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Round-up: 7 iPhone music-making apps
More software for your Apple handheld
Computer Music/Future Music, Tue 3 Nov 2009, 10:33 am UTC
Xewton Music Studio
£11.99
The fact that an app like Music Studio can exist at all on a phone will astonish anyone who made music back in the good old Atari and Amiga days (or, indeed, anyone who ever thought they were 'it' with their hefty old-school brick phone). This is a fully fledged sequencer with a slick interface that makes good use of the iPhone's capabilities.
The Keyboard page is where most of the action takes place. It enables you to play up to two instruments simultaneously by splitting the screen horizontally. The iPhone touchscreen excels in this area and you can play some surprisingly complex parts once you get the feel for it.
Music Studio uses sampled instruments rather than synthesised sounds, with a selection of 21 presets to choose from (including pianos, drum kits, organs, brass, guitar and so on), but very little in the way of editing capabilities. The drum sounds are good, although it's a shame they have to be triggered using the keyboard interface - pad-style input would've been preferable, clearly.
The Tracks page offers mixing and editing of up to 128 tracks, and Music Studio has excellent sequencing capabilities with reassuring attention to detail. Adjustable time signature? Quantise? Transpose? Note velocity? It's all right there.
Finally, the Effects page offers a basic but useable reverb, tempo-synced delay, three-band EQ and an amp simulator with adjustable overdrive. Each of the effects can be applied to the master out or used for FX sends. Once your track's finished, you can export as WAV, but we'd like to see the ability to export tracks as MIDI in future versions, enabling you to take your ideas into your DAW and develop them further using production-quality sounds.
Although Music Studio lacks any synthesis and sampling capabilities, it's excellent at what it does and would make a great tool for jotting down ideas on the run or even for writing quick demos. This is already a very serious sequencer and we'll definitely be keeping an eye on it to see how it develops.
