As a guitarist and indie home studio producer, I always rely on both my guitar and my iPad to do all the music stuffs. I can’t deny that iPhone and iPad has played a huge part in my entire music leraning experience. Playing After doing this stuff the whole year, I want to share my favorite iPhone/iPad apps that have been a huge help for me as an indie home studio producer/guitarist in producing music.
Best Tabular/Chord: Ultimate Guitar Tabs
If you’re looking for an app that has all the guitar chords of any songs you can imagine, then this app will suit your need. Ultimate Guitar Tabs has the largest catalog of guitar chords, tabs and lyrics and even for ukulele. It doesn’t stop on that only. You can even learn how to play the chords with the chord diagram that has notes placement on fret board. It makes you play your favorite song like it was nothing. And even better, you can use this app without internet connection (well, you only need the connection just to update your song catalog). Oh, one more fancy thing about this app is that this app will autoscroll the song for you. Just enter the tempo that you want to play with and the app will scroll it down for you automatically.
Best Guitar Learning: Tab Pro
Want to play guitar lick from your favorite guitarist but the drum sounds too loud so you couldn’t hear the lick properly? Then you’ll need to use Tab Pro. With HQ playback and Multiple Tracks features, you can play your favorite song with an accurate tab from multiple instruments. It’ makes you able to learn specific instrument of the particular song (rhythm guitar only? done, solo guitar? done, and still many more instruments). If you think the song is moving too fast, you can slow down the tempo. Or if you want to just learn the specific part of the song, Tab Pro can loop that specific fragment of the song to let you master the song perfectly. You can also create your own favorite song list to access it without any internet connection.
Best Tuner: Tunable: Tuner, Metronome, and Recorder
There are many tuner applications out there in the store. But for me, I go with Tunable for tuning my electric and acoustic guitar. Beside the beautiful flat design, it gives you a beautiful metronome as well. This metronome has been a great used for me, helping me play the guitar more in the right steps. Not only helping, Tunable also improves my ear with tone and chord generator. This feature helps me to check a note without taking so much time to guess the right note.
Best Guitar Effect/Stomp/Amp: JamUp Pro XT
Like the Tuner app, there are waay too many guitar effect apps in the store. But for stability reason, I choose JamUp Pro for my guitar companion. JamUp Pro offers a wide line up of stomp-boxes, amps, and rack effects (it includes distortion, compression, delay, reverb, filters, tremolo, noise gate, bass effect, and even acoustic amp). It also has this Jam player that can be used to play together with your guitar complete with all the effects from JamUp. Not only that, JamUp also have live-view that enable to you to switch from one preset to another with ease. You can also copy other guitarists effect preset with this ToneSharing features. It showcases all the presets that the world has created with JamUpPro, and you can simply choose it and try it yourself.
Best Loop Workstation: Loopy HD
There’s a time that you think, “ah, i should’ve put this in a loop and use it to make some cool sound”. Well, wait no longer. You don’t need to buy that expensive loop workstation anymore to make a cool sound, you just have to use Loopy by atastypixel. Loopy has been well known for the best loop workstation for iPhone. Although the app is very difficult to master for advanced user, in contrary the app is really easy to use for beginner. The app is as simple as, tap to record, tap to stop, and tap to play the loop. But on the other hand, to master it you need to see the interactive tutorial. After you see all the tutorial, you’re guaranteed to be satisfied with the quality of this product.
Jimmy and Billy Joel loop their voices on an iPad app to form a 2-man doo-wop group — singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens in 4-part harmony.
Best Multitrack Recording
There have been two different points of view when talking about recording apps. The one that use BeatMaker for their project, and the one that think GarageBand is enough for their home studio recording. For that reason, I’ve decided to put both of them in this list.
BeatMaker 2
BeatMaker is more of the hard-core app when we talk about iOS recording ecosystem. With this second version, the app is coming with many more features than their first version. It has more than 170 high-quality instrument and drum presets from synthesizers to realistic orchestral sounds. And like most multi track recording would be, it offers AudioMIDI support which means you can play your MIDI accessories connected with this app (of course with MIDI interface). BeatMaker 2 serves you with a really powerful drum machine. With 16 pads over 8 banks, you can even create your own drum machine bank presets with Chop Lab features. It also has that many basic features of what Multi-Track recording app should have, for example: Multi-track sequencer, partial undo, pre-roll, note erasing, resize patterns, wave editor, and also mixer console.
GarageBand
If BeatMaker is the hardcore, GarageBand is more to a user friendly multi track recording. The app is easier to learn and use. But at the same time it held almost the same powerful features as BeatMaker 2 has. GarageBand is powerful when it comes to the Touch Instruments. It has a Multi-Touch gestures to play with instruments like piano, organ, guitar, drums, bass, and even a violin. Smart Instruments makes us play like a pro even if you haven’t play any instruments before. What makes GarageBand even more amazing is the feature called Inter-App Audio. With this feature, you can stream your audio outside the garageband app. It means that you can record guitar with the amazing stomp-boxes from JamUp Pro inside GarageBand without any loss of quality.
Best Guitar Play: iFretless Guitar
Who said you can’t play a guitar if you don’t have one? iFretless Guitar tries their best to counter this statement with their app. iFretless is coming with a concept of a guitar fretboard to replace two handed playing and strumming with a one touch per note. This enables you to play melodies, scales, and arpeggios without any guitar in your hands. It just your iPhone and iFretless Guitar.
