Groovy Music City

Pinnacle is best known for its Studio video-editing program, but it’s also part of a group of companies that includes music software specialists Sibelius.

So Pinnacle has borrowed some of Sibelius’ musical expertise to produce Groovy Music City, a program that helps 7- to-12-year-old children learn how to make music.

Instead of the lines and notes of a conventional music score, Groovy Music City presents the user with a small animated figure walking along a city street. At the top of the screen there is a series of ‘parts’ that can be used as the building blocks to assemble a piece of music.

There are parts for chords, basslines, rhythm patterns and melodies. Children can click on these parts to hear what they sound like and then drag them down onto the street to build up a song. Hitting the Play button makes the on-screen character walk along the street, playing each part out loud as they walk past it.

Parts can also be modified by adjusting their volume and tempo, and you can even change the sound altogether by choosing some of the instrument sounds included in the program’s own library.

If you wanted to change the bassline you could pick an acoustic bass or a slapped bass sound instead, for instance.

It’s a clever approach to creating music, and once you understand how it works you can leave the kids to experiment on their own for hours.

Unfortunately, the program’s ease of use is marred by the fact that no printed manual is supplied. There are some built-in help files, but these are arranged in a seemingly random order and didn’t really help as we tried to get started. In the end, we had to look around on Pinnacle’s website to find some tutorial files to help us out.

So while Groovy Music City is a good attempt at encouraging kids to make their own music, the lack of effort put into getting started is a disappointment and means more work for parents at the beginning.