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Top 10 Apps for the Young Musician The benefits of tablets in modern education are undeinable. Educational games and applications are inexpensive, abundant and almost addicting for kids.

For children with communication or motor difficulties, the touch friendliness of tablets is a total game changer. The tablet gives them a way to communicate that is more expressive and faster than ever.

For children who love music (or for musicians who act like children), the possibilites for music creation on an iPad are extrordinary. Never before has one device had so many inexpensive games, instruments and programs to help wrtie, record and perform music.

Below is a list of 10 music iPad apps that I have used in music classes with private students and in personal jam sessions for years. I think you and your kids will really enjoy them!

- Mr. Rob

P.S. If you are not familiar with the Guided Access features of your tablet, definitely check them out. For example, you can set up your iPad so that a triple click on the home button password locks your child onto whatever app they’re already in.

P.P.S. These are not affiliate links!

10 Melodica

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Ages: 3 + Cost: $.99

Difficulty: Easy

Kicking off our list is one of the early iPhone step-sequencers, Melodica.

Melodica (like most step sequencers) is a blank grid of tiles. The rows each represent a musical note. The columns represent small units of time.

The song plays from left to right, and by filling in the grid, you can tell which note (row) when to play (column).

What’s great about melodica is it’s different “moods” (soundscapes) and that it limits the user to a consonant (error-free) set of notes.

Your child will most likely try to fill up every square on the grid on their first go around, but you can make some really hypnotizing melodies if you remember that less is more. You can also spell your child’s initials, which kids tend to enjoy.

No matter how you use it, Melodica is a good introduction to making music on an iPad.

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Auxy

Story Bots: Tap and Sing

Drum School

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Website

Website

Ages: 4 +

Ages: 4 +

Ages: 6 +

Cost: Free

Cost: Free

Cost: 5.99

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty: Medium

Auxy is kind of like Melodica times four. With four tracks (one drum, one bass, two leads), it’s a little more expressive but also a little trickier to navigate.

Once you’ve created clips for the four instruments, you can mix and match clips to create new mixes, sections and songs.

Like Melodica, Auxy is somewhat errorless because it only presents the user with consontant notes to choose from. Though dissonant notes can be more expressive and more interesting, if you’ve never played an instrument and don’t know much about music theory, starting with a limited and consonant set of notes is a good idea.

Tap and Sing is a two octave chorus of robots. Notes are played by animated robots who ‘bum’ their way through simple melodies.

You can free play with the robots (in the key of C Major), or you can use the guided song mode to have the robots lead you through simple melodies like “Mary Had a Little Lamb”.

In the guided mode, the robots light up and wave to encourage the user to press them in the order. This makes it really easy for children to get started playing some simple melodies!

Story Bots has several other well designed apps that “feature you child” in the style of Jib Jab talking heads.

Drum School is probably the most referential app on our list. By that, I mean it’s more of a library of well sequenced beats (grouped by genre and difficulty), excercises and fills.

It doesn’t actually have any instruments that the user can play, but for anyone who plays drums, it has videos and sheet music that you can speed up or slow down to meet your skill level.

So while it doesn’t make sense for anyone who DOESN’T have a drumset, it is a must have for any drummers out there.

Website

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DM1

Toca Band

Figure

Website

Website

Website

Ages: 2 +

Ages: 1 +

Ages: 3 +

Cost: 5.99

Cost: Free

Cost: Free

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty: Medium

The DM1 is my favorite drum machine for the iPad. Like Melodica and Auxy, the DM1 is a step sequencer that plays a grid of tiles from left to right.

The main difference here is that instead of composing with musical notes, the rows represent different drum sounds. This is essentially the type of technology that you hear on lots of hip-hop tracks, lots of Michael Jackson records and really all over popular music.

You can learn A LOT about drums and rhythm from playing the DM1. For instance, if you leave all of the tiles on, you’ll notice that you have 16 increments of time from left to right (much like the earlier step sequencers). You might also notice 4 bigger beats on the 1st, 5th, 9th, and 13th increments. These represent the four main beats that are then sub-divided into four smaller beats.

Sonically, the wide range sounds in the DM1 are impressive, and based on my experience, it is stable enough for live performances!

If you’re looking for a cute, fun and easy to use app for your young child, Toca Band is a great place to start, even for kids as young as 1 year old.

Toca Band allows kids to mix and match different musicians on a stage. The musicians play in time together and play more or less complicated patterns on how high or low you set them on the stage.

By dragging a musician to the start platform, you become the performer! This lets your child explore different types of instruments that are colorful, cartoonish and consonant with the rest of the musicians playing.

All in all, it’s a catchy song your child will love (even if the vocal part begins to drive you nuts after awhile)!

The flexibility, features and sounds in Figure make it my personal favorite instrument on the iPad. It might prove difficult for children to navigate some of the features, but once set up, it sounds great. The layout is a little tricky, but there are a lot of great videos about how to use Figure.

If you have more than one device in the house, you can sync the two instances of Figure together for some really interesting and mesmorizing jam potential.

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1 Piano Maestro + Dust Buster

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Garage Band

Guitar Bots

Website

Website

Ages: 3 +

Ages: 6 +

Cost: 4.99

Cost: 5.99

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty: Medium

Apple’s premeire music app for the iPad is AWESOME! So awesome in fact that several bands have produced entire albums on the iPad’s version of Garage Band.

There are dozens of quality instruments inside Garage Band that look, sound and feel great. The “smart” instruments help you minimize any ‘bad notes’ and they will get you sounding great in no time. You can also record vocals and instruments through the iPad/iPhone mic.

The sampler is a lot of fun for kids. Like it’s name suggests, it accesses the microphone to let you record and trim a short sample of sound. It then pitches the sample across a whole keyboard, so you can jam on your sample to your hearts content.

I got my first sampler on a blue and green Kermit the Frog Keyboard when I was young enough to still be potty training. I used to sample “Ma, Come Here!” and play the heck outta it when I was ready for some parental assistance finishing up in the little boys’ room. Good times!

Where was this app when I started playing guitar? Seriously. This is a game changer.

GuitarBots presents sequential and logical guitar lessons in video game fashion. Imagine Guitar Hero but where it listens to a real guitar (via the mic on the device) instead of using a dumbed down guitar-like controller.

The game uses a bouncing ball to help guide the student to reading guitar tablature. The ball bounces down the neck of an on screen guitar showing you how to play bass lines, melodies, chords and solos.

I love how it progresses from open strings to simple melodies to basic chords and onto songs

Like Guitar Bots, where was this app when I started playing piano? I’ve written extensively about Piano Maestro in the past, but in short, it is a free app that presents a video game for learning how to read music and play piano. Teachers can connect to students, they can assign weekly home challenges, and the app is alwasy putting out new songs to keep up with the pop charts, the sea-sons and other popular piano methods.

This is a must-download for any piano student! For really young kids, use the ‘hold’ and ‘note name’ option, and the on screen keyboard to make it easier!

Cost: FreeAges: 2 + Difficulty: MediumWebsite

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