Favorite Four – Music Creation Apps

Posted by Chris Nitz on September 22nd, 2010

Music production is no longer something that is restrained to long hours in a studio with egg carton foam plastered all over the walls. Now everyone from the most skilled beat mixers to the metalheads next door can throw down tracks that would make even Lady Gaga quiver in her Meat Dress.

How is the next composer of ear bleeding beats supposed to lay down tracks while on the road, though? For those who need to get their music production on while praying to some deity in a cab ride of death, the App Store has your solution. Here are four apps worthy of your musical talents, as have hit our fancy lately.

DigiDrummer – DigiDrummer is one of those apps that snuck onto the App Store at an early stage in the App Store’s life. This app has since grown to be one of the best drumming apps around. Version 3 has brought on a wealth of sounds, recording options, and a completely new level of being quiet in your bedroom while you bang on the drums all day. There is even the option to bash real drums instead of those ho-hum beat pads. Who knows, you just might be the next Brett Domino Trio in the making with this.

Looptastic – Looptastic is chock full of loops for virtual DJ maestros. Over 380 loops spanning genres like techno, house, hip-hop, and ambient are available for blending, melding, and spinning goodness. If that is not enough, import loops to add to the list. Loop up to four minutes of ear pleasing goodness and then kick it out in a CD quality track to share with everyone on that contact list.

Not enough to get that hard earned coin yet. How about having nine different effects to meld all that looping sexiness together. Top it all off with playing 20 loops at one shot and you got something computer software just might be jealous of.

iSyn – iSyn touts itself as a virtual studio right on your iPhone. Starting off the beat train is two synthesizers. Each of these synthesizers contains three oscillators, 24db/oct ladder-style lowpass filter, and full modulation routings.

Taking it to the next level, iSyn will allow users to work on 32 projects. Each project can contain two synthesizers blending in 32 patterns and 1 drum set. There is even some Audio/MIDI live recording to keep the features on the greener side of the fence.

Ultimate Guitar Tabs – Ever wanted access to those guitar tablatures from CCR? This app is here to help users get their rock on. Over 300,000 guitar, bass, and drum tablatures are easily searchable on the iPhone.

Once that song from the 70’s has been found, users can add it to their favorites so there is no need for future searching. Keeping those guitar chords new is easy with a Top 100 tableture list for each tablature type. The app even goes so far as to scroll tabs for users so they can keep playing without having to move things along on the iPhone. Who knows, maybe the next Slash is using this right now.