DIY: Creating a music video on your iPhone

Creating and performing music and video on a computer is so 20th century. Many artists routinely do so using specialized hardware and digital music software from companies such as Native Instruments and Cakewalk.

How about doing it on something a little more current, and challenging, like, say, an iPhone 3G S? Now that's a task worth tackling...and tackle it I recently did.

Some cameras and camcorders let you construct slide shows or edit what you've captured. But none let you create your own music. The iPhone (and iPod Touch) lets you do all of these, but first you need to download apps (software) from the iTunes App Store. Such apps offered a couple of advantages, I found:

• Simplicity. Most apps' user interface made it easy to use. And I didn't need to read lots of manuals, or books, the way I generally do with computer software.

• Cost. Compared to most software for PCs or Macs, which can cost hundreds of dollars, apps are cheap. The most expensive one I bought was about $20. Many years ago, I bought a $500 TASCAM four-track, analog cassette recorder, which let me create separate recorded tracks that were in sync with each other in order to create music as if I was playing with an entire live rock band. With a $5 app, I was able to create superior-sounding music.

Of course, apps also have their disadvantages:

• No multiple or background apps: On an iPhone, there's no multitasking, meaning you can only run one app at a time. In multimedia, this can pose a big problem.

• Limited features: Quite often, I found myself searching for a way to do something and finding out that the app didn't have such a feature. For example, in the video-editing app, I had to work around the problem of not being able to turn off the audio on my video clips (I'll discuss this, and how I got around it, in a future post).

• Some apps have confusing interfaces: Although most apps are pretty straightforward, some had counter-intuitive interfaces.

In my next post, I'll describe how I used music apps to create the song I wrote for this project, "Hey Ma, Look What I Can Do." (Video embedded above.)

Have you created rich content on a device like the iPhone or an Android phone? If so, share your experience below.

—Terry Sullivan