While the focus of Guitar & Drum Trainer is on functionality to help you learn and transcribe new music, let's face it - software needs more than just "functionality" - it needs style too.
To add your own personal touch to your music, Guitar & Drum Trainer waveform and equalizer visuals are fully customizable with numerous options that blend form and feature perfectly to your tastes.
Virtually every aspect can be changed, providing an infinite amount of flexibility for you to customize individually beautiful displays for each song. (You can equally create ugly monstrosities if you like...)
Customizable groups include:
- Colors
- Waveform shapes
- Equalizer styles
- Envelope outlines and gradients
- Beat detection
- Resolution & refresh rate
- Size
Below are some simple examples of combinations of colors, styles, and other options available. Click on them to enlarge them to full size, or the width of your browser window (whichever is smaller).
"Mellow Mauve" with bright green beat detection on the zoomed waveform:
Here are the same waveforms in a simple black with a light grey outline:
Similarly, a white background with the right colors and gradient can look very sharp:
But you can also change waveforms styles from the default stereo waveform shapes to mono, dual mono, and half-mono. This is a mono waveform shape:
Dual mono waveforms superimpose the right as mono on top of the left as mono. In this case, having the left and right as different colors works best. Here you can see the light green left underneath the black/mauve right audio channel:
The mono bottom waveform shape flattens a half mono waveform along the bottom of the display, and works nicely to show volume levels at various points. Beat detection set along the bottom of the waveform works nicely here:
For songs that are recorded quieter (a lot of older music is like this), gradients don't display very well as the peaks aren't very high. These kinds of quieter songs work very nicely with gradients turned off and only simple solid colors.
When designing a color scheme, a bit of thought or a basic concept helps to give some direction.
The following pink and light blue theme could be titled "Cotton Candy" or "Girls and Boys":
Going for a bit darker theme, the following color set based on orange, black and yellow is ideal for Halloween:
Targeting a season (winter, spring), holiday (Christmas, Easter), emotion (sadness, rage), mood (depressed, content), general feeling, or whatever else sparks your creative juices, is a good way to get a start with getting a nice color set done. The song itself is also an excellent source of inspiration, and can truly help bring you into the music on a deeper level with some thought and emotion.
The Guitar & Drum Trainer EQ visuals also sport several different styles to suit your personal preferences. The default EQ visuals are ideal for helping to figure out notes:
Other EQ visual displays are similarly functional, but offer a slightly different flavor:
Yet other EQ visuals are completely different with a clean, sharp look:
While less "functional" than others, Guitar & Drum Trainer includes several other EQ visual styles that can be quite attractive for those that simply prefer a bit of style.
More EQ styles are available inside Guitar & Drum Trainer with variations on the distinct styles that are both flashy, and functional.
Oh... yeah... Almost forgot... You can also create horribly ugly monstrosities as well.
As a general rule of thumb, contrasting dark with light works very well. Outlines are often best as a neutral grey or light color. On a white background, darker grey outlines work well. But as you can see, the possibilities are limited only by your own imagination and creativity.