IOS
Take notes in Music memos
If you’re musically minded, you’ve probably used Voice Memos to capture ideas. But while Voice Memos is a great app it’s also very basic. Apple’s Music Memos for iPhone and iPad takes Voice Memos and adds stacks of musician-friendly features to create a brilliant and useful app for guitarists and piano players.
The first thing you’ll need to do is record your tune – and to do it in tune, thanks to the built-in acoustic tuner that works for all kinds of stringed instruments.
When you play, Music Memos works out what chords or notes you’re playing and enables you to add bass and drums to it: these automatically follow the tune, and you can adjust the sound and the playing style and get them to drop in and out to add interest to the arrangement. The chord recognition is pretty good, but it’s not perfect – which is why Apple also gives you tools that you can use to change the detected notes or chords. Apple says it’s optimised for acoustic guitar and piano, but we got good results with electric guitars and ukuleles too.
GarageBand or share
Music Memos may look simple but it’s clever and very useful for songwriting. It’s a great way to flesh out simple musical ideas to hear how they might sound in a band environment, and when you’ve got something you like you can share it as an .m4a audio file or open it as a new project in GarageBand.
CARRIE MARSHALL