ToneStone is a music production app from the people behind Guitar Hero and Left 4 Dead

ToneStone is an app designed to make producing music easy, even for users without any musical experience, and it’s created by people who worked on Guitar Hero and Left 4 Dead. Even though the app is officially being announced today, it’s still in closed beta, and there’s a waitlist for those who want to try it out. As a music production hobbyist, ToneStone’s interface and game-like features very much seem like my kind of jam, based on videos I’ve seen of the app and my conversation with founder Greg LoPiccolo.

Read the full article on The Verge.

Meet ToneStone

We’re thrilled to announce our newest investment in ToneStone, an interactive musical creativity platform.

The ToneStone platform combines easy-to-use tools, countless sounds, and engaging gameplay to enable interactive musical creations and experiences, allowing anyone to create and share professional sounding music without the need for formal music training.

Founders Greg LoPiccolo and Tom Leonard have decades of experience at Harmonix, Valve, and Amazon Game Studios, releasing games such as Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and Left 4 Dead. Their experiences made them believers in the power of combining music with gameplay, player-driven platforms, and user generated content (UGC). These beliefs led to the creation of ToneStone, which offers creator tools and game mechanics, on the scale of a platform with endless UGC possibilities.

You can make and share amazing videos with the phone in your pocket, but musical creativity is still elusive to many. That’s why we started building ToneStone. We realized that so many people want to make music, but that the available tools weren’t great for casual creators.”

- Greg LoPiccolo, CEO, ToneStone

Why ToneStone?

We like ToneStone because they not only align with our core values at Tyr Ventures, but also because they share our strong belief in the creator economy.

In the past, content in the video game and film industries has primarily been financed, published, and distributed by large companies and institutions who leveraged this dynamic into lucrative businesses for themselves, but that often took advantage of the creators of the content. It seems like an obvious proposition that the people that create the content should reap the benefits of their creative work, but we forget that historically most of the value has gone to the entities who finance the content (for example, game publishers, film studios, and music labels). Today content is being produced by individuals and small productions using innovative new tools and platforms that allow creators to create, own, market, and distribute their work while being fairly compensated in an open creator economy.

We believe that ToneStone has the opportunity to become a cornerstone of the creator economy by enabling content creators of all types to add original music to their works.

It’s vital to us that our investments recognize the power of the community and provide that community with meaningful value. ToneStone is a great example of this. With their music creation software, they are providing a truly unique tool that empowers a global community of music lovers to create, listen, collaborate, and share.

ToneStone was also created in part to fill a gap in what the founders saw as a lack of music education in schools. Cuts to music education funding mean that thousands of kids will not be able to discover the joys of creating and performing music, nor reap the positive benefits that music education has across all areas of intellectual development. It is ToneStone's hope (and ours) that ToneStone will bridge that educational gap.

We look forward to supporting ToneStone’s launch and beyond!

ToneStone is currently in private beta, but you can sign up for a chance to check out the platform by joining their waitlist here.

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