Favourite music iPad apps

michelew
Posts: 87
Joined: Sat Aug 22, 2009 5:43 pm
Location: Sydney, Australia
Status: Offline

Thu Nov 29, 2012 8:37 pm

Hi y'all

Well I've got a bit of time on my hands today and I can't play my guitar or watch videos, so I decided to start this thread. I'm often asking for advice and I get a heap of fabulous information and suggestions from you generous folk. So, this is an attempt to give a little back by sharing my experience in the hope that some of you may benefit from it, especially because I know that at least one TGer is considering getting an iPad. :)

This is basically a discussion of the iPad applications that I'm using the most for music related stuff and a little of why. I'd love to hear whether any of you have different experiences and what you're favourites are and of course why.

I find myself doing most of my guitar playing and learning away I'm my Mac now. I generally sit in the lounge room on the couch (perhaps not great for my posture - it's pretty low). But one of the greatest benefits of the iPad is that it gives you the mobility to play and learn wherever you want to be, you're not tethered to your computer.

This is probaaaably my top 10 and is sort of ordered by how much I use it (or have in the past).

1. Cleartune - this is on my phone too. I can tune my guitar wherever I am, which is really cool. It's visual and you can control the needle's sensitivity (and a bunch of technical stuff that I don't get or use). I understand its an accurate tuner. It's very easy to use.

2. Amazing Slow Downer (ASD) - the Mac version is great, but the iPad (and iPhone) version are even better and even friendly. You can take any song in your iTunes library and change the pitch, change the tempo, loop it, create a stack of loops for sections of the song and save them under separate names. It's brilliant! And it's really intuitive. This is probably the best tool I have in my guitar learning tool box, if you haven't looked at it yet do yourself a favour (to steal a line from Molly Meldrum) and check it out.

3. ForScore - this is brilliant for storing music tab, sheet music, and music pdfs (like Neil's lessons) it accepts many file formats. Who needs 600 three ring binders (hint, hint Bear) when you can store it all in this database and take ALL of your music (all your electonic files) with you wherever you go. You can search on a bunch of different info (depending on how much meta data you include). And the last five played filed are stored for easy access. Generally the name of the song and the composer is stored when you import music into it, but you can change the info and enter info like store genre, keywords like fingerpicking, barre chords, whatever you like. You can create set lists which make this really useful. I create a new one from time to time for the stuff I'm working on and/or playing regularly at that time. I also have lists that are primarily easy songs, primarily strumming stuff, primarily finger picking, etc. You can annotate the pages too.

One of the most brilliant aspects of this application is that it will turn the page for you. All you have to do is set the tempo, the time signature and the number of beats or bars for each page. To get it working, you start the metronome (normal clicking or a silent visual pulsing one), you start playing and then hey presto when you reach the bottom of the page it turns the page for you, it's fantastic. Better still, if your time it properly you can use the ASD to play against a slowed down song and read the sheet music/tab too. I love it.

4. GarageBand (GB) - this has to be the greatest value for money of all the music apps. Hmmm... Well it's damn good anyway. I use it to record a single track, say from my bass, then I transfer that into GarageBand on my Mac, which has greater functionality. (I initially did this because i couldn't connect my guitar directly to my Mac (and GB). But the iPad version, while cut down is great. And it comes into it's own if you have an electric guitar (or bass) that you would normally need an amp for. Not only can you record without an amp (and play through the iPad's speakers), but you can waste an ENORMOUS amount of time playing with the huge variety of different amps (32) and effect pedal (10 - 4 simultaneously) combinations. It's wickedly fun. And hilarious. :). Why spend hundreds, thousands(?) of dollars on amps and pedals (if you're not performing in public) when you can get all of this for $5. You can even export your amped/processed sound to external speakers in real time. :) Brilliant!

I initially used iRig to interface my guitar to my iPad and GB. But, I had issues with noise and feedback. I've since discovered Jam by Apogee. It's $99 instead of $50, but the sound difference is astounding. And I can use headphones through the normal iPad headphone jack rather than the one on the iRig which I find better too. The Jam also allows you to interface directly with your Mac through a USB port, which you can't do with the iRig. I highly recommend the Jam. It's just an interface, but the sound difference is well worth it.

You can get other amp apps like Amplitude, Fender, Amps... But they use iRig and if I can't use Jam then I'm not interested now. (Until a better iRig comes along).

5. Guitar Pro - this is especially useful for TG lessons because Neil provides GP files. It also allows you to focus on a single line of music, which is hard to do when listening to songs through ASD, it also (of course) plays the music as written. You can slow it down, speed it up, change the pitch, loop. And of course you can also annotate the music and use it to write tab/scores if you're into that. It's really useful.

6. Ultimate Guitar - Tabs - I know that there are a few tab apps. But, I do prefer this one. They seem to be set out better, you can easily change the font size and the key and you can use autoscroll (I hope I'm not confusing this one). I like the way the tabs are stored too. The down side of this app is that it's a subscription app, $12 a year. That's pretty expensive given people post their tabs for free. But I pay it regardless because I find it useful.

7. Planet Waves ChordMaster - this is a 'how do I play that chord?' app. I like how easy it is to use and that it offers chords all the way up the neck. It doesn't have some chord types like sus2, but it has lots of fancy blues and jazz chords it you want to go there.

8. Musicopolous - this is a great music theory app, it's visual and plays music examples so you can hear the lesson and the keyboard allows you to answer the quiz questions and see and hear where you're going wrong. It's cool.

9. GuitarAtSight - this is good for reading sheet music and familiarising yourself with the fretboard. It comes in bass and ukulele versions too. :) I find th bass one particularly good because my bass clef skills are really weak. You can test yourself on just the note name too.

10. HD Voice Recorder - cool for recording your friendly neighbourhood frogs in HD. :)

I have many others, including little black book song books (Beatles) and some other cool apps, but these are the 10 that I use most or have at some point and found useful.

The iPad is fantastic for music. There are some great guitar magazines too, which now come with video links and music samples. I won't mention them by name, but the iPad is great for music magazines too.

Other stuff that's good for TGers:

iTune - say no more

Podcasts - you can subscribe to Neil's weekly news broadcast. I don't tend to watch it this way because there is a lag between it being posted on the forum and it appearing on the podcast list. I generally watch it on the day the news is posted to the forum. But, if you're going on a trip or somewhere where you won't have Internet access, you can download Neil's podcast to this app and watch it later.

Safari - derrrrr! You can watch Neil's lessons. This used to be pretty slow, but now I can watch Neil's lessons on my iPad while sitting wherever I want to without any issues (I watch it on low resolution). Brilliant!!!

And of course you can read and participate in the forum and watch TG member videos until your heart's content. :) like in bed. :)

Well there you go. Was that my longest post yet? Probably. :) I hope some of you find this useful. If you have other favourite apps tell us about them. Or if you think some of the info here is misleading or wrong, then let me know.

Enjoy and play, play play. I hope I haven't fuelled any itches that you DIDN'T want to scratch. :)

Shel


(Sent from my iPad) :) :) :)