Great Android Music Apps

There are some very sophisticated and useful music apps on the android phone market, many of which are free or have free versions. Here's a quick guide to a few great music apps.

Chordbot is an essential app for any composer or songwriter. It lets you create and play a variety of simple and advanced chord progressions. It is great for experimentation and accompaniment to guitar, piano or vocals. There's a massive range of chord types to choose from in all keys and inversions. You can alter the tempo, transpose the chords and create slash chords. Some of the complex diminished, sixth and seventh chords are probably more useful to experienced composers, and can sound very dissonant. However, this app can create song arrangements from absolutely nothing and it's good fun to play around with. Chordbot Lite is free, but you have to pay for the full version, which comes with extra features like extra instruments and exporting options.  

Songo is essentially a chord finding app without the boring bits of music theory. It's a tool that helps you find chord progressions by joining chords of the same key together. You can create songs in 12 keys, transpose the songs or just have a good old mess about. The design does look a bit too kid-friendly, but that doesn't take away from the fact that this is a vital educational tool for songwriters of all ages, and can help you understand how one chord relates to another. This can be used alongside Chordbot for even more effective chord progressions. The basic free version is fine, but the full version can let you play around with altered chords in seventh and minor seventh variations, see each note of a chord and includes a hands-free auto-play mode.

Piano For You is a great piano app. It has a full piano keyboard (88 keys), you can record it, you can create custom instruments using samples, it loads quickly, it's completely free and has no ads! Even that description doesn't do the app justice, there's plenty to explore on this app and it provides hours of creativity and entertainment. I would personally like to see more keys on the screen to play with, but apart from that this app is fantastic!

For the more experimental music creator, Plasma Sound is worth a go. It is an instrument that acts as a theremin, continuum, keyboard and sequencer. When you touch the screen a note is generated. The left-right axis controls the pitch and up-down axis controls the volume. You can pick the note range, the waveform, tremolo, vibrato, delay and much more. Some of the controls should be used with caution, as they can create some seriously unstable sounds, unless that's your intention. The design is certainly very slick and it's completely ad and cost free!

There's plenty of variety and experimentation available to you with these apps, and are fine examples of how new technology can shape modern music composition.