Mixis Review

Musical mixing apps are quite plentiful on the App Store, but a few too many of them are a little intimidating for musical newbies such as myself. Rightly or wrongly, they might look great but I don't find myself gravitating towards them as I figure I need something more aimed at newbie me. I think Mixis is my kind of thing.

It's a simple tool but a fun one. Users are presented with a board of white tiles. Tap one and that's where a note goes. Tap a few and a tune is created. It's simple yet intuitive, making it easy to tap one tile at a time or drag a finger over a whole bunch of them at first. The free version comes with two types of note - 'playful' and drums. It's a little limited so I'd recommend the $0.99 in-app purchase to see the full package which includes a further 16 choices. Piano proved to be my favorite but there's a wide range of options such as 'eerie' and 'wonder' adding suitably emotive music.

I'd have liked to have been able to mix together lots of different music types, which isn't possible, but it's still quite fun to pick a random set of tiles and see what comes out. Each choice comes with two slightly different sounding tiles so that adds to the variety quite nicely.

No one is going to create great masterpieces through Mixis (although if they do, it's possible to save them for later reference) and it could perhaps do with a few more features, such as mixing different sounds and the ability to share creations. What it does do well, however, is entertaining its user. It's fun to mess around with, even for the musical newbie. It's even bordering on oddly therapeutic. Still, fingers crossed we see an update in the future that adds a bit more flexibility to proceedings.