LAMB OF GOD’S VOX OF GOD iPHONE APP: GOOD FOR A ONE-NIGHT STAND, NOT LONG-TERM GF
I’m an unabashed Apple/iPhone fanboy and I also love Lamb of God, so when the band announced they’d released the Vox of God iPhone app a couple of weeks ago I decided to take it for a spin. The app promises to create “a vocal simulation of Lamb of God lead singer Randy Blythe’s vocal style by applying advanced audio processing techniques and audio modulation to [any] voice that is recorded with the app.” This little doo-hickey is gonna make my puny, nasally voice sound all scary and awesome like Blythe’s?? Sweet!
As advertised, Vox of God does make me sound like Blythe. But that’s about it — the gimmick wears off fast, and there’s not a whole lot to it.
Best used with headphones to avoid an infinite feedback loop, users can talk, sing or whisper into the iPhone’s mic and their voices will be magically and instantly transformed into a bowel-shaking death growl. Two options allow you to either record to a 15-second loop of a Lamb of God song as a backing track, or to nothing at all. You can save your recordings and share them via social networks, and the app naturally has built-in links to visit’s Lamb of God’s website and buy their new album Resolution.
Unfortunately, the fun doesn’t last for very long. There’s not really much practical use for this app — I guess you could use it to record a vocal track for your own material that you’d then import into GarageBand or something, but that’d be a logistical headache — and once you’ve played with it for a minute or two the fun wears off. To use videogame jargon, there’s no re-play value here whatsoever. You use it once, then you’ll probably never touch it again.
At $1.99, I can’t really recommend that anyone downloads this app for the mere couple of minutes of fun it’ll provide. Lamb of God would’ve been much better off viewing this app as a marketing tool, encouraging thousands of folks to download this by app releasing it for free, then counting any small amount of album/merch sales it happened to generate as a nice little bonus.
-VN
