The world of smartphone apps is ever growing and it can be hard to sift through what is bad versus what is good. Fortunately, we are here to do the hard work for you! In this new series of posts we will be highlighting apps that are particularly useful for the touring artist, and where better to begin than with an app called Road Trip!
Road Trip – £4.99
Road Trip is an app available on iOS that helps you to plan out fuel economy and costs for any journey. It is vey extensive, allowing you to see graphs with details of your MPG over the course of the trip, add in any extra expenses such as service and maintenance repairs, check how much distance you can cover until you absolutely have to refuel, and export all of the data to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for you to use. The graphs show various statistics about your trip, with the average cost per day, total distance and fuel used, total fuel cost, and average cost per mile being key figures to help economise on a journey.
While this app sounds useful for any driver, the uses of it for a touring musician are unparalleled. The more money you can save while on tour the better, as many independent artists will profess. A lot of bands that are on their first or second tour will inevitably lose money in the end because they did not economise, but for those that do, they can often come out with a profit. As this app also lets you track the cost of repairs, its also great for making sure the band split costs evenly when on the road.
Songwriter’s Pad – £7.99
Songwriter’s pad is an app available on iOS, Mac and PC, with the promise of release on Android and Windows phones coming soon. It allows users to write song lyrics into it like a standard notepad, but with a twist. This app helps people with writers block, by suggesting ideas for lyrics using a word generator. The artist can choose where they need a little hint of inspiration in their song and the app will make its suggestions. You can even change between different moods depending on the tone of the song to receive different suggestions. The app will leave an annotation by that line of the track reminding you to look at the lyrics there so you can keep track of where you are in the writing process at any one time. It can also help with arranging the lyrics, allowing you to swap verses round and alter the structure.
The app also includes a voice recording feature with cloud storage so that you can record a vocal idea or melody whenever inspiration hits, chord notation for laying out the basic structure of the song, and a built in Dictionary or Thesaurus for finding alternative words to go into the lyrics. All of this, together with the ability to import backing tracks to write lyrics over, make this a very complete package.
Some of the names that praise this app on the app store also make this a must have.The creators state that they have found anyone from an independent artist to a grammy award winner using their app, which goes to show just how diverse and useful this app can be for anyone writing songs.
Both of these apps are well worth checking out, and will undoubtedly help you to plan out your song writing and travelling. We have plenty more apps to tell you about in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for the next post!
Links
Road Trip – https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/road-trip-mpg-mileage-fuel/id298398207?mt=8
Songwriter’s Pad – https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/songwriters-pad-songwriting/id380151611?mt=8
Written by Robert Hill
Read Full Article Here: http://www.helpforbands.co.uk/top-apps-for-musicians/
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