Apple wants to help you with your budding music career
Want to tap into your musical potential? Apple has released new and refreshed music apps to the App Store, designed for everyone from a budding muso to a professional artist.
Music Memos is an all new app that enables musicians and songwriters to capture, organise and develop ideas on their iPhone.
A major update to GarageBand for iOS introduced a slew of new features including Live Loops, which provides tools to make an iPhone or iPad into a DJ booth.
According to Apple, many musicians and songwriters use the Voice Memos app to record ideas - and many hit songs begun as a Voice Memo.
The new Music Memos app is inspired by Voice Memos, but adds musician-friendly features designed for songwriting and developing musical ideas.
With Music Memos, you can record any musical instrument through the iPhone's built-in microphone in a high-quality, uncompressed format, then name, tag and rate it to start building a library of your ideas.
The app can analyse rhythm and chords of acoustic guitar and piano recordings, and instantly add drums and a bass line to provide a virtual, customisable backing band that plays along to match the feel of your song.
Music Memos can even provide basic notation that displays the chords that were played.
With iCloud your Music Memos are automatically available across all your Apple devices so you can open them in GarageBand or Logic Pro X to further develop your songs.
Musicians can also share their ideas via email or with their fans through Apple Music
GarageBand for iOS is reportedly the world's most popular mobile music creation app, and the new GarageBand 2.1 update introduces Live Loops, an entirely new way to create music.
Inspired by DJ hardware controllers and drum machines, Live Loops enables anyone to create music by tapping cells and columns in a highly visual grid to trigger different looped instruments and samples.
The loops can be performed, arranged and remixed Iive, and GarageBand automatically keeps all the beats in sync with perfect time and pitch.
To get you started, Live Loops comes with a library of Apple-designed loop templates in a variety of genres including EDM, Hip Hop, Dubstep and Rock, or you can create your own loops from scratch.
GarageBand 2.1 for iOS also includes the new Drummer feature with nine EDM and acoustic virtual session drummers that provide their own signature sound, as well as an expanded selection of amps for bass players.
Advanced GarageBand users can now create more polished sounding songs using new automation features, controls recording and a new simple EQ.
GarageBand 2.1 works well on the 12.9-inch Retina display on the new iPad Pro and gives you access to even more controls and room to play, Apple says.
And on iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, the app now supports 3D Touch, allowing you to play with more expression.
"Musicians around the world, from the biggest artists to aspiring students, use Apple devices to create amazing music; the innovative new Music Memos app will help them quickly capture their ideas on iPhone and iPad whenever inspiration strikes," says Philip Schiller, Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing.
"GarageBand is the most popular music creation app in the world, and this update helps everyone easily tap into their musical talent with the powerful new Live Loops and Drummer features, and adds support for the larger iPad Pro screen and 3D Touch on iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus," he says.
Apparently T-Pain, American muso and Grammy Award winner, recorded his first album using GarageBand and uses it to this day.
On the latest offerings from Apple, he says, "It'll change the entire way a generation makes music.
Music Memos is available for free on the App Store and is compatible with iPhone 4s and later, and iPad 2 and later.
GarageBand 2.1 for iOS is bundled free with new iOS devices 32GB and larger, is available as a free upgrade for existing users with compatible iOS 9 devices or later, and is available to everyone else for NZD $6.49 via the App Store.
