Leaf Trombone: World Stage « Super Amazing Number One

11Sep/090

Leaf Trombone: World Stage

Leaf Trombone

Here's the first game and entertainment app on my iPhone to be featured in my new Fun From My iPhone feature. It just happens to be Leaf Trombone World Stage from smule. It's currently selling for $0.99 on the American iTunes Store. I think I might have paid more for it though. It's important to note here that every app I'm covering is either free or paid for with my own hard earned cash. It looks like there is also now a Lite version of the app on the store which is free. The Lite version is lacking online performance and has a smaller song library.

Read on for my impressions.

So, what is a leaf trombone? It sounds like a synthesized version of making a leaf buzz between your lips, which I could never figure out how to do. smule has taken a very simple idea here and added enough features to turn it in to a phenomenon.

Main Menu

The main menu has 3 options to choose from: Play a Song, World Stage, and Free Play. There are also buttons for Help and Settings. The help has pictorial guides as well as links to tutorial videos online. Playing a song gives you a selection to choose from which smule claims is from a library of over 2000. The World Stage allows to to Watch, Judge, and Perform online. Free Play turns your iPhone in to a free form leaf trombone.

Playing your leaf trombone is pretty simple. Along the right hand side is a slider. You slide your finger up and down to change the pitch of your instrument on a sliding scale. There are markers to show you where actual notes are located. In the upper left are + and - buttons to raise and lower your octave. Making the actual notes play is done in one of two ways. You can either blow at the microphone or just have it react to your finger touching the sliding portion of the screen. Both ways are fun!

I'm better than this, really!

Both Play a Song and World Stage modes are more complex than Free Play. In these modes notes fly at your slider in a way pioneered by other music and rhythm games like Frequency and Guitar Hero. In the lower left corner is a rotating disk with spokes on it. These function as a sort of percussion and rhythm section for your performance. The flying notes, which look like leaves, are shaded differently if they require you to press the octave change buttons.

Play a Song is pretty much just that. You pick a song and play along with the percussion/rhythm section according to the leaves that are flying at you. There's no score, passing or failing. To get that, you can step on to the World Stage. At that point you can then watch performances and perform one yourself. You can even judge other people's performances, and that's where the scores come in. When you're navigating around the menus, you'll find yourself interrupted fairly often with requests to be a judge on the world stage. It's neat but you can turn off that feature if you want.

Overall, Leaf Trombone: World Stage is a fun experience. I mainly use it as a fun little musical toy, but I can definitely see the appeal of trying to impress anonymous judges from the Internet. It also looks like you can go to smule's website and compose your own songs for use in Leaf Trombone.

Is it awesome? It's a fun little musical toy. I'll say it's Almost Awesome!

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