I’m quite lazy it has to be said. I’ve owned a mac or two for the last 3 or 4 years and not once have I recorded anything in GarageBand, why? Well by the time I’ve loaded it up and plugged in my Takamine I’ve started to lose interest. Then I’m searching around for a decent drum loop to jam to and well its all over and I’m online searching for cool guitars before I know it. Well I don’t have that excuse anymore because I am now the proud owner of Sonoma Wireworks - Riffworks! If you haven’t heard of this product I encourage you to watch this video or search YouTube for videos tagged with “Riffworks”.

Ok done that? Impressed? Skeptical? Ok so that video is edited a little in order to make it nice and snappy but believe me the first 2 riffs the guy lays down are realtime, Riffworks only records a new layer when it has a signal so you can wait for a couple of repeats then start playing and it will instantly record your next take. Ok I’m getting ahead of myself… This is a really fun bit of software, it really takes me back to when my brother and I got our first 4-track (Yamaha MT100II) and started recording song after song. The key to Riffworks is that it has been tailored to creating songs by Riffs (not suprisingly!). So you can just keep adding layer after layer without touching the computer and it keeps each take which you can also set to mute as it finishes so that you can do multiple takes. The next thing that makes it so great is a little feature called Instant Drummer™ which lets you dial up a drum loop and with the turn of a dial alter the intensity of the playing and the variation of the pattern. This is left to the creators of the drum patches to interpret as they wish but it is so easy to find a drum track to jam along to. These drum patches are available as add-ons from the website at $9.99 a set so be prepared to outlay a few extra dollars to get the right mix of loops to keep the creative juices flowing.

When you create a layer, say an 8 bar riff in 4/4, you can add and remove effects to this layer. The effects are pretty amazing, you could quite literally use riffworks as your main signal processor for recording without using any other features they are that good! They aren’t just your run of the mill reverbs and delays either there are some very creative units like the Attaq and Tempest modules. I was stuck playing with those two for hours!! Oh and did I mention that the standard version comes with Amplitube 2 Live? Oh my… When you plug in to Riffworks you can choose to use hardware monitoring or if you prefer, run it through the effects first. Please, please make sure you do this it is soo good. Select Amp and use Amplitube to create a head and cabinet to get your sound started, then you can either use Amplitube’s stomp boxes which are good or you can use Riffworks effects which are great. Although I found myself making silly noises far too often because it was fun! I plugged my Takamine TEAN46C directly into my Macbook Pro and used Amplitube to create a nice Amp and then played around with Riffworks effects to create a couple of tracks and a bass track using the Tripwire effects module to detune my guitar an octave. You can hear the results of an hours messing around here and believe me it really doesn’t do this software justice!!

Once you create a riff it is really easy to then put them together to create a song, just by dragging and dropping onto the song timeline. You can even create songlayers which are not riff based so that you can lay down solos or vocals. However this is not Riffworks’ main focus and it is tricky to edit the volume throughout a songlayer for instance if you wanted to splice two together, you might be better creating a few and then exporting them to Ableton Live or something for more detailed wave editing. I think if I coupled this with something like Abelton Live I would pretty much have a perfect set up for a very small amount of cash. There is a lot more to this software like the online collaboration and sharing functionality but I really recommend you just download the demo and check it out for yourself. I’m off to try and emulate Eddie’s “Brown sound” and write me a VH classic!