Wanna make a record? There’s an app for that.

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Like many of us here at CM, I’m a musician. I picked up the bass at 13, and since then I’ve been in and out of about a dozen bands. Most of them never made it out of the basement. A few lucky ensembles, however, managed to escape and venture into that Mecca of every aspiring rock legend — the recording studio.
Until just a few years ago, “going to the studio” was a big (and pricey) deal for most bands. But boy how things have changed. Today, recording studios are fighting to maintain relevance in a world that’s filling up with great, inexpensive home recording gear.
Apple deserves major credit for the proliferation of home recording. In 2004, when the company introduced GarageBand as a pack-in application for all of its computers, the floodgates opened for millions of bedroom balladeers to easily and affordably record and share their music.
Nowadays, you don’t even need a computer. The iPhone and the iPad (as well as the Android market) have hundreds of solid recording apps available such as Amplitube, n-Track Studio and my personal favorite, NanoStudio.
NanoStudio is pretty expensive as apps go, but at 15 bucks, it costs about the same as 15 minutes in a real recording studio. It’s powerful and easy to use, and though my iPhone version is tricky to use because of the screen size, it’s still a beast of an app.
NanoStudio’s strength is in its synth modeling. It has about 130 preset sounds and each is infinitely customizable. It even allows users to sample sounds through the phone’s built-in mic and then manipulate those samples on various keyboard instruments.
In the past few days, I’ve been having a lot of fun noodling around with NanoStudio. I haven’t yet composed my masterpiece, but here’s a little groove that I put together just for the blog. Have a listen!
Latest tracks by StephenDMorgan

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