MTV Music Generator 2 Review

It's not suitable for everyone, and it will require considerable time and effort on your part in order to produce satisfying results.

MTV Music Generator 2 is based on the original music-making program from 1999, and it once again lets you create music, piecemeal, using a fairly intuitive graphical interface and a library of canned riffs. This new installment adds more of the same sort of features created for the original product, including riffs from new types of music genres such as garage and R&B, support for a greater number of simultaneous music channels, some more graphical bells and whistles, and other such advantages made possible by the PlayStation 2's superior memory and storage capacity as compared with its predecessor. MTV Music Generator 2 also sports the endorsement of the music producer Funkmaster Flex, who says on the back of the box, "Get MTV Music Generator 2 and be a platinum producer like me." Flex chose his words carefully, as this bold-sounding statement actually doesn't necessarily imply any correlation between achieving success in the music industry and purchasing MTV Music Generator 2. In fact, despite the program's relative success at lessening the learning curve and the cost of entry required for composing music electronically, MTV Music Generator 2 is still a relatively difficult program to use, and one whose lessons won't necessarily translate if you wish to go further with your music-making endeavors.

The 40-page manual packaged with MTV Music Generator 2, some encouraging words from Funkmaster Flex in the game's opening sequence, and a splash screen showing you what does what on your Dual Shock 2 are all the help you'll get trying to get the hang of the program. Actually, the product also comes packaged with more than 20 finished songs from various electronic music artists, which you can load into the program and try to learn from by example. While MTV Music Generator 2 is certainly easier to use than all the instruments and the software suites used by actual electronic music composers, the program could have been considerably friendlier if it had offered a more in-depth tutorial and more step-by-step instruction within the program itself. As it is, you'll invariably take some time getting acquainted with the controls and all the various onscreen icons. If you don't like the layout of the screen or the glossy default look of the program, you can actually change the superficial appearance of the entire interface using one of the nine available custom skins, which offer such colorful graphical themes as "submarine radio" and "post apocalyptic." Fortunately, the program makes good use of floating help labels, which reveal what all the different indicators actually mean. After a few hours, you should get the hang of what's what, and you'll find that the interface is functionally sound, no matter how it looks.

The program works like its predecessor. You can select from multiple rhythm, bass, melody, and vocal riffs from a total of eight music genres like breakbeat, house, college, pop, rock, and trance. The game visually depicts these riffs using color-coded rectangles that you drop onto the screen in the order in which you want them to play. There's no clear visual difference between the various riffs of a particular type--for instance, all bass riffs are blue--so if you mix up your riffs a lot, and you want to do some editing, you'll just have to float your cursor over the various riffs to distinguish one from the next. It's easy to listen to sample riffs, and you can listen to your work in progress at any time, so MTV Music Generator 2 ends up working fairly well by trial and error--you just drop riffs that sound good into your composition and see if the composition ends up sounding better for it. You can undo your last action if you ever change your mind.

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MTV Music Generator 2

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