Tanpura Droid 1.5

Unfortunately, Tampura droid is in no way shape or form related to the traditional Japanese dish of similar name. Tampura is an Indian string instrument that is used to provide background musical drone (or droid in this case) to traditional music. Having a tampura sustaining your musical performance ensures a rich and mysterious sound. Being that a drone accompaniment is rather different than an accompanying bass guitar, you can easily have an app take care of it.

Tampura Droid is rather simple. It has one play/stop button and two control sliders for Speed and Volume. Musical artistry derives from the three values of First String, Pitch and Pitch semi(?). Well, asking me about musical theory is the same as asking me about molecular biology, so don't be mad that I can't present these things in more detail. Chances are that you already know them or if not, experimenting is fun.

There's not much to be desired from this app. The sounds are clear and the interface is clear as well. The only downside is that the app resolution is fixed. So it while it looks okay on an older smart phone, it simply sticks to the upper left corner on bigger screens. Quite the letdown considering the easiness of control on a considerably bigger screen is not reflected with Tampura Droid.

Features

• Continuous Tampura accompaniment
• String, pitch and speed controls

Pros

• Good sound

Cons

• Fixed graphical resolution (and small at that)

Conclusion

Tampura Droid is a nice enough app. Asks for no permissions and works as intended. An adaptable vector interface would have been nice, but that's not that big of an inconvenient, considering that you'd normally just set it, tap on play and forget.