I'm not a real musician, but I love playing around with music apps... I own FingerBeat, JR Hexatone, Dopplerpad, Noise.io and Xewton Music Studio. Fingerbeat is the easiest to use, you can create smaller loops pretty easily, but you won't get far with it. Noise.io was very overwhelming at the beginning, but you can create some pretty nice patterns with it. Dopplerpad has a huge potential, too. It makes a lot of fun to mess with it and try to nake some nice sounds Hexatone is in my opinion a nice App for creating drum patterns. It will give you a totally new perspective on making sound loops. Xewton Music Studio is the most impressive, yet hardest to use, music app. For real musicians it is a must-have in my opinion.
Then you might want to try ThumbJam. It has the most realistic sounding instruments you will find on the iPhone and for a non-musician that enjoys music, it's gratifying just to play, without knowing how to play. It is $5.99 but well worth it! For the best mind blowing sound ... use your headphones!
i own Xewton Music Studio and it's one of the best app i own.. it just need more percussion instruments and perhaps.... i forgot lol
Thumbjam looks interesting... but something keeps me from buying it... I dont know what... the screenshots look weird.
ThumbJam is amazing.. I love the looping features, direct import and export of samples, recording of your own samples.. not to mention, the best sounding instruments I think I have ever heard in synthesis.. Even professional musicians can respect what this device does.. if nothing else, lets you get your ideas out quickly and produce something to email off to yourself / splice up and throw into your own DAW... endless.. it really is my favorite app so far..
I thought about ThumbJam again, and I finally bought it... let's see if a non musician can do anything with it
seems like the best overall studio type apps are Beatmaker and Xewton. think i'll wait for Xewton to implement their sampling features before i make my purchase. i'm a hiphop beat maker, and wouldnt mind messing around on the go to get some ideas together. anything you can recommend? and on a fun tip, what are some good DJ / mixing / scratching apps that you can recommend? some for fun, and some for actual work / brainstorming?
Flare and Touch DJ.. Flare offers that vinyl scratching sound and it's pretty fun. Touch DJ is a more professional app for aspiring DJs. It's fantastic - best of its kind hands down.
I'm impressed. If you aren't scared by the UI (It looks unfriendly at the beginning ) and try to work yourself through the menus, you can easily create some pretty nice sounds. I needed a few minutes to find out how the recording thing works, but all in all the App is very polished! I found a "Collaborate" option somewhere... is it possible to work on one Recording with two devices? It sounds awesome to me
ThumbJam is freaking amazing. If you've ever played with BeBot (one of my favorite iPhone apps), this is essentially the full-fledged sequel to it. The sound you can make with this app is absolutely incredible, and I love the ability to shake the device to add vibrato or pitch bend. The looping feature allows anyone to make a song once you pick a particular key to play in. It's so cool. The only thing missing (if anything) is some sort of sequencer, so you can lay out a full song. This is more like an amazing improv session simulator. I wish I knew someone else with an iPhone/iTouch and this app, because it even has a bluetooth collaboration mode where you can jam together.
For putting together very simple things with recorded samples, FingerBeat is a nice thing I guess. Although I haven't recorded own samples for it yet, making some small loops with it is very easy. The interface looks well done everything is very user friendly. For a more professional mixing of self recorded things, DopplerPad is nice, too. Xewton will get a sample function? Great (too bad I bought it a few weeks before they put it on sale )
I've been getting tons of fun out of The Muppets Animal Drummer. It's more of a "rhythmic Simon" than Rock Band. Free play mode is fantastic. It's not the best sounding drum app, but man is it fun to play along with the ipod.
do any of the dj apps let you scratch or mix over your own library that's on your phone/touch? i downloaded one, and it was horrible.
not my reviews ....but keeping the info in one place http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?p=800902#post800902
Just thought to drop a quick note to inform you of a demo video of our upcoming CHORDiCA Touch app. The vision of Scoreless Music is to enable anyone to make music. With that vision in mind, and seeing how almost all iPhone music instrument apps are poorly designed for the blind to use, Scoreless Music went to the drawing board and came up with CHORDiCA Touch. CHORDiCA Touch is possibly the 1st iPhone music instrument app that has deliberate design and assistive technology that does not discriminate against the visually handicapped. Watch this video to see a short demonstration of the Vocal Coach in action. All the best for 2010! http://chordica.com
TabToolkit is useful for those who play guitar, bass, drums and other instruments that tabbed. I use it often because it supports Guitar Pro tabs, and basic text tabs (I hate txt tabs though) and you can mute all the other instruments in it when playing back a Guitar Pro or Power Tab.
