Surprising Powerful Apps that Fit in Your Pocket!

by Tom
(UK)

Developers are still finding new ways to wring more power out of devices like the iPhone and iPad, and iOS is still maturing as a platform. It's crazy that these incredible apps are just a taste of things to come:

Jasuto Pro is an incredibly powerful patchable modular synth with a multitude of uses. It can be configured a live synth, sequenced synth, realtime effects unit and much more. It can also remotely interface with a VST version of the app running on a desktop or laptop computer!

The best all in one app for music production on iOS is probably NanoStudio. It has four built in polysynths which sound incredible, in addition to a 16 pad sampler. The effects sound great, and the routing is flexible. The sequencer is the best I've seen yet on iOS.

Xenon could be uncharitably thought of as a poor man's NanoStudio, but while it doesn't have quite the same breadth of features, it's still a very competent tool, and the workflow might lead you to different ideas and results. You can never have too many tools at your disposal!

MultiTrack is an incredible piece of programming and is capable of playing back up to 24 tracks of audio simultaneously on your iOS device. It also allows basic mixing and non-linear editing. It's fantastic for mashing together the different audio snippets you'll collect from other software.

If you value playability as well as programmability, then bleep!Synth is for you. It's just as at home being played live as it is being sequenced, and it sounds phenomenal. I saw a guy busking with this running on an iPod touch jacked into a portable guitar amp the other day.


SunVox has a tracker style interface with new-school modular routing and clever sequencing. It's multi platform software and also runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and other handheld platforms. If you like trackers, you'll love this, but the learning curve might be steep for newcomers.

If you've used nanoloop on the Gameboy or GBA, then the interface will seem vaguely familiar, but the iOS version is quite different from it's namesakes. It's not as capable in terms of synthesis as some of the software I've already listed, but it's unique interface will ensure you come up with new ideas.

iStroboSofthas to be the best software tuner I've used on any platform, and it's better than four of the five hardware tuners I own (not to mention substantially cheaper). It's fast, accurate, and forgiving about background noise. If you play an instrument that needs tuning, then you need this.

Sound Warpis a tool which allows you to perform some kind of realtime granular synthesis on imported samples. It's capable of some really amazing effects and is great fun to jam live with. Snippets of vocal dialogue are particularly well suited to being mashed up with this tool.

Touch The Wave 2 is a simple looper and scratching tool with a lovely clean (although initially confusing) interface. It's completely free, so there's no reason not to have it.