It’s an exciting time to be a musician, as both smartphones and tablets have become more popular, developers have gone to great lengths to give us many functional and creative apps. Allowing us to have access to an incredible amount of creative and utility tools with just a single IOS device.
So today we’ve gathered up 5 of our favorite apps that we deem ‘must haves’ for musicians that will allow you to have a plethora of powerful tools at your disposal from a single device.
Guitar Tuna
It’s an embarrassing situation when you forget to bring your tuner, and the awkward moment before band practice when you have to lean over to your fellow guitarist and ask if you can borrow his.
This is where Guitar Tuna steps in, it’s one of the most comprehensive and robust tuning apps for iOS that will work with electronic and acoustic guitar, bass guitar, and can even tune ukuleles and 12 strings, as well as a huge range of alternate tunings across each instrument.
Then, as an added bonus, it also has an in-built metronome, chord library, and some minigames to help you learn different music theory concepts from chord families to scales.
A simple yet accurate and comprehensive app for any musician!
Garageband iOS
If you’re a musician and a Mac user, there’s a good chance you’ve already spent some quality time with Garageband. It comes free on any OS based system and for many is a gateway to Apple’s bigger DAW offering, Logic Pro.
Designed with the beginner in mind, Garageband has always offered easy, intuitive, and creative ways to write, record, and edit music in a way that even an absolute beginner can get great results with.
It’s powerful and feature complete enough to where you can both compose and produce full, studio quality tracks purely within Garageband iOS and is an absolute must for any musician interested in production.
‘The Metronome’ by Soundbrenner
So, you might be thinking that metronomes are all the same and there’s nothing special that differentiates one from the other.
But the truth is, as apps have matured over the years they have introduced features that are now absolutely invaluable and I couldn’t imagine using a metronome without them.
So what makes it so special?
At first glance, yes, it’s a simple metronome that has a pleasant sound and a beautifully sleek black interface, that is laid out in a way that is both intuitive and accessible.
It gives you additional pitch control over each subdivision, so say for example you are in 4/4 and you wanted a slightly different tone on your 3rd beat, you can do that. This makes playing along to rhythmically challenging songs much easier as you can stress any part of the bar you wish.
You can even save any setting in the app’s song library which saves you the trouble of needing to memorize and re-input the settings each time you need to play a particular song.
Minimoog Model D (minimoog)
Possibly the most famous synthesizer of all time, the Minimoog has an aura of prestige and quality surrounding it that few other synthesizers have. Popularized by artists such as Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, and Pink Floyd, the Minimoog is now an extremely rare, and ludicrously expensive instrument.
Yet, people still desire those thick sounding oscillators and iconic ladder filters. So the idea of having one in your pocket seems like a dream too good to be true!
Well, while it’s not exactly identical, Moog has created a fantastic emulation of it, and it’s available on iOS absolutely free!
There are also new effects thrown in such as arpeggiators and delays which are modeled from the popular ‘moogerfooger’ pedals.
iMASCHINE 2
Maschine is a long-running line of production and performance hardware units from Native Instruments that allow you to create tracks or beats in a fun and easy to use way.
However, these units are serious bits of kit and can cost quite a lot of money. So if you like their concept but can’t quite make the leap to hardware, you might want to consider iMASCHINE 2 which is Native Instruments mobile/iOS equivalent.
It gives you access to a full sampler, arranger, pads, and midi keyboard allowing you to use any of the in-built sounds or expansions purchased from Native Instruments. It also has great synergy with hardware units allowing you to export your mix/effects for use on regular Maschine hardware.
Software at its finest
It’s a very exciting time to be involved in iOS based music creation, we are truly spoiled with so many tools and instruments that cover all the utility and creative aspects of music that we could want.
We hope the apps we’ve shared today will make your life a little easier as a musician, or help fuel your creative spark for your next song or production.
