While writing the lyric of a song, you get stuck thinking about what could be the perfect phrase to express a specific emotion. Even after spending hours, you fail to touch the chords of those elusive feelings. Likewise, you wish to rock out the entire band but don’t get the desired inspiration to perform in the top-gear. Whether you are a seasoned artist or the one who aspires to be the next-gen king of pop, you must have the luxury of the best iPad and iPhone apps for musicians to help you break the shackles with the touch of innovative ideas.
1. Yousician
Yousician is what you should pick to learn piano, guitar, bass or ukulele in a fun way. The app keeps an eye on how and what you play and offers valuable inputs to improve both your timing and accuracy.
Designed by expert music teachers, the curriculum can be enormously helpful for musicians of all levels. So whether you are novice or pro, you will find this app spot on.
You can watch step-by-step video tutorials to learn how to play perfectly. Even better, you have more than 1,500 missions and exercises that will not just offer better practice but also keep you motivated to put your best foot forward.
Price: Free
2. PlayScore 2
Playscore 2 is a full notation music recognition app that’s a great addition to every singer’s toolkit. Just use your iPhone or iPad to take a picture of a music score or sheet music, and the app will play it back for you. You can even import music from PDF files.
There’s a lot that musicians can do with this app. For instance, you could create backing tracks by silencing the instrumental parts that you want to play. Or, you can create rehearsal parts for different voices in a vocal arrangement.
What’s more? It offers plenty of features and flexibility, such as the ability to loop sections of a track, change the tempo without affecting the pitch, and adjust volume, instrument, and transposition for each staff.
Moreover, you can create custom score documents that anyone can play using the free Playscore 2 player. This makes it easy to collaborate and rehearse with others on a song.
You can even export any score as MIDI and MusicXML. This makes it a handy tool for visually impaired musicians to import the file into a Braille music transcription app.
The user interface is relatively straightforward, and the app is easy to use. The free version lets you play and interact with PlayScore playable scores, listen to your part on its own, play music n 1 or 2 staves from a photo, and create and share single-page playable documents.
For full functionality, you can go for PlayScore’s Productivity or Professional subscriptions.
Price:
Productivity subscription – $3.99/month or $19.99/year
Professional subscription – $5.99/month or $22.99/year
3. forScore
A digital sheet music reader as impressive as forScore deserves to be on your radar. You can fully customize it to use as a smart file digital sheet music library. Use the app to create links to take control of repeats effortlessly. Play along to an audio track to ensure you stay in sync.
You will also be able to use the half-page turns to view the bottom half of the current page and the top half of the next one simultaneously. Furthermore, you can connect to cloud storage services like Dropbox to quickly import or export files. This App is compatible with iPad only.
Price: $9.99
4. Tempo
I have always rated Tempo very highly as a metronome app. It continues to run even in the lock mode, thereby being a very useful aid for live drumming. Tempo features 35 different time signatures such as compound and complex meters. You have six rhythm patterns for simple meters and three for compound meters.
You can ideally personalize accents or turn beats off to make complex rhythms. Depending on your requirement, you will also be able to control setlists, tempo, and playback with AirTurn, iRig BlueBoard, PageFlip Cicada, etc. That’s not all; it has pitch pipe to let you elegantly play all 12 chromatic pitches.
Price: $2.99
5. Cleartune
Get the most out of this chromatic instrument tuner and the pitch pipe to perfectly tune your instrument with the help of top-quality microphone of your iOS device! Cleartune is a fine tuner that features “note wheel” interface to let you effortlessly find your pitch.
There is also a highly responsive fine-tuning meter to let you discover an awesome tune. It has the support for multiple custom temperaments, transposition, notations like solfège, and adjustable calibration.
You can use Cleartune to tune an acoustic or electric guitar, bass, bowed strings, woodwinds, brass, piano, tympani and more. And yes, don’t fail to check out the built-in temperament for violin instruments.
Price: $3.99
6. Music Studio
Music Studio is a powerhouse and a must for aspiring musicians. The app offers an excellent music production environment with almost all the advanced features and fantastic sound quality.
Packed in with a piano keyboard, 123 studio-quality instruments with sustain, a 127-track sequencer, extensive note editing, reverb, it ensures you have all the tools required to compose great music. Oh yes, there are also ten real-time effects add the x-factor to your music.
It has categories like symphonic, classical, band, electronic, world, drum kits to ensure your experiment has more freedom. Better still, you can record up to 24 channels at one go with CoreAudio (class compliant) hardware.
Price: $14.99
8. Hokusai Audio Editor
Hokusai has long been a great multi-track audio editor. If you wish to edit your music with ease, you shouldn’t look beyond this one. You can quickly record or import a track to edit it nicely. Trim the unwanted parts, cut, copy, paste or delete the songs you don’t want anymore.
Use the app to edit multiple tracks side-by-side and mix them to create magic. Besides, you have a suite of tools like fade in/out, normalize volume levels, reverse time, and basic synthesis to give your music the needed flair to win hearts.
If you ever feel constrained, you can upgrade the app to unlock more powerful features like new tools and effects.
Price: Free
9. GuitarTuna
GuitarTuna boasts more than 100 tunings for 15 musical instruments. Perhaps, for this reason, this app has been downloaded over 80 million times. Its speed and accuracy are also instrumental in making this app such a huge success.
When you pluck the strings of your guitar, Tuna detects the sound using your iPhone or iPad’s microphone. The app gives you visual feedback of your tuning. While creating music, the app cancels background noise with its noise cancellation technology.
Price: Free
10. ThumbJam
Lashed with 40 real top-quality instruments, ThumbJam can get the best out of you. With the availability of a great many scales, you have the liberty to play in any style– from the evergreen classic to the scintillating rock. Making the most tilt and shake, ThumbJam adds vibrato, tremolo, and note bends to deliver the praiseworthy outcome.
ThumbJam for iPad offers eleven simultaneous touches and up to 32 voice polyphony (iPhone five). The delay and stereo reverb bring in more depth to the sound, whereas the resonant lowpass filter further enriches the sound quality. That aside, you also have a large variety of scales to try out.
Price: $8.99
11. GuitarToolkit
Here comes an adorable app for the guitarist! GuitarToolkit is loaded with several guitar tools including tuner, metronome, chords, scales & arpeggios so that you have the maximum flexibility to create the mesmerizing tune.
With the support of several instruments like 6-, 7- and 12-string guitar, 4-, 5- and 6-string bass, ukulele, banjo, and mandolin, it ensures your love for making enchanting tune has the license to thrill. The huge library of more than 2,000,000 chords, scales and arpeggios have you fully covered on all fronts. Besides, take advantage of custom-build patterns with up to 32 tracks and 75 different drum sounds to craft masterpiece.
Price: $2.99
12. Songwriter Pad
Songwriter Pad is a pretty good lyric writing tool. Apart from letting you write your lyrics and record your ideas, it boasts a number of highly user-friendly features to inspire your writing.
Make the most of Idea tool to let you artistically express your emotions. There is also a rhyming dictionary to help you find the perfect rhyme. Simply input your word, and the app will offer many good suggestions. Use chord notation to insert chords within your lyric easily.
Moreover, you can sync your entire lyrics and audio files to Dropbox to keep them secure and accessible from across the devices. This app is compatible with iPhone only.
Price: $5.99
That’s all, folks!
What’s your pick?
I’m sure you have discovered a big asset to help you compose a masterpiece. I would be really glad to know some of your picks in the comments.
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