Ever wanted to unleash your inner beat poet, but lacked the backing bongos and stand-up bass? Or felt your very own three-chord rock classic bubbling up within you, but lack the guitar or the chops to play one? There's an app for that.
Zoozbeat is a free application from Zooz Mobile for the iPhone. With it, you can create and remix your own music just by tapping and shaking the phone—the app will convert your gestures to music, using sampled musical instruments. Then you can save your creation, and share it with friends over Facebook and other social networks.
The app comes with a number of styles of instruments, in sets of sampled instruments and percussion, or "beat sets", that range from basic jazz to rock to hip-hop. If you feel limited by the free sets that come with Zoozbeat, there are a number of other beat sets that you can purchase from within the app for a dollar.
You can also add your own voice on top of the instruments, or record other sounds, using the iPhone's microphone. Once you've completed your musical masterpiece, you can save it to the Zoozbeat website, and post it to your Facebook wall or Twitter feed.
Zoozbeat has also produced custom versions of its application, including two versions that use the music of the Jackson 5. Using samples from some of the Jackson 5's greatest hits, you can remix and rearrange to create your own versions. Zoozbeat currently is running a contest based on the Jackson 5 app, offering a grand prize of $1,500 for the best remix of a classic Jackson 5 song, and $250 each to 3 runners-up.
Even if you don't feel your producer skills are up to the competition's, the apps cost less downloading the songs themselves from iTunes. And they're worth the price of admission just for the flashback value for those of us who listened to the songs first on 45s.