Apple Music Memos

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Apple Music Memos

(Requires IOS 9.1 or newer)

Apple releases Music Memos: record and develop song ideas on your iPhone


New app is designed to be used at the start of the creative process




Apple Music MemosMusic Memos is more than just a recording app.
Apple has added to its roster of music making software by releasing Music Memos, a new iPhone app that enables you to capture and develop song ideas.

Music Memos is a free app that's optimised for guitar and piano and is designed for songwriters who want to be able to capture their ideas whenever and wherever they have them. Inspired by the Voice Memos app in iOS, it enables you to record any instrument you like, and your memos can be named, tagged and rated.

This isn't simply a recording app, though: Music Memos can analyse the rhythm and chords of acoustic guitar and piano recordings and automatically generate drum and bass parts. You can customise how your virtual backing band plays until you get the feel that your song requires.

Basic chord notation is also included, and Memos can be backed up to the iCloud so that they can be developed further in GarageBand or Logic Pro X. You can also email your ideas or share them via Apple Music Connect.

Music Memos is available now as a free download from the Apple App Store.


https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/id1036437162&v0

oad apps.
Description
Music Memos is the easiest way for songwriters to capture and organise new musical ideas. Use your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to record acoustic guitar, piano, voice or any musical instrument as high-quality, uncompressed audio. Then name, tag and rate your ideas to start building a library of all your favourite new song parts and riffs. Music Memos automatically detects your tempo, rhythmic feel and chords and lets you instantly hear your musical idea accompanied by a rhythm section with realistic drums and bass. View the chords you've played, add comments and lyrics, or share your recordings with friends or directly to Apple Music Connect.* And it's easy to take your favourite ideas into GarageBand to add more instruments and continue building your song.

Quickly capture musical ideas
• Easily record any musical idea using a simple interface
• Instantly listen to your recorded song ideas with a virtual drummer and bass player, who follow along like a live band in the room
• Adjust the groove and sound of the drum or bass using simple and intuitive controls to hear your song idea in different ways
• Tune your guitar with a built-in instrument tuner

Build a library of song ideas
• Name any song idea, or delete unwanted recordings
• Tag your song ideas to help you find them later using keywords like verse, chorus, mellow, energetic, or add your own custom tags
• Rate your song idea 1–5 stars to help you identify your favourites
• Supports iCloud Drive so your library of song ideas is always safe and available across all your iOS devices

View, edit and document your song ideas
• Automatically analyses the music you played and displays musical measures and suggested chord names
• Rename or provide further detail for any chord names throughout your song
• The drum and bass performances adapt immediately to match any chord and rhythm edits
• Trim away any unwanted parts from the beginning and end of your recording
• Keep track of comments, lyric ideas, alternative guitar tunings or capo position

Share your new song
• Use iCloud Drive to make your song ideas available across all your iOS devices
• Email any song idea to a friend to share your music, or to collaborate with other musicians
• Quickly open your idea in GarageBand for iOS to add more instruments and keep building your song
• Export a song idea to the Mac so you can work in GarageBand or Logic Pro X as a full multi-track production
• Share to SoundCloud, YouTube and Apple Music Connect*

Elantric

http://pogueman.tumblr.com/

By David Pogue

Today, Apple released one of the most amazingly advanced apps it's ever made—but one aimed at a fraction of its users.

It's called Music Memos, and it's for people who write music.

Apple had noticed something about songwriters. When they want to capture little musical ideas, they fall into the habit of recording them into Voice Memos, a simple audio recording app that comes on the iPhone. Apple's music team thought: "Well, we can do a little better than that."

Music Memos (free) starts out looking a lot like Voice Memos. There's nothing there but a Record button. You're supposed to tap that button and then start noodling on your guitar or piano, playing your idea for future reference. (Other instruments are fine—this means you, ukulele players—but piano and guitar work best.)


There's no metronome, no click track, no count-off; you just start when you're ready. (There's even an Auto mode that begins recording as soon as you start playing, saving you the tap on the Record button.) Understand, your instrument is not plugged into the iPhone; it's recording only from its microphone.

You can name your idea or tag your idea with keywords for later searching.

Your virtual backup combo

So far, none of this is especially impressive. The real magic happens on playback. At that point, the app can add bass and drum parts automatically.

I'll wait while you recover from that sentence.

If you're a musician, you must already be scratching your head. How can a little app create bass and drum tracks automatically, without any input from you?

Remember: there was no metronome. So to come up with a drum track, the app must analyze your playing and figure out what the time signature and tempo were, and then create a virtual drummer that plays along with you, even when you speed up or slow down. As you can see in this Music Memos Demo, it does all of this rather spectacularly:


But what about the bass? To come up with an automatic bass line, the software has to do something even more impressive: It has to analyze the harmonies of what you played, and determine for itself what the chords are.

This is a very difficult job. Software that can understand complex harmonies is every bit as amazing as software that can understand spoken English. Maybe harder.

There have been music apps that can transcribe single-line melodies, where only one note at a time is ever sounding (from a flute or a singer, for example). But for software to hear and interpret polyphony—multiple notes played simultaneously (chords), as from a guitar or piano—is astonishingly hard. It's like asking you to type out the transcript of four overlapping, simultaneous party conversations.

Music Memos is among the first apps ever written that can perform that task—and as far as I can tell, the first free app, for consumers, ever.

How well it works

If you play something pretty straightforward—a blues progression or a fairly straight-ahead rock ditty, for example—Music Memos nails it. You record, you turn on the virtual bass and drums, and hit Play, and your jaw falls out of its socket. As long as you didn't stray much from the primary chords in the key, the bass plays along perfectly.

(Unfortunately, it's hard to hear the bass when you're relying only on your iPhone speaker. It's loud, clear, and distinct through earbuds, headphones, or speakers.)

The bass player doesn't always get it right, though, when the harmonies are even slightly more unusual. It simply guesses the wrong notes to play.

And very occasionally, the drummer gets it wrong, too. The result can be a train wreck, as in this example.


Fortunately, Apple also gives you a lead-sheet view that displays its interpretation of your harmonies:


In here, with some effort, you can dial in a corrected time signature or harmony.


Alternatively, you can export the musical sketch to GarageBand (the GarageBand app on the phone or tablet, or to the Mac version of GarageBand via iCloud). There, the virtual bass and drum tracks show up as individual recordings, which you can edit to your heart's content.


Oh, by the way: If, in Music Memos, you hold your finger down on the Bass or Drums icon, you open one of these little panels:


Here, you can control the virtual player's volume relative to your original performance, what kind of bass or drum kit is used, and how complex the accompaniment. This video, for example, lets you compare the Quiet, Loud, Simple, and Complex settings for the virtual drummer:


Where Music Memos can go from here

As a musician myself, I've already started using Music Memos for its intended purpose. I wish it were less clumsy to edit the harmonies within the app. I wish there were some way to record different fragments of a song within a single file. Or that there were a way to drag song chunks into a sequence. (Of course, GarageBand does all of that quite nicely, but that's a second app.)

Otherwise, though, Music Memos is a fantastic super-niche app.

My biggest question is: Why would Apple put so much effort into a free app that benefits such a small audience?

Apple suggests that, beyond professing to love music in general, there's a "let a thousand flowers bloom" strategy at work. Perhaps encouraging a huge songwriting ecosystem to flourish is in Apple's interests, if only because the best of it may one day wind up for sale on the iTunes Music Store.

May you be so lucky. In the meantime, enjoy a free app that pulls off a truly amazing musical stunt.

maxdaddy

Wow, that's a great little app. Works just as described.

mbenigni

Very exciting!  When I got ahold of the Digitech Trio last year, one of my first thoughts was, "this would be an incredible iOS app."  Music Memos seems like it leans a little bit in that direction.  Sounds very useful - I'll be downloading it ASAP.

HAMERMAN409

I finally updates to IOS 9 last night just so I could try this app.

I like that it has a tuner built in. I was able to adjust the Bass and Drum volume but is there a way to adjust the recorded track volume? I often found that the guitar was too high in the mix. (I know - how often do you hear a guitarist say that!)

I haven't tried exporting into Garage Band yet - do the drums and bass get exported?

Speaking of Garage Band I am looking forward to trying the new loops feature but first I will have to clear some room on my iPad.

Elantric


Now_And_Then

  Why would anyone want an app (either this, or Band In A Box, or pedal, for that matter) to add drums and bass?

I'm sure that this will be an unpopular point of view on this technology-centric board, but I am basing it on the Pogue review, which is rather detailed.

Here's what I think: the more the app or pedal successfully and appropriately adds bass and drums to a song, the less there was of anything original or unique in the song to begin with: it seems that you need to, or have, adhered pretty closely to this or that given genre of music for the algorithm to work.

And once you've got this track that's unoriginal and un-unique, the algorithm will reinforce that unoriginality and un-uniqueness with... more of the same.

Where exactly is the fun or satisfaction in that? 

Am I missing something here?

How about this: take your basic song idea, and put it into the app (or through the pedal). If the app successfully copes with it, take that as a hint that you need to come up with something that is rather less formulaic and stereotypic, and that you will need to make an effort to move the song in a direction other that the obvious - in this case, "the obvious" being defined as "what the algorithm thinks is appropriate".

So perhaps there's some utility there, after all.








GovernorSilver

I absolutely love this app.

While it does not seem likely that I will create a finished piece of music with it, I just love recording random stuff into it then laughing at the results.  Here's one recording that I'll leave up for a limited time:

https://soundcloud.com/governorsilver/ill-be-bach

I understand musicians want serious tools to make music.  Well, this probably isn't it. 

OTOH, I find it unhealthy to be serious all the time.  Laughter is good for the soul.  At the end of a guitar-playing day, I fire up the app and let it record while I free improvise (as advised by Joe Diorio and David Torn), then chuckle at the "rhythm section" the app creates for my improvised guitar meanderings.

supernicd

QuoteWhy would anyone want an app (either this, or Band In A Box, or pedal, for that matter) to add drums and bass?

Most technology can be used for good or evil.

I personally probably wouldn't make use of tools that create an automatic accompaniment for a final song.  But as a practice tool, to shake yourself out of a rut, to experiment with different styles, to help you better convey an idea to other musicians, maybe as a tool to help get you to a final destination in a songwriting endeavor, I can see a lot of potential, legitimate uses for tools like these.

I grabbed this one but haven't tried it out yet.  "I'll be Bach" does sound fun. :)
Strat w/ GK-3, Godin LGXT
VG-99, GR-55, GP-10
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Elantric

#9
I'm bummed Apple Music Memos requires IOS 9.2 or newer

I'm sticking with IOS 8.4.2 on my iPhone 6 Plus - because i prefer a usable iPhone that does not bog down under the bloat of IOS9.


Edit: Finally updated to IOS9.3 - mostly to use this new Lightning USB 3 adapter
https://www.vguitarforums.com/smf/index.php?topic=17658.msg125996#msg125996

whippinpost91850

I never went past 8.3 on my 6plus for the same reason.

BackDAWman

I haven't found any major usability problems with 9.2.1 on my iPad Air 2......yet.

supernicd

Quote from: BackDAWman on January 27, 2016, 11:17:36 PM
I haven't found any major usability problems with 9.2.1 on my iPad Air 2......yet.

Same here - 9.2.1 on my iPad Air 1.  I cautiously took the plunge a couple of months ago since some apps I wanted are now requiring iOS 9.  It generally seems OK.  No major issues yet.  YMMV as always.
Strat w/ GK-3, Godin LGXT
VG-99, GR-55, GP-10
---------------------------------------------------------------

GovernorSilver

I just updated to 9.2.1 on both iPhone and iPad.  The app still works.   8)

Codeseven

9.2.1 on my 16gb Air 1 too. Seems to have been very stable so far. Looking forward to updating to 9.3 and beyond.

utensil

iOS 9.2.1 seems ok except for sample tank for me on iPhone 6plus, launches works fine and then always crashes after a few mins

Elantric

#16
In my experience IOS 9 ( or newer) runs just fine on the very latest hardware.
*  2014 iPad Air 2
* 2015 iPhone 6s
* 2015  iPhone 6s Plus

But if you own an older IOS device and upgrade to IOS 9, it will slow down under the bloat, or become downright non functional for many musical needs.

I intend to leave my 14 month old iPhone 6 Plus on IOS 8.4.5 - because my friends with this same iPhone model who updated to IOS 9 now have a very sluggish user experience.

If you want to see how bad it can get - upgrade an iPhone 4s to IOS 9 

supernicd

QuoteIf you want to see how bad it can get - upgrade an iPhone 4s to IOS 9

No thanks. I struggled enough with the decision to put it on the iPad Air 1, and wouldn't have done that without some compelling reason(s). :)  It does seem OK on that though.  Hasn't caused me major anguish or regret.
Strat w/ GK-3, Godin LGXT
VG-99, GR-55, GP-10
---------------------------------------------------------------

supernicd

#18

Strat w/ GK-3, Godin LGXT
VG-99, GR-55, GP-10
---------------------------------------------------------------

admin

#19