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Create music on your iOS device with these software packages
There are a lot of music-making programs for iOS available in the App Store. Some of these involve building beats with a playable interface or drum-machine-style grid; some extend the paradigm to include audio loop libraries; some have builtin software instruments; and some—not as many as you might think—can record audio directly, like Sonoma Wire Works’ FourTrack (reviewed December 2010). We’ll be featuring many of those programs in future iOS Music Tools columns, and do our best to explain what makes each one unique as we try to match products to workflow preferences. But where to start? For our first look at comprehensive music-composing programs, we did something very unscientific: we looked at the chatter among folks using them already. Devon Brent noticed one name popping up all the time in reviews of a wide variety of iOS music apps, and I noticed another... and that’s as good a place to start as any. Even non-iOS users will want to see what these two products can do. Let’s check them out.—MM

For Composers

Reviews by Mike Metlay and Devon Brent

Apple GarageBand
$4.99; www.apple.com/ipad/from-the-app-store/garageband.html

Two things become very clear when you look at what Apple’s GarageBand for the iPad can do. One is that thanks to Apple’s inside track on developing hardware and software in tandem for iOS, it does at least a couple of things no one else is doing yet, while doing a whole bunch of other things better than the competition. The other is that at five bucks, it’s a no-brainer to buy and try for yourself. Getting started with Instruments GarageBand’s creative process starts with making and recording audio, and it gives you a choice of nine Instruments with which to do this. Two of the Instruments, the Guitar Amp and the Audio Recorder, actually record your own audio sources into GarageBand (while adding effects processing); we’ll get to them later. The other seven are called Touch Instruments and create sounds internally. Touch Instruments’ data is stored as MIDI rather than audio, so you can quantize it and transpose it when arranging and mixing a Song. The Touch Instruments are divided into three Instruments played by hand, with their parts recorded as is, and four Smart Instruments, which use special user interface tweaks to help non-players (or players who know one type of instrument but not another, e.g. guitar players who want to lay down keyboard lines) get usable ideas quickly. Apple’s approach to all of these Instruments is unique, and makes GarageBand stand out from all other iOS music apps we’ve seen so far. The three hand-played Touch Instruments are Drums, Keyboard, and Sampler. You can play any of these instruments from the onscreen controls or hook up an external controller via the Apple Camera Connection Kit, which lets you control compliant iPad apps with external USB devices. While this will give you the most intuitive playing feel, it bypasses some of the cool features that come from playing GarageBand from the screen, which I’ll discuss below. The Drums are the simplest, with a choice of three acoustic kits and three drum machines. You play the sounds by tapping the drums in the interface or the pads on the virtual machine, and there are a few controls to tweak your sounds. The Keyboards offer a large selection of piano, electric piano, organ, clav, and synth
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sounds, with effects and sound parameters tweakable on many of the models. And the Sampler lets you record a sound into the iPad’s internal mic or audio input, then play it back from a keyboard with pitch transposition, looping, basic envelope editing, even reversed playback.

http://www.apple.com/ipad/from-the-app-store/garageband.html

Recording - November 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - November 2011