DIY: Creating music on your iPhone

In part one of this blog post, I said apps are integral to creating music or video on an iPhone. Here are the ones I used to create music:

First, I downloaded Beatmaker, by Intua, $20, because it was one of the few that let me play the iPhone like an instrument and program what I wanted it to play. In this app, I mostly used the step and song sequencer features.

In the step sequencer, I chose each instrument (such as a bass guitar), then painstakingly selected individual notes in a four-beat measure to make several different short-pattern sequences. Next, using the song sequencer part of the app, I strung a series of these short sequences together to produce a line of music, such as the bass line in a song. I programmed all the instrument patterns and, after several hours, produced a song with several instruments—drums, bass, guitar and two funky keyboard sounds—playing along with each other.

To record a vocal track, I needed another app. So I downloaded GigDaddy, $3, an app that lets you record several simultaneous tracks, import music files and combine various tracks together. But I couldn't edit my piece with GigDaddy until I first exported my "instrumental" song as a .wav file from Beatmaker to my computer. (Check Beatmaker's site for details on this painstaking, intricate process).

GigDaddy (click to enlarge)
Source: Iometrics

Then I imported my instrumental music into GigDaddy and created several vocal tracks by singing into the iPhone's mic. At the beginning of the song, I recorded my voice several times to create an a cappella sound clip, although most of the song has just two vocal tracks. Once I finished the vocals, I left one track open for additional sounds.

At the end of the song, which got cut off in the video due to the video editor's limitations, I added keyboard effects created with synthPond and Argon synthesizer apps.

Unfortunately, you can't use two iPhone apps at once, so I transferred the output from each app to my computer, then re-recorded it back to the open track on the iPhone, through the built-in mic. This was one of several workarounds I used in this project.

Next, I mixed down the song, converting this multitrack file into a .WAV file by exporting it to my computer. GigDaddy requires a wireless transfer (since Apple limits your ability to access any of the iPhone's internal file structure). Luckily, I had a wireless router that let me transfer the file. I also needed to export the file to my computer yet again because the video editor couldn't import it directly from within my iPhone. But I'll get into this in my next post.

Click here to listen to the song. (This link will open up a new window browser and start your digital audio player, if you have one installed.)

I know that there are lots of hardware and software that are better and easier to use than the iPhone to create music. Still, I was impressed that the technology let me create a complex music composition using several apps, right on my iPhone. In my next blog post, I'll describe what apps I used to capture still images and video for the music video.

—Terry Sullivan