Composer’s Sketchpad
A pad for musical ideas that isn’t helpful enough
$2.99 Developer Alexei Baboulevitch, composerssketchpad.com Platform iPad Requirements iOS 8.2 or later
Let’s state the obvious: this isn’t an app for composing entire musical scores, although you probably guessed that from the price. The name is a pretty good description of what the app does – it’s a place for you to mess around and experiment with musical ideas, which you can then export as MIDI or JSON when you’ve got something solid to work with.
Composer’s Sketchpad looks rather like a kids’ version of pro app Ableton, with big buttons and pastel colors. It’s designed to be used two-handed, with your right hand sliding and zooming. When you want to add a note, you press down with your left hand and then place the note with your right hand, either by tapping for a single note or sliding for a move from one note to another (you can reverse the hands if you’re left-handed). There are more than 100 instruments to choose from including drums and percussion, guitars, basses, exotic instruments and sawtooth synths, and the toolbox gives you options to snap to time or snap to pitch.
It’s an odd thing, though. Creating music in Composer’s Sketchpad isn’t immediate; instead of playing along, you stop the music, place your note(s) and then play them back. If you’re trying to find a happy musical accident, apps such as SoundPrism are more serendipitous. If you’re trying to get the tune in your head into an app, GarageBand’s smart instruments and Drummer deliver the instant gratification that Composer’s Sketchpad lacks.
the bottom line. Composer’s Sketchpad does things differently to other music creation apps, but we didn’t find it very intuitive. Gary Marshall