iPad Music Apps

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Notion is a musical scoring and creation app for your iPad.    It gives you the ability to produce, manipulate, and playback scores.  Its sampled instruments were recorded by The London Symphony Orchestra and you can expand this library via app-store purchase.  The stock sounds are decent giving you access to several instruments to work with including guitar, electric bass, piano, and various orchestral pieces.

The notation editor in Notion is fairly easy to use and navigate, but lacks some important features like engraving and stem direction.  Notion won’t replace your go-to desktop software for this sort of thing, but it does provide a mobile solution for those who need it.

One of the things I like most about Notion are the host of articulations you get for each instrument and how it easy it is to change the articulation of a note on your score.  If you’re working with a guitar score, adding bends, whammies, vibrato etc. is a breeze.  Another added benefit of using Notion if you are a novice composer or producer is the fact that you’ll undoubtedly start learning how to work with sheet music.

Notion comes with a built-in mixer, reverb and distortion effects, and you can share your work with other Notion users for collaborative efforts.  At $14.99 it’s a little on the expensive side, but it’s still a quality app with a lot to offer.  Library expansion packs range from $.99 to $4.99.