APP CULTURE

The app behind Emma Blackery's new material

Emma Blackery started her YouTube channel to promote her music at first, but it kind of took her off in a different direction. It was her comedy skits and confessionals that helped supercharge her subscriber base to the 1.4 million she has today.

Now, having lived the YouTube life, she’s concentrating more and more on her music. She’s been releasing material throughout her rise to fame, of course, and had been part of several other bands before going solo in 2012 with pop-punk EP Human Behaviour. EPs Distance (2013), Perfect (2014) and Sucks To Be You (2016) followed, but her poppier 2017 Magnetised EP was her highest-profile record yet.

After performing in several bands, Blackery struck out on her own in 2012.

Now, Blackery is recording a raft of new tunes, and all of that material started life in synth and beatmaking app Auxy.

“It’s how I’ve been making all of the demos for my new music,” she tells us. “You can write entire songs on it – I do it on the go, with headphones on. That’s literally what I’ve been sending to co-writers.”

“I started off using other people’s sampled tracks and working out how they do stuff…now I’m able to write songs from scratch using this app,” Blackery continues. “When I first downloaded it I was like ‘oh my God how am I going to use this?’ because I had no experience with beat machines or anything before. But now I can literally just write a song in this – it’s quite intuitive.”

Auxy has become the starting point for much of Blackery's new material.

There’s no shortage of music creation apps out there – the likes of Medly, NOIZ and FunkBox Drum Machine – but Auxy proved particularly fruitful because Blackery “wanted to go in a more pop direction, and it’s got loads of synths," she adds. "Obviously, they get built on in the studio but it gives my producers and co-writers some ideas to work from.”

Alongside her YouTube videos about life, making music and other silly stuff, Blackery aims to have a new single out early next year, before releasing a full debut album in the summer of 2018.