In case you missed the news, Apple recently
released a brand new iOS app aimed specifically at the songwriting community. Known as
Music Memos, Apple's new app builds upon the the existing Voice Memos app by working in a number of features that can help any musician. The question now is, can this app actually help songwriters jot down their moments of inspiration? We have spent a few days with the app, and are now ready to share our thoughts with you.
Launching Music Memos brings you to a very basic interface that sets a record button directly in the middle of the screen. Beyond this, you will find three small buttons across the top of the screen that enable auto recording, open the recording library, and start the tuner. That's it. Pure, unadulterated simplicity.
Okay, maybe that is a little unfair to say, as the inner workings of the app are actually much more complex, but to the user's eye there isn't much to see. Which in this particular case is actually a great thing. This isn't a full digital audio workstation (DAW) that has been worked down to run on an iOS device -- that's GarageBand's job -- but instead is just a tool for jotting down musical ideas whenever and wherever they occur.
Alright, so lets talk a little more about each of the recording options. The central record button acts exactly as you would expect. Tap the blue icon and a new recording is created, capturing all audio until the stop button is pressed. Recording feedback is provided to the user in the form of a waveform along the bottom of the screen, as well as through pulses emanating from the center of the screen. Auto, on the other hand, is a little smarter. Tapping this icon will prepare the app to begin recording, but will not actually start capturing any sound until a certain noise threshold is passed. At this point the app will automatically start recording and continue to capture all audio until the sound dies off.
In both cases, the resulting audio files are saved directly to your iOS device as a 24-bit, 44.1kHz audio file. This file can be kept on your iOS device for later reference, or exported to a number of locations including GarageBand, iCloud Drive, SoundCloud, and Youtube. So you have read this far and are thinking to yourself, well this sounds just like voice memos with an added tuner, what's the deal? Well the real magic beyond Music Memos isn't actually visible until after you have made a recording.
Open any previously-made recording, and you will see be presented with a songbook-style page showing the waveform marked with both harmonic and tempo information. That's right, without any interaction from the user, the track is broken down into individual bars with the estimated chords written above. Yes I said "estimated." While the engine is fairly good at pulling out the correct harmonic information, it is far from perfect.
Without getting too deep into music theory, many chords are built from the same collection of notes, but organized into different patterns. This makes it very difficult for any algorithm, or human for that matter, to correctly determine the intended harmonic structure all of the time. On this point, we will say that the app was good at identifying basic root chords, such as G major, E minor, etc, but struggled to properly identify chords with any jazz extensions.
Thankfully, all of this data is not only made visible to the user, but is also completely editable. With any recording open, simply look to the top of the screen and find controls for adjusting the time, chords, and track length, as well as for adding notes and exporting the file.
Editing time is a fairly simple process, providing options to double or half the detected tempo, as well as to shift the downbeat and switch the time signature between 3/4, 4/4, and 6/8. Some song writers may desire some less common time signatures, such as 5/4, but in reality this is everything you need for basic songwriting. Chord editing is also a fairly straightforward process, though we must say we have a few minor gripes with the current implementation.
Opening the chord editing interface transforms every noted chord into an editable bubble. Tap on the bubble and you are able to change the recognized chord to any custom chord, which is all well and good. Changing the duration of chords, however, we found to be a less-enjoyable experience. After tapping on the chord bubble, movable markers are placed at the beginning and end of the detected chord. Simply grab hold of one and move it to the desired position -- seemingly a simple task, yet one that quickly becomes a hassle.
As you drag one chord into the space where another exists, the second chord's duration is reduced as one would expect. Drag too far, however, and this chord can be entirely wiped out of the file. Accidentally pull a marker onto the next line of the recording, and watch every chord on the previous line disappear.
I know you are reading this and thinking to yourself, "don't be such a fool and use the markers more carefully" -- I can assure you it is not quite so simple on a small screen (an iPhone 5s in our case). Even worse, there is no "undo" option in the case that you do make a mistake. In the event that you accidentally erase some data while editing, your only option is to reset the file back to the state it was in when you began to edit.
Because of this fact alone, we found ourselves saving our file after every single chord edit, which requires leaving the chord editing interface each time, just to ensure we don't ruin several previous edits because of one small mishap. We are sure Apple will bring an undo option in the future, but we also can't help but wish that it was just here now.
So your idea is now properly time-stamped and marked with chords, what good does that really do you? Well aside from having a handy reference to look back on, this quick recording can now be filled out with a few more Music Memos tools. Look underneath your recording, and you will find two central icons -- one bass guitar icon and one drum kit icon. Tap either of these buttons, and your recorded track will instantly be filled out with either a bass player, a drummer, or both. Don't like the way the generated tracks are sitting with your recording? Simply hold down one of the buttons and gain access to a few additional controls for improving the fit.
Now back to the question we posed at the beginning of this hands on: is Music Memos a useful tool for songwriters? While the answer isn't quite as resounding as we originally thought it might be, we still feel that musicians of any calibre can find a use for this new app. We certainly had a few gripes with the software, but almost all of these can be addressed with future updates. At it's core, Music Memos is a solid app, and we look forward to seeing how it evolves in the future. We should also note that the app is offered completely free to all iOS users, so take a chance,
give it a download and share your creations with the world.