BAND MATES makes that dream available and accessible to everyone. Rock Band meets Garage Band — an "all play, no work" way of making music, where anyone can play with anyone else, whatever they know about music.
Music takes years of lessons, expensive instruments and hours of practice. Band Mates takes all of that away.
You don’t need to read music, own an instrument, or have ever made anything before. That isn’t a compromise in the design — it’s the point of it.
Nothing to set up and no lesson to sit through. On a controller, chords sit on a wheel and show as colours — you never see a note name. On keyboard and mouse, it’s a piano instead. They’re genuinely different instruments, not the same thing with different buttons. Either way, the first thing you do makes music.
The whole session shares one root, mode, tempo and swing, and every instrument is locked to them. It isn’t a difficulty setting — it’s the part of music that was never the fun bit, taken away. What’s left to decide is where the song goes.
It’s very easy to make music that sounds good in BAND MATES. The magic is that you feel like you did that — not that the game did it for you. That’s the part people don’t expect, and it’s the part they remember.
Record what you played and keep going: a 16-step sequencer you can extend and edit note by note, five tracks per instrument, effects and mixing. Six tutorial lessons and a 34-entry glossary are in there too, for when you want to know why something worked. The depth is there when you want it and out of the way when you don’t.
Multiplayer isn’t a mode bolted on afterwards — the game was built around it. Up to four players, one per band member. On one machine that’s couch co-op, a controller each. Online it’s a friends-only lobby, where the notes and the clock cross the wire while every machine renders its own audio — so you hear each other play live, not a stream of someone else’s game.
Send a song to someone else and let them take it somewhere you never would have. A single song can carry up to four editors, so the four-piece band survives even when nobody’s online at the same time. Make it, share it, get it back different.
One player per band member, up to four. Playing solo, you take each of them in turn and layer the parts up until the song is whole.
"I've never been able to play instruments, and this game makes me feel like I am."
— Playtester, GDC
The free demo is the whole game — no cut-down build, no locked features. A Nintendo Switch version is planned after launch. English only for now. Around 3.4 GB installed.