In a nutshell:

Music making on your mobile, but only if you’ve got a PHD.

What’s it good for?

Creating bleepy click-hop music, and giving yourself a headache in the process.

Judgement time…

Syntrax is ambitious. Turning your mobile into a music sequencer, it’s designed to let you create complex musical arrangements with just your phone’s keypad, the app’s built-in sound samples, and an awful lot of effort.

And that’s the problem. The effort required to extract tuneful noises from Syntrax is immense, and not helped by attempts to cram huge numbers of complex controls onto tiny screens.

If you’re unfamiliar with musical terminology, this is definitely not the app for you, especially since that terminology is, on the whole, abbreviated to make it twice as hard to understand.

Still, if you have a few hours to kill, a burning desire for frustration and the creation of tuneless bleeping, give Syntrax a whirl. If you really get stuck, you can always load up a demo track and pretend to be Jean Michel Jarre for the afternoon.

It’s clear Syntrax is capable of impressive musical feats, but it’s not for those who just want to fiddle about and make some simple tunes.