Music Production Apps For iPhone OS
Moore’s Law is alive and well – an iPhone now has about as much processing power as my desktop computer did seven years ago. Even before that, a lot of great music was produced on computers with far lower specs, so it seems entirely reasonable that modern smartphones can also be used for audio production…
In Touch With The Music
The speed and scale of the development of the iTunes app store has been quite remarkable, and there are now a lot of impressive music production apps available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. These range from simple chord charts to full-on digital audio workstations, and I’ve compiled a few of these below as an introduction to portable multi-touch music production.
Music Production Apps – Intua Beatmaker
The obvious starting point for iPhone OS music production if you want something that does it all – Intua’s Beatmaker app is basically a DAW in your pocket. It features 16 sample/drum pads, live recording/sampling functionality, a step sequencer and an arrangement sequencer. Beatmaker also comes with its own original sample library – entire albums of original music have already been produced using only this app.
Music Production Apps – Noise.io
Noise.io is a remarkably powerful synthesiser which was designed specifically to utilise the unique control surface that the iPhone/iTouch offers. As well as multitouch dragging, it provides a velocity-sensitive keyboard and a host of sound design options for some wild audio bending. Here’s a video of a track made solely on the iPhone, with Intua Beatmaker and noise.io at the center of the action…
Music Production Apps – Simple Songwriter
Here’s a bit of a change of pace – this, as its name suggests, is a songwriting tool which can assist in musical inspiration. It provides a table of common chords and chord sequences, and makes it easy for you to come up with musical progressions…
Music Production Apps – Bloom
No introduction to iPhone production would be complete without a reference to Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers’ Bloom. This is a delicate and intuitive ambient music/visual generation app which has an obvious appeal…
Music Production Apps – Hexatone
New technologies are beginning to push the development of new keyboard layouts – Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater was a fan of the physical Axis keyboard controller which has a hexagonal honeycomb key structure, and now that interface has been ported across to the iPhone OS in app format…