What are the best ‘sketchpad’ apps for iOS?

Mobile devices are perfect for sketching out new song ideas. For one thing, they’re extremely portable – if you’ve got an iPhone, you’re likely to have it with you at all times, so you can whip it out whenever you have a spare few minutes or when inspiration strikes – and many of the apps are conducive to helping you generate ideas or getting the ones you already have recorded quickly.

If the plan is that you’re going to take this initial idea and develop it on your main DAW at home, you need it to have the appropriate export options, too. So, if you’re a Logic user, GarageBand for iOS is a good option as it offers full project compatibility, and the same goes for Cubasis on the iPad and the desktop version of Cubase. There’s a mobile version of FL Studio, too.

Ableton Live users have even more options; the Live Set Export SDK is now available to all developers, meaning that anyone can add the option to offer, as the name suggests, Live-compatible project export in their app. It’s starting to become a common feature, found in the likes of Korg Gadget, Blocs Wave and Elastic Drums, to name but a few.

One other app that we’d specifically recommend as a terrific scratchpad is Auxy Studio, a MIDI sequencing app that’s made all the better for keeping things simple. Patterns are composed in a piano roll, and these can then be grouped together as scenes and arranged into tracks, very much as you would in Ableton Live. It’s limited in the sense that it doesn’t communicate with other iOS apps via Audiobus or Inter-App Audio, but working within its parameters can be extremely liberating, and you can export both MIDI files and audio stems when you’re done. Best of all, it’s free.