Drum Teacher

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It's somewhat telling that the developer refers to Drum Teacher as a 'game' - although presented very much as a serious drum teacher (albeit a limited one), the appeal here is very much in 'having fun' territory. Or, if I was still a teenager, 'annoying my parents' territory! Pity the Qt implementation here is buggy.... Screenshots and link below.

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Five predefined drum patterns are preprogrammed, with a 'learning' mode for these, where you try to copy what is played. Curiously, the sixth 'Autoplay' is a (presumably licensed, but who knows?) recording of Coldplay's "Yellow", the idea being that you play along to the track!

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The digital samples used for each drum are very quick, there's almost no lag at all while each starts playing - they're also very loud and, as far as I can see, there's no way to turn the drum volume down - the controls shown above are for the backing track (in this case Coldplay). On an N8 or 808, the loudspeaker will make this almost unpleasantly loud.

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There's a 'load music' function, though you do have to put MP3 music in a specific folder for it to work. In this, staying with the Coldplay theme, I went with "Paradise".

All of which is fair enough, albeit a bit limited, but DrumTeacher is buggy. Numerous times I found the drum sounds not played and I had to switch patterns to get them back. Then the app crashed without warning. Kudos to the developer for the idea and implementation of the drum playback with minimal latency - but more work is definitely needed on the app as a whole.

DrumTeacher is £1.50 in the Nokia Store. Possibly one for drum fanatics only? And only then if they stick with the developer through an update or two!

Source / Credit: Nokia Store