The tech world is growing day by day and its impact on music has been so heavy that people can now almost stop carrying instruments for certain shows and depend just on their laptops. We have now come to a point where even iPads are used for shows and are used to emulate various instruments like violin, nadaswaram, big synths and even drums.

In this article we will be covering 5 Apps that can be used to play music via iPad.

Animoog

This is a fun synth emulation with a great design. It has a lot of engaging animations on-screen which make it fun to play. The best part is its XY pads which are of great use.  The presets are pretty good and there are a lot of options. This app also has an option that allows us to record upto 4 tracks on it.

Model 15
This is an emulation of a Moog style modular synthesizer.

It has the following features :

• Virtual Keyboard
• Sliders
• In-built arpeggiator.

It also has a lot of presets which have very good tones and can be very useful.

The stand out feature is that it can be used for educational purposes because it teaches the basic flow of a synth.

Geoshred

This is one of the most popular apps for iPad music. Almost every other musician uses this and has become so popular in the indian musician circuit as well because of its highly expressive capabilities. You can achieve realistic guitar sounds that bend, stretch and manipulate the sound into endless possibilities. The bending and stretching has made this popular for indian musicians that play Carnatic music on it.

Some of its features are :

• Multiple Modeled effects
• Echo, a unique looper and multi-tap echo
• Finger vibrato, slide and fret scraping
• Unique mono mode using intervals of multiple strings.
• Built in arpeggiator
• Alternative tunings
• Intelligent pitch rounding

Alchemy Synth

This might sound very familiar to the producers who use Logic Pro or Garage Band. The iPad version of it is pretty good as well. It performs pretty well in the iPad as well and has pretty good animations on the interface. While it’s obviously not as functional as the plugin version, it is pretty good for using it through an iPad.

ThumbJam

ThumbJam is a sampler that has a good amount of instrument sounds and unique playing interfaces. Just like the other synths, ThumbJam has note bends, vibrato etc for expressive playing. ThumbJam uses shaking and tilt to add expressions such as vibrato, glide etc.  There are also effects like reverb and delay to add depth. The best aspect of ThumbJam is that we can load different instruments and handle them simultaneously with its split screen feature.  This is a fun app that can be used in live performances.