Once you’ve had a play with GarageBand for iPad’s instruments, your next move will be to start recording with them using the 8-track sequencer. To create a song, you work in song sections - you can specify the number of bars or, if you just want to plug in and record a whole track, choose the Automatic option.

Once they’ve been recorded, regions can be moved, cut, copied/pasted, deleted, looped or split, and you can also trim them by clicking and dragging at either end. However, what you won’t find is much in the way of audio or MIDI editing - a piano roll is particularly conspicuous by its absence.

To be honest, we were pretty disappointed when we discovered this omission, but you do at least get a decent selection of quantize options. If these don’t work for you, you’ll simply have to re-record your part.

GarageBand veterans would have known not to expect a mixer in the iPad version (you still don’t get one on the Mac) but you can bring up Track Controls to the left of the arrange window. Specifically, these are mute, solo and volume, but annoyingly, pan settings have to be made in a pop-up window.

Effects provision is pretty limited too: there aren’t any inserts and only Echo and Reverb Master Effects. You can at least change the flavour of these, though.

NEXT: Performance