Ableton has released its first iOS app, Note. It’s a music sketchpad designed to help you come up with ideas on your iPhone or iPad.
Desktop DAWs Developers, if you want to build an iOS variant of your software, there are several options. You can try to create an app that acts as an end-to-end music production solution ( Steinberg’s Cubasis Or, instead, come up with something simpler and leaner designed to complement the PC/Mac product rather than recreate it.
Caution definitely falls into the latter category.this is No iOS version of livethe company’s wildly popular desktop DAW, but with some similarities, tracks started in Note can continue in Live.
Billed as “a playable iOS app specifically designed for the early stages of the music production process,” Note is built for starting tracks. It comes with 56 drum sampler kits that can be played and recorded on a 16 pad grid, and 261 synth sounds and 36 melodic sampler instruments that can be played polyphonically on a 25 pad grid.
These sounds represent a “curated selection” of sounds available in Ableton Live and use the same synth engine and samples.
Recording with Note does not require you to press the red button. Start jamming and when you’re happy with it, hit the capture button to commit. Phrase length and tempo are automatically detected and loops are created.
In most cases, the timing of the recording should be tight. That’s why Note comes with a quantize/nudge feature that lets you overdub your sounds to create additional layers of harmonies and rhythms. There are also sound shaping controls and effects.
If you want to create your own drum kits and melodic instruments, you can sample and create directly in the app. You can then edit and process the sound.
Note is not a full DAW, but you can experiment with arrangements in the familiar Session View. Export Session View content as audio to send to collaborators, or use Ableton Cloud to send note sets directly to Live for further development. Loading it here allows you to edit sounds, samples and effects in more detail.
Ableton Note is now available for iPad and iPhone on the Apple App Store.The cost is $6/£5/€7, see Ableton (opens in new tab) website.