Review: Apple iPhone Applications

Review: Calum Orr

APPLICABLE APPS

Guitar Toolkit ($12.99)

Guitar Toolkit is the first app I bought for my iPhone (which incidentally my wife and son now call ‘Gwyneth’, since I spend so much time with her instead of them). It combines a metronome, chord finder, fretboard scales and tuner all in one application. The metronome has a tap tempo pad at the top of the screen and a slider for setting the tempo. You can also choose from a variety of sounds to produce the click, with or without a flashing light.

The chord finder section allows you to choose from 22 different chords across all keys in up to nine separate neck positions. The graphic display of each chord is easy to decipher via the mellow, slightly old-school interface that’s gentle on the eyes. New in version 1.2 of Guitar Toolkit is a fretboard scales section that shows the user notes for virtually every scale known to man. There’s also an all-new instrument selector, with the ability to choose alternate tunings for the fretboard section and opt for left-handed axe wielding.

Guitar Toolkit’s tuner has a classic look to it, similar to the ubiquitous Boss TU-12 in use, albeit with the added feature of being able to set it for 43 different tunings simply by pressing the Mode button at the bottom of the screen. A green light appears when you’re ‘bang on’ target and the note you’ve arrived at is read out to you as ‘F2’, ‘G4’ etc. I highly recommend you switch the iPhone into Airplane mode under the Settings tab before using the Guitar Toolkit as your main tuner during either a recording session or live performance, otherwise you’ll be capturing or broadcasting the usual mobile phone ‘di-di-di-di-da-das’ – and that’s never good. While the Guitar Toolkit isn’t the cheapest app in the iTunes store, it’s arguably one of the best crafted and most useful on the market.

Pocket Guitar ($1.19)

At this price, Pocket Guitar is a no-brainer. Just released in the app store (having been available on jail-breaked phones for some time now), the Pocket Guitar has a couple of stability and feature issues to sort out before its praises can be sung too highly, but it currently sits at No. 1 in the App Store’s ‘Top Paid’ apps section. Hours, days or even weeks of idle (or productive) enjoyment can be had playing virtual guitar (or bass) on your iPhone using this program. You can bend notes up or down or add vibrato using the iPhones accelerometer effect, which simply involves either lifting or shaking the phone. Unfortunately, the bending effect has to be set as either ‘up’ or ‘down’ in the Settings page before you start, so you can’t adjust this on-the-fly. Likewise, two effect slots that can hold either delay, distortion or chorus ‘pedals’ must be setup prior to playing on the fretboard screen. The effects are pretty decent sounding, as are the sample sounds themselves, which have been taken from various contributors to The Freesound Project under license. Acoustic, Electric, Classical and Muted guitar as well as Electric Bass and even a Ukulele comprise the stringed instruments currently on offer, and you don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to predict that more ‘stringed instrument packs’ will become available in future updates, as well as the ability to use your own samples. The Pocket Guitar also has adjustable fret and string placement as well as the ability to be left or right-handed. My favourite settings are muted guitar with delay, and bass with distortion. Looking forward to updates on this one!

For my money, Pocket Guitar beats Guitarist (also in the App Store) hands down. Not only is it way cheaper, the supplied samples are sonically superior. Having said that, if you need the whole fretboard, you may need to look at Guitarist rather than Pocket Guitar.

iDrum for iPhone ($5.99)

This program comes from well know plug-in designers, iZotope. It comes in two editions: Club or Hip Hop, both of which seamlessly integrate with the company’s iDrum application (US$59), allowing the swapping of samples and MIDI between the iPhone and computer over Wi-Fi. The iDrum is a professional app at a remarkably cheap price.

Fundamentally, the iDrum comprises 16 pads per kit and 16 bars per program. Pattern construction couldn’t be easier; simply touch the screen to select where the hit happens in your four beat bar. The iDrum for iPhone comes with plenty of samples of the hip-hop variety, but personally I felt a little hemmed in by the sounds until I got iDrum for my computer and began creating my own sample library. The on-board sounds are certainly good, and happily start you off in the right direction, but they don’t get you far. Hopefully updates to this app will include new samples and integrated effects. For now though, once you get your head around the ‘screen within a screen’ approach to programming, I think you’ll really enjoy the workflow of iDrum’s touchscreen environment. It’s easy, for instance, to alter volumes and pans of each cell/sound in the pan/volume vector window. The graphics and easy navigation make iDrum a must-have for a little beat writing on the go, on the phone or whatever!

METRONOMES

There are plenty of metronomes to choose from at the App Store. So many, in fact, that complaints abound in the user reviews pages along the lines of: ‘oh please, not another metronome’. I’ve checked them all and so far my faves are the aforementioned Guitar Toolkit, iTick which is simple and effective (and free) or plain old Metronome, which looks and sounds like a standard metronome and is also free.

We’ll be writing more about new apps somewhere in the pages of AT as and when they’re released. Next issue we’ll investigate the first four-track recorder for iPhone, which is bound to lead the charge in a procession of porta/phoney/studio thingies… I dunno, ‘Phoney Reaper’ or ‘Logic 8 for iPhone’ perhaps… they have a nice ring to them (pardon the pun). We’ll also take a look at Sruti, an Indian-styled drone machine and some other OSC (Open Sound Control) apps.