Now you can jam like Timbaland, thanks to Open Labs’ StageLight app

It’s one thing to create music that’s influenced by artists you admire, but what if you could actually team up with those artists to create a new song?

That’s in effect what’s happening with music startup Open Labs‘ latest update to its StageLight software. The company recently added a soundboard — sounds and drum machine beats taken directly from a sound library — that was created by hip-hop superstar and investor Timbaland.

So if you want to create your own soundtracks, using Timbaland’s sounds and beats, you can do it with StageLight for about $30.

“We’ve been a little bit overwhelmed by how interested people are in this,” Open Labs founder Cliff Mountain said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Tim has had a phenomenal career… It’s wonderful to actually get someone who has a lot of history and wonderful sounds over the last few decades, and who’s still relevant and in the middle of [the popular music scene] today.”

StageLight is like a more user-friendly, accessible version of Pro Tools, the audio-editing software used by a large portion of the music industry. StageLight’s main selling point is that you shouldn’t be limited to the kind of music you create just because you don’t have years upon years of experience learning how to edit it. The same goes (to an extent) for honing musical ability, too. The StageLight 1.3 software includes tools like “Key Lock,” which helps artists maintain the key of their composition quickly and easily.

To grab the soundboard created by Timbaland, you will need to buy the StageLight – Timbaland Edition package. The software, which contains all the tools needed to produce music from all genres (including hip-hop, of course), costs $30 for new users and is available on both Windows desktop and tablets. However, anyone who already own StageLight can download the Timbaland edition for just $20.

Not a fan of Timbaland? (Well, nobody is perfect.) StageLight also has soundboards available from Linkin Park, and Mountain told me he hopes to add soundboards to StageLight from other artists in the future as well, including sounds from prominent DJs.

The Austin, Texas-based Open Labs has raised a total of $2.1 million in funding to date. For a closer look at StageLight’s Timbaland update, check out the video below.