How does Stealth Bee Jam compare to Apple's GarageBand for iPad?

Last week, Apple released GarageBand for the iPad, which includes a feature called Smart Instruments, that's designed to give non-musicians an easy way to make music. GarageBand is a very cool app and Smart Instruments are a great feature, but the way you make music in GarageBand is very different from the way music is made in Stealth Bee Jam.

First, GarageBand requires you to build each song from scratch by recording each individual track, using real instruments, Smart Instruments, or built-in loops. While this provides lots of flexibility, it also means that you can't just fire up the app and start playing songs like you can with Stealth Bee Jam. The whole idea behind Stealth Bee Jam is that anyone can jam along with a finished song in about three button taps.

Second, Smart Instruments are primarily designed to play background tracks - the Smart Instrument bass, drums, keyboard, and guitar play background patterns that can be combined, one track at a time, to build the background parts for a song. But it's not an entirely automatic process, you still need to tell GarageBand which chords to play, and you need to play them in the correct sequence and appropriate timing. Stealth Bee Jam short circuits this entire process by providing fully realized song arrangements right out of the box. You can vary these arrangements on-the-fly as you jam, by pressing different Loop buttons to trigger different bass lines, guitar parts, keyboard parts, or even add crowd noise! All of these parts are seamlessly integrated into the song - you don't have to worry about constructing chord progressions or figuring out which patterns to play. The really cool thing is that each song in Stealth Bee Jam has its own unique loops - there is no duplication of musical content among any of the songs in Stealth Bee Jam.

Finally, GarageBand and Stealth Bee Jam differ the most when it comes to playing melodies and leads. This is where Stealth Bee Jam really shines and delivers big on the musical fun factor. All you have to do is a start a song and then wail away on the Riff buttons to play countless combinations of riffs and lead lines. It's that easy. With GarageBand, if you're not a musician, you can use the the Smart Instrument guitar in to play melodies by switchng it into Note mode and selecting a scale, but you still have to pick out each individual note. Stealth Bee Jam lets you do the same thing with its Single Note buttons, but the real fun lies in the professionally recorded Riff buttons, which GarageBand does not have.

So in the final analysis GarageBand and Stealth Bee Jam are two very different kinds of music apps. GarageBand focuses on building songs from scratch, one track at a time, while Stealth Bee Jam lets you play fully formed songs right away without having to worry about chord progressions, track arrangements, timing, etc. Stealth Bee Jam distills the music making process down to the most fun elements while still offering lots of flexibility and plenty of room for individual creativity.