A few months ago I learned I was going to be getting an iPad and I started researching synth apps that I could use with my keyboard. There are several great apps out there that do everything from analog modeling to full mobile recording solutions. I took a look at the description for Apple’s Garageband as I am familiar with that application on my laptop already. It looked pretty good. I also learned that there is an iPhone version of Garageband! I most definitely installed it on my iPhone immediately. It is a huge install, I think close to 700 megabytes. Took a good while to get it all downloaded, but once it was installed and I fired it up I was immensely pleased. The built in piano sound is pretty gorgeous, and the organ sound blows away many of the electronic organs I have used, both software based and dedicated hardware (still nowhere close to the Nord sounds though!). That huge sound coming out of my phone got me really excited for the possibilities of showing up to a gig with just my 61 note M-Audio keyboard and my iPhone.
iPhone’s Garageband also comes with a ton of built in loops that can be dropped into a song. While fiddling with the app I compiled this song together. I think it is pretty impressive for something built on a phone!
The two main issues I had with the app were moving the cursor around and the lack of undo. Moving the cursor is more of an annoyance, but the lack of undo caused me to inadvertently lose large chunks of the song a couple times. Boo! I have not yet been able to sit down and play with the iPad version, but it sure looks cool. I hope the issues have been fixed for the iPad, but either way, I am excited to try it out on a live gig 🙂