Apps - Page 9

Hal Leonard has brought their digital sheet music store to the iPad. Sheet Music Direct for iPad is a three-in-one app, allowing access to the publisher’s more than 100,000 songs available for purchase, as well as a sheet music viewer and score library. Past Sheet Music Direct customers can access all their previous purchases through the app, and new customers...

If you’ve been wishing for a music notation app for your iPad to make quick sketches or exercises, or any other simple notation and charts, Symphony Pro by Xenon Labs might just be what you’ve been waiting for in an app. While Symphony Pro can’t match up feature-for-feature with desktop apps like Sibelius or Finale, it is a terrific notation...

If you’re looking for an “slow-downer” app for aiding in transcribing tunes, you might want to give Robick a shot. While this app is not entirely intuitive, once you get the hang of the interface, it’s actually a pretty powerful music slowing/altering app for transcription. When you launch the app, you’ll land in the one and only screen for the...

So far, I’ve focused in on mostly iOS apps in this space, but this time around, I’m going to focus in on hardware that works with many of these apps. I recently tried out the new iRiffPort by PocketLabWorks, which is a digital instrument interface in conjunction with the PocketGK app. For starters, PocketLabWorks got things right by making it...

Finale 2012, the latest edition of MakeMusic’s music notation software, is now available. The updated program now includes ScoreManager – a tool designed to improve workflow by centralizing key functions like changing staff names, orders, transposition, clef and playback sounds. Finale 2012 now supports Unicode text, allowing for use of all characters in your fonts, while also making it easier...

I have tried most every tuner on the app store and there are many that I like for many reasons. Some look fantastic, but have accuracy issues. Some are accurate but are just plain ugly. After trying about a dozen tuner apps, I have finally settled on Cleartune. This app is attractive, highly accurate and versatile. Cleartune works quite well...

I was planning on writing this article on Metronomics, an app developed by John Nastos offering quite a few new features that go beyond your basic metronome app. However, I was recently tried out “Time Guru” by Avi Bortnick (John Scofield’s sample guru and rhythm guitarist) which does many of the same things – and also a few different things....

I have not been a huge fan of any of the iOS drum machines or drum-along “screen tapper” drums-set style apps. But BeatStudio, by Frontier Design Group, brings something new to the table that is really useful and is changing my opinion of this sort of app. Not only does BeatStudio offer multitrack recording abilities, quantization, editing and an array...

Right Note is an app by Orange Qube, offering ear training and pitch and melody recognition on iOS devices. While there are a number of ear training apps available at the app store, I found Right Note to be worth a special mention, primarily due to the inclusion of the microphone as a means of interval recognition. This allows you...

I have become quite a fan of Audiophile Engineering’s FiRe2 recording application (see my previous review). Now, the folks at Audiophile have introduced FiRe Studio, which is essentially a multi-track version of FiRe2. As with FiRe2, there is a little bit of a learning curve, but FiRe Studio is similarly loaded with an informative user manual. Once you’ve gotten a...

Have you ever been on a sound check and the singer or one of the house sound guys asks the monitor guy to “lower 1k about 2db” in this wedge, or something like that? I’ve long marveled at those who could so quickly identify a problem frequency and eliminate feedback or simply make the mix sound better. While I studied...

I am often asked how one can better learn the fretboard and how one can improve their reading. I generally talk about certain things I’ve spent time studying and how to practice with intention and focus, the importance of repetition (to make information stick) and suggest a few books, and so on. I now will have one more thing to...