with plans to start charging for use sometime this summer.
So far, only one of the companies has started to break through on the funding front. Vinyl Dreams has been entirely funded by founder Dean Goodermote so far, though he says he’s “not averse to raising money for it.” (He worked for a time at a venture capital firm.) LoPiccolo says that ToneStone has raised about $3 million from angel investors and early-stage venture capital funds, and is trying to raise more. The startup has a listing on Republic, a fund-raising site that allows startups to raise money from individuals, but that campaign hasn’t yet gone live. LoPiccolo says he hopes that campaign will raise $500,000 to $1 million more.
As with any new app trying to attract lots of users, figuring out how to effectively build buzz without access to a big budget will be a challenge for Vinyl Dreams and ToneStone. LoPiccolo says he hopes that musicians who publish riffs and snippets through ToneStone — and earn money when those elements are sold — will promote the app to their fans. That’s “the best way to bring it to a mass audience,” he says.
One problem with video games, notes Eran Egozy, is that even when they sell millions of copies, the fun eventually fades, and fans move on to the next thing. With music creation software, “the hope is that creative engagement will be the long-lasting model,” he says, making products more like Microsoft Word or Adobe PhotoShop, which continue to be used year in and out. Egozy ― who invested in ToneStone ― is the cofounder of Harmonix, the Boston company that created games like Rock Band and Dance Central, and also an accomplished classical clarinetist.
Creating software that can make music creation as addictive and enjoyable as playing video games, Egozy says, is “not an easy task, but I think they are on the right track.”
LoPiccolo knows that the idea of “democratizing” music creation will probably aggravate some musicians and producers who have put years into honing their skills. He says he has two responses. “One is that people making music in any way is better than people not making music.” The other: software that simplifies music-making doesn’t replace conventional music-making, which, he says, “is going to be with us forever. But this opens that creativity up to a much bigger audience that is denied access now.”
Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottKirsner.
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