Amplitube for iPad – iPad Musicians Tools

Amplitube iRig is another tool for making music with the iPad and it can be used with the Garageband application. Also you have the Amplitube 2 for iPad application, which is a fully functioning guitar multi-effect processor and is also a recording and sound and music production studio for your iPad. Basically what you do is you turn your iPad into a mobile guitar, bass, keyboards and multi-effect processor for vocals. The Amplitube App gives you a complete recording studio on your iPad.

To connect up your guitar you use the Amplitube iRig interface adapter and there is also the iRig microphone, or iRig Mic, so that you can process and record your vocals as well as acoustic instruments. You don’t have to be sitting in a recording studio to make music. So long as you have your guitar, the Amplitube adapter and your iPad with the Amplitube software on it, you can practice and record just about anywhere.

Using Amplitube iPad Effects

With the Amplitube 2 for iPad, it is like a traditional live set up and you have four daisy chained stompbox effects that run into an amplifier with a plethora of effects. You also have a cabinet and a microphone. There are 11 stomp box built in effects to choose from. There is delay, fuzz, overdrive wah, chorus, envelope filter, phaser, flanger, octave, noise filter and also distortion.

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You have five different amps to choose from, that have full controls, along with five different speaker cabinets and two microphones. One of the microphones is dynamic and the other one is condenser. The condenser microphones are more for the studio use as they are more sensitive. With the five amplifiers you get clean, crunch, lead, metal and bass.

Amplitube iPad and the paid for extras

It is also possible to expand the recording rig that you start with, by making some in app purchases ,with affects like the compressor, reverb, parametric EQ, graphic EQ and the limiter. Personally I think that those FX should have been included already in the basic package as standard. So when you are looking at the price of this setup you should see how much the in app purchases are going to cost you, so that you know how much the total is going to be. There are other amps and effects that you can add from the Amplitube Fender and vocal effects from the Vocalive apps . When you have all of this installed there would be hardly anything, that you couldn’t do with Amplitube for iPad.

Amplitube 3 – Organising your favourite presets

Having all these wild and wonderful amps, effects and so on is great, but you do need to have some way to be able to manage them. Within Amplitube for iPad there is a folder panel system that allows you to store, find and recall your library of sounds. You can actually make some dedicated buttons with favourites and there are 10 available banks to store your 40 most often used to presets. So when working on a song, it can be quite manageable to change from one preset through to another.

A large part of the functionality of the Amplitube for iPad application is the ability to grab your musical ideas, and record your performances quickly and easily. Amplitube iPad has a built-in recorder and from this you can export out high-quality sound files. Within the recorder you can also apply different sets of effects and be able to change the tone and the sound of the original track. You can make all sorts of tweaks to perfect your soundtrack in recorder. Once again to be able to get the full benefits of the application you have to add, in app purchases, this time you have to pay extra to turn the single track recorder into a multitrack recorder. I suppose the benefit of this is that you can get the bare application to test out the basics and then expand it as necessary.

Amplitube for iPad – Single Track or Multi Track

When you have the eight track recorder and the master effects section, you are able to work on each individual track with the volume control, pan control, solo and muted switches, as well as controls for adding ambience and depth. It is also possible to import audio into each track and there is a feature which allows you to bounce tracks into one track, which frees up extra tracks for you to be able to use.

Amplitube 3 for iPad looks as though it is an extremely capable musicians tool that will be continuously expandable, so long as you’re prepared to pay for extras. It looks easy to set up and work with the Amplitube iRig, which you use to connect up your guitar. Then you also have the iRig microphone for adding your vocals. A one stop shop for guitarists and singers. Don’t forget there is the ioDock from Alesis that is an excellent tool for connecting microphones to the iPad.