These can range from a rugged, stage-ready model like a Shure SM57 for $100 to exotic Neumann condenser mics that cost as much as a used car.ĭigital audio interfaces also run the gamut in terms of prices, and they vary in their number of inputs, their flexibility, and their ability to power sophisticated condenser microphones. If you want higher quality audio, a step up is to add a digital audio interface (DAI), like Shure’s MVi (compatible with all iOS devices), an adapter that lets you plug an instrument or a microphone directly into your phone.Īn electric instrument, like a guitar or a keyboard, can be plugged straight into the DAI acoustic instruments will need a mic. Here are a few to check out: FL Studio (Android and iOS), a mobile DAW that functions much like GarageBand Loopy HD (iOS), a live looping app Propellerhead Figure (iOS), a very simple music-creation tool and Native Instruments iMaschine 2 (iOS), which has a 16-pad, drum-machine-like interface for creating beats and other sounds.Īlthough the digital instruments on a smartphone are quite powerful, many musicians, including me, want to use traditional instruments.Ī cheap, easy, and lo-fi way of doing this is with Apple's own Music Memos app, which allows you to record music using the phone's internal mic, then drop the resulting track into GarageBand. There are quite a few other apps on the market that are similar to GarageBand. You can begin with a freestanding synthesizer app, tweak the tone with a separate effects app, and ultimately add that synth track to a song in GarageBand or another DAW app. If you're working on your own version of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" with 20 separate harmony parts, you can consolidate them onto a single track, freeing up space on the other 19 tracks.Īnother app that’s extremely useful is Audiobus, which allows you to chain various apps together. You can also "bounce" tracks like a 1970s rock producer. You can use the app's built-in loops or import your own, which works well with a DJ-inspired Live Loops interface. But if you're more skilled and ambitious, GarageBand can keep up. GarageBand will allow you to come up with something that sounds polished in less than an hour. The app's built-in click track-a kind of digital metronome-helps keep everything in sync. You might start by laying down a drum track, followed by a bass, then layer in rhythm and lead guitars, and finish it off with lead and backing vocals.
Once you're happy with an individual track, you can shift to the digital audio workstation (DAW) portion of the app, where you actually build the song. (I'll discuss the details of working with live recordings below.) If you're not much of a musician, the smart instrument feature allows you to produce sophisticated sounds, like strumming patterns on a guitar or simple riffs on a piano. To start, you'll probably want to experiment with the built-in music synthesizer that does a great job mimicking instruments such as drums, bass, piano, and guitar as well as exotic options like an Erhu or Chinese drums. It works a bit like a real studio, with each individual instrument assigned to its own "channel," where it can be tweaked before all the tracks are ultimately combined into a song. GarageBand is a great way to familiarize yourself with the basics of music creation.
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GarageBand isn't available for Android devices, but that platform does have its own good music-creation apps.
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On the iPhone, the best place for a musician to start is with GarageBand, an app that comes installed free on new phones-it's an app I use all the time. I first wrote about this six years ago, and since that time it has only gotten easier to create music using mobile devices. I’ve been recording my own music since the mid-1980s, when I bought an $800 Tascam PortaOne four-track deck that recorded onto a standard audio cassette, but I actually like my phone better than any other system I've owned.Ĭompared to my original dinosaur deck, my phone is not only cheaper but also more flexible, and the end result-all digital-is vastly higher in quality.
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