music - page 6

If you’re learning to play the guitar, then you will constantly be looking up two things: Scales and chords. After you get a bit further into it, you’ll add arpeggios to that list. And you will keep referencing them for years, becasue there are a zillion way to play each chord, scale, or arpeggio on the guitar. And here’s the problem. Reference materials for these three essentials are a pain to use. Either you spend more time clicking around an app than you do practicing, or you have to keep a ton of PDFs around, and try to keep those organized. Now, though, a super simple (maybe too-simple) app finally ge ts it right. It’s called Fretbud, and I love it.

When Apple Music made its debut, one of the biggest reasons to switch from rival streaming services was for its $15 family plan. But it wasn’t long before Spotify copied it — and it’s been paying off in a big way.

The bargain family plan helped Spotify attract another 8 million paying subscribers during the second quarter of 2018, taking its total number to 83 million worldwide.

HomePod is expected to get even smarter this fall when Apple rolls out a big software update.

A new report claims the $349 device will be able to handle phone calls, retrieve your voicemail, and run multiple timers. It could also give you the ability to search for songs by using their lyrics, and to translate languages.

Music artists are getting an all-new way to promote unreleased music thanks to a new feature Spotify is rolling out his week.

Getting a song onto one of Spotify’s curated playlists can give a big boost to an artist or band’s visibility on the platform. So starting today, members with a Spotify for Artists account can submit unreleased music directly to Spotify’s editorial team for playlist consideration.

Striking up a conversation on Instagram just became as easy as slapping a sticker on your Story.

Instagram revealed today that it has added a new feature called Question Stickers that gives users a new way to ask and receive questions from followers so you can get more acquainted with each other.

Do you love your AirPods but wish they looked like they came out in the 80’s?

ColorWare has come out with a new customization of Apple’s AirPods that look like the could have been paired with the original Macintosh. The Pantone 453 finish makes the buds look more retro, but they’re anything but cheap.

WhoSampled is an iOS (and Android) app that tells you whose samples were used in the music you’re currently listening to. Just like Shazam, you hold it up to a playing tune, and WhoSampled identifies the track. But then it also gives you a breakdown of all the other songs that were sampled to make that track, and can even list cover versions.

This week we go to school with Apple’s Schoolwork app, then take time out cooking up delicious recipes for pixelated Pokémons. Then we enjoy a beautiful soundtrack on maybe the most impressive synth on iOS — and all for free!

Synth One just launched. It’s a new synth app for the iPad, but it’s also a big deal. Why? Because it is free, open-source, and built by volunteer musicians and programmers. Stay with me here. Synth One isn’t out typical hideous open-source bloatfest of an app. It’s beautifully designed, sounds great, is easy to use, and is above all fun.

Do you have an album or a playlist that you listen to over and over? Or maybe you have kids, and all they ever want to listen to is that Abba record you hate, again and again. And AGAIN. Are you sick of firing up Apple music and searching around for that record every time you want to play it? Well search no more! Today we’ll see how you can add any music to your home screen, and play it just by tapping an icon.

Apple is launching a new music publishing division, headed up respected industry executive Elena Segal.

The newly created Global Director of Music Publishing role will involve working in both the United States and London. Creating the post was apparently one of the first moves made by Oliver Shusser, who recently took over as head of Apple Music.

Imagine a piano keyboard that is also a multitouch surface, like the screen on an iPad. Now imagine that this is a tactile silicone surface with bumps and dips so you can feel the keys, just like a piano. Hold that image in your mind — you are currently imagining the Roli Seaboard Block, backpack-sized Bluetooth MIDI keyboard that will change the way you play music.

YouTube Music, a new service that will take on the likes of Spotify and Apple, goes live next week.

Listeners will be able to enjoy the service for free if they don’t mind their music interspersed with advertisements. An upgrade to YouTube Music Premium, priced at $9.99 a month, will remove those ads and allow for background playback and music downloads.

Learning a musical instrument is hard. Really hard. It takes a long time to make anything that sounds like music, and yet still people put in the long hours and the hard work to become great at their chosen instrument.

There’s no way around practicing, but there is. lot you can do to make the practice easier, more effective, and much more fun, and all you need is there on your iPhone or iPad.

There’s little that’s more hipster than an audio cassette. Its sound is far from perfect, it’s impractical, and — most important of all — it is easy to see that you’re using one. But that doesn’t mean that tapes were all bad. Lo-fi cassette decks actually add some rather pleasant audio artifacts to audio.

So what? Well, now you don’t need to lug around a Walkman and a bag of tapes to enjoy the retro sound of audio cassettes, because there’s a) an iOS audio plugin and b) a website that will tape-ify any track you like.

This week has been big on big updates. Drafts, the best text-capture app for iOS, got a brand-new version. Cultured Code’s Things also received a big update (but still doesn’t allow drag-and-drop to task lists). And Dropbox finally did add drag-and-drop, just seven months after iOS 11 added the feature.

Well done!

Vulse is a neat app for musicians. More specifically, it’s for guitarists. The app has been around for a while, but got a big old update this week that makes it worth a new look. The idea of the app is that you stick your iPhone onto your guitar, just below where you strum the strings, and then use a combination of wild flailing and screen-stroking to apply crazy effects on the fly.

You have a new iPad, and you have a new Apple Pencil. Time to learn how to draw, right? Not necessarily. Just like a regular pen or pencil, there are ton of other things you can do with an Apple Pencil. You can write, of course, but you can also play games, compose musical scores, do coloring in books, edit photos, and even play the Apple Pencil like a musical instrument.

Let’s take a look at the best non-drawing apps for Apple Pencil.

Electric guitar players have effects pedals. It’s an addiction, and a law of nature. We keep buying little stomp boxes in pursuit of the perfect sound, and of course we don’t even call it sound. We call it “tone.” But the sensible players don’t try to beat the addiction. They switch to software. Instead of buying and trading expensive hardware boxes, they move to something like iOS effects apps, which let you experiment at a fraction of the cost.

And that’s where IK Multimedia’s new iRig Stomp I/O Pedalboard comes in. It’s a hardware pedalboard that provides guitar players with a familiar front-end to all those amazing iOS effects.

HomePod sales have fallen well below expectations, according to one of the best Apple analysts in the game.

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo told investors today that Apple is considering making a low-cost version of the HomePod in order to give disappointing sales a boost.

This is the Roadie. It’s a guitar tuner with a rotating slot that you slide over a tuning peg of your guitar. Then you pluck a string, and the Roadie listens to the pitch, and actually turns the peg for you, shifting the pitch up or down until it is in tune.

Laney’s new Mini-Laney and Mini-St-Lion are tiny, portable, desktop versions of the U.K. guitar-amp company’s popular full-sized amplifiers. They come in retro and modern styles, and mono or stereo versions. Plus, they can be hooked up to any amp-simulation software on your iPhone using a single cable.

Are you a musician struggling to come up with song ideas? Are you a non-musician who just wants to come up with a neat melody for that cat video? Then you should check out Fortamento, a melody generation app for iPhone which is both incredibly easy, and surprisingly deep.

Apple Music appears to be narrowing the gap with Spotify when it comes to paid subscribers.

In a tweet this afternoon, Apple revealed that the total subscribers for its music service passed the 40 million mark during the same week Spotify’s stock went up for sale on the New York Stock Exchange.

The Apple Pencil, now compatible with pretty much all new iPads, is not just good for drawing and writing. Because if its bevvy of sensors — tilt, pressure, acceleration, and orientation — the Apple Pencil is also a pretty good musical instrument. Pen2Bow is a new iPad app which turns the Pencil into a violin bow, letting you use all of these natural gestures to play a virtual violin.