Android and Indaba for musicians on the go

By giizii, January 3, 2010 2:40 pm

So, you never have enough time to record a new tune? You have millions ideas in your head and they all go unrecorded because you are not in front of laptop or desktop box with your favorite editing software? If you are lucky enough to have Android Phone with this really simple work-flow you can start capturing your ideas and turn them into songs.

You will need to install only two free apps from the Market, SoundTrail and Robotic Guitarist and with the native Android Music Player you can start composing new songs whenever a new idea strikes you anywhere. You can also use any notepad (my favorite is AK Notepad) to write the lyrics starting to circle around your melodies so you don’t forget them.

Robotic Guitarist

Robotic Guitarist

SoundTrail

SoundTrail

Start by tuning your guitar with the excellent tuner featured in Robotic Guitarist, or layout few chords in the same app to make your chord base for your new idea, test how it sounds when you are away form your instrument . Robotic Guitarist is offering you all possible guitar chords with option to have 7 chords to play with in same session. Once you have your basic idea, record it with SoundTrail with your guitar, piano or just whistle or sing.

You can play your base in the music player and launch the SoundTrail on top of it. This is one of the great advantages of Android, running up to six apps in the same time and they can all share device I/O sound capabilities. You can’t do this on iPhone yet.

Since you will need some sort of mix/edit software to hear all your separately recorded files/tracks, you can use the excellent and free indabamusic.com collaboration app, to upload your tracks (small downside is you will need to convert AMR SoundTrail file format  in to MP3) and mix them in their free Java based mixing console. Works really well on both Mac and PC. In the same time you can start sharing your ideas with your collaborators and download their takes and mixes on your phone and meditate on top of them in infinite iterations until you are sure you nailed that song down.

You can use all this apps and services for free. Free Indaba account limits you to only six sessions, but that is more then enough for idea capturing. What’s not free is your mobile data plan and of course you will need to end up in pro recording studio to turn your drafts in to everlasting recordings.

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