Recording music on Apple devices

By Macky, 8 January, 2013

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi all. I am doing a college course on Sound Production and I was wondering what software or apps anyone has experience of using across all Mac, ipad, and ipod platforms for recording musical instruments? Any details of accessibility and general useability would really help me along. Many thanks in advance for any input.

Options

Comments

By Walei on Wednesday, January 23, 2013 - 01:14

Are you specifically looking to record real/acoustic instruments? Or does that include software instruments? I have used Garageband to record both. Garageband on the Mac is mostly accessible but it has a couple of bugs that I experience often. Especially if I'm working on a big project like a full song. Using an audio interface, you can plug in a guitar or microphone to record real instruments. I believe you can also use USB controllers and MIDI synths. Although I haven't personally tested those out. When it comes to software instruments, Garageband has plenty of those. If you buy the jampacks, you will have access to hundreds of software instruments that you can play on your computers keyboard or through an external keyboard/controller. I find that my MAcbooks laptop keyboard is very unresponsive in recording software instruments. The good thing is, once i've recorded a region I can then use quantizing to fix the entire region. I don't think there's a way to use voiceover to fix the timing of individual notes. There are also plenty of effects such as echo, reverb, phasers, Flangers, filters, auto Wa, and guitar amp settings. All of which are very customizable. The only fallback with Garageband, is when you export a project. The volume is always very low because it normalizes. Usually after recording a project you will need some post production using another application. Garageband on iOS is also very accessible and pretty much does the same things. The interface is a bit different though. Another great iOS app for recording software instruments is iKaossilator. It's strictly made for creating loops. You can then export them as wav files so you can use them in Garageband or other applications. You can also just copy a loop and paste it into your Garageband app on iOS. iKaossilator has 150 instruments and you can record up to 5 instruments on each loop. You can change the scale, tempo, length of each track as well as quantize. In terms of editing and pos production, the latest version of Audacity has become a lot more accessible than the previous versions. You can use it to play around with compression, EQ, and amplification. There are also some cool effects such as pitch and speed change, reverse and echoes. You can even pick specific regions and tracks for these effects. That's as far as my knowledge goes. I have also heard good things about Sound studio and Amadeus Pro. Both are Mac applications.