Music Technology and the iPad

If there is one art form on the iPad that keeps on evolving and transforming possibilities, it has to be music technology. Garageband is Apple’s flagship app for making music and around this app there is a growing ecosystem of apps and tools that work alongside it and sometimes directly with it. The touchscreen nature of the iPad has enabled app developers to create software instruments that we swipe and tap to play.

The music app Figure has become a free app. Now three years old, it has become one of the most popular iPhone music apps. It works well on the iPad Mini, where there is more space to manipulate the screen.

This is great news as it enables learners to create beats, bass lines and lead lines. These pieces of music can then be added to Garageband, using the “Audio Copy Audio Paste” function. These music creations can also be added to the timeline in iMovie.

In contrast to swiping and tapping to create music, Auxy, another free app, teaches students how to program their music onto a grid or, as music technologist call it, a matrix or piano roll. This grid approach to organising notes for melody and rhythms and beats is a standard feature in professional music software. As a result, it makes for a great gateway app into the world of music technology. The music created in Auxy, like Figure, can be pasted into other music apps or added to iMovie as a soundtrack.

In paid-for apps’ world of music, Korg’s Gadget has become one of the most popular music apps. It combines the swiping and tapping of Figure and the more detailed editing and control of Auxy. This app is expensive but probably the best example of the iPad being used for music creation.

As you can hear with all of these apps, headphones are crucial. We will be looking at the headphones for the classroom in a future blog post.