If you’re a serious musician, Music Studio is one app that you should seriously consider for your composition needs. Music Studio is essentially a music sequencer much like Logic Pro, Cubase, or GarageBand, but instead of being tied to a desktop or laptop, you can compose anywhere you’re able to take your iPhone. Of course, being an app for a phone, it cannot match the capabilities of the aforementioned products, but it is still jam-packed with features that will handle most of your needs.
Many of the details in Music Studio have been well thought out and it is apparent that the developers want to make their app a real professional tool. Take composition as an example. To begin work on a composition, you can import a MIDI file of your work from any other sequencing program or you can attach an external keyboard. Of course, if lacking either one, you could use the app’s very capable on-screen keyboard. This keyboard can be scrolled through smoothly at will and can be zoomed in or out to make the keys wider or narrower. If that’s not enough, you can set two rows of keyboards to appear and set different instruments on each.
On the subject of instruments, it comes with 40 instruments and drum kits and 50 more are available to purchase. There is a wide variety within the selection of instruments so musicians of any style will be able to find suitable sounds. You can refine the instruments further with effects that you would expect to find in any modern tool such as reverb, delay, EQ, and hi/lo-pass filters. In a composition with several instruments, the audio quality sounds just as good as that of most desktop sequencers, which is to say that it sounds mostly realistic but obviously electronic.
When it comes to editing, Music Studio uses the standard piano roll layout. You might think that this would be painful on such a small screen, but the X and Y axes can be zoomed in and out quite easily and sliding through the piano roll is just as easy, intuitive, and fast. The interface takes full advantage of the touch interface and makes it very easy to find your notes and edit them. In fact, the interface in every part of this app has been highly polished and optimized for speed. As an example, to get into the preferences, you just touch the ever-present Setup tab and when you’re done you don’t need to touch OK—you just move onto another tab. Even though the app is packed with many features, it is easy to find the functions that you need and also easy to understand how they work. Many functions have on-screen prompts that are semi-transparent and superimposed over the screen to make it very obvious how to use it. Collectively, these things reduce the need for users to think technically when attention is focused on creative faculties.
The polish in Music Studio even extends when you save your work. It uses its own proprietary file format, but you can also export your work as a MIDI file or as a WAV file. To retrieve these files, Music Studio has a built-in Web server that you can connect with to upload or download files. This will save you a trip to iTunes.
Music Studio is an excellent app, but it is missing one much-needed feature, which is the ability to record from a microphone for vocals or acoustic instruments. This function will arrive in the next major update that will be released within a few months.
Music Studio sells for $14.99. A Lite version is available for free.
Many of the details in Music Studio have been well thought out and it is apparent that the developers want to make their app a real professional tool. Take composition as an example. To begin work on a composition, you can import a MIDI file of your work from any other sequencing program or you can attach an external keyboard. Of course, if lacking either one, you could use the app’s very capable on-screen keyboard. This keyboard can be scrolled through smoothly at will and can be zoomed in or out to make the keys wider or narrower. If that’s not enough, you can set two rows of keyboards to appear and set different instruments on each.
On the subject of instruments, it comes with 40 instruments and drum kits and 50 more are available to purchase. There is a wide variety within the selection of instruments so musicians of any style will be able to find suitable sounds. You can refine the instruments further with effects that you would expect to find in any modern tool such as reverb, delay, EQ, and hi/lo-pass filters. In a composition with several instruments, the audio quality sounds just as good as that of most desktop sequencers, which is to say that it sounds mostly realistic but obviously electronic.
When it comes to editing, Music Studio uses the standard piano roll layout. You might think that this would be painful on such a small screen, but the X and Y axes can be zoomed in and out quite easily and sliding through the piano roll is just as easy, intuitive, and fast. The interface takes full advantage of the touch interface and makes it very easy to find your notes and edit them. In fact, the interface in every part of this app has been highly polished and optimized for speed. As an example, to get into the preferences, you just touch the ever-present Setup tab and when you’re done you don’t need to touch OK—you just move onto another tab. Even though the app is packed with many features, it is easy to find the functions that you need and also easy to understand how they work. Many functions have on-screen prompts that are semi-transparent and superimposed over the screen to make it very obvious how to use it. Collectively, these things reduce the need for users to think technically when attention is focused on creative faculties.
The polish in Music Studio even extends when you save your work. It uses its own proprietary file format, but you can also export your work as a MIDI file or as a WAV file. To retrieve these files, Music Studio has a built-in Web server that you can connect with to upload or download files. This will save you a trip to iTunes.
Music Studio is an excellent app, but it is missing one much-needed feature, which is the ability to record from a microphone for vocals or acoustic instruments. This function will arrive in the next major update that will be released within a few months.
Music Studio sells for $14.99. A Lite version is available for free.
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