If the popular music- mixing software package Cakewalk crawled into bed with the remix features of the games Frequency or Amplitude, the resulting love child might be something like Codemasters' MTV Music Generator series. A little more than a toy yet far less than a full-featured music-mixing application, MTV Music Generator 3 allows you to mix, morph and create (to a limited extent) mainly hip-hop or electronica tracks, using an included array of synthesized instruments and samples from the 10 included tracks or songs from your own CD collection.
Using bass lines, drum lines, short samples and whatnot from the included songs (featuring the likes of Snoop Dogg, OutKast and Sean Paul), you can reconstruct and rebuild your own mixes, and the interface -- which has been redesigned to be much more console-friendly than the previous iteration in the series -- is intuitive enough that you don't even need the manual to dive right in.
But lest you entertain delusions of being the next Usher or R. Kelly (yikes!) or whomever the kids are listening to these days, be warned that MTV Music Generator 3 is really just a fun little widget to play around with, or maybe to introduce total newbies to concepts behind mixing music.
(Entertainment Weekly did a cute feature recently, in which they shopped around some tracks made with MTV Music Generator to various record labels and were told the songs were horribly amateurish and unfit for distribution.)
But if all you want is a disc you can pop into your PS2 or Xbox so that you can fool around with some tunes and show off your mad skills to friends, it sure beats humiliating yourself for eternity on MTV's Becoming.
Now, if someone would just do a game based on Pimp My Ride ...
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BOTTOM LINES
While MTV Music Generator 3 is easy to pick up and mess around with, would-be DJs would find the time better spent learning a software application that actually gives them the freedom to create without the restrictions and limitations found in this fun but simple package.
