Chatter
Music Studio App
by Tom Anthony on Feb.24, 2011, under Chatter, Music
I have been on an extended visit to my Brother Steve’s place near Atlanta as he recuperates from some surgery. He is getting along fine, and I am heading back to Virginia in a couple of days. Meanwhile I just had to do some kind of music while I was here. I mean two weeks away from my studio is a long, long time!
Music Studio app for iPad
I decided to see if I could do something nifty on my new iPad and sure enough two programs really jump out at me… Music Studio by xewton.com which I will give a mini review of next… and AmpliTube by IK Multimedia which I will review next time.
Music Studio pretty much blows me away. I am not one to do a lot of sequencing – mainly I just play my music and record it – then do additional tracks and mix it. (See http://music.tomanthony.com/about/what-i-use/) And while I have messed around with cakewalk in the past, I have not even had the program I own installed for some time. That being the case I would still say that if you are familiar at all with midi sequencing you should be comfortable in Music Studio.
Spending just a few minutes at a time I put together a surprisingly high quality music bed and several loops. Because this is also a pod cast I will only post one example of the music I created on my iPad as an MP3 file – see the link below. In case you also have the Music Studio app I have zipped and posted the native XMS files. You may import these into the app and mess around with the stuff I did… it’s not much but you are welcome to check it out. I have also included a zip file of the midi files from the loops and song… if you do use cakewalk or any kind of midi editor you may do the same.
Music Studio Instrument and Effects tabs
The Music Studio app starts with a keyboard screen that you can adjust for width of the keys and position of the keyboard – you can also make it a dual keyboard and assign two different voices. The instrument tab features 40 voice settings and of those three are drums and one is reserved for various sound effects. The voices sound surprisingly good – especially the synth leads and guitar power chords.
The tracks tab features a 128 track sequencer – but it might get a little clumsy managing more than a dozen tracks owing to the size of the iPad screen. There are decent effects, and it is easy to export the files. All in all I am glad I installed it.
