If you’re a musician self-isolating at home, you might be missing the feeling of jamming with other people. Hours spent without leaving the house might be great for writing songs, making beats, or practicing your instrument, but there’s no substitute for passing ideas back and forth amongst collaborators in the same room. Or maybe you’re a non-musician, just bored at home and looking for a creative way to pass some time with friends. In any case, you’re not completely on your own: There are plenty of apps available that allow you to make sound together while physically apart, whether you’re a total beginner or an artist equipped with bedroom recording essentials. Here’s our guide to five of the best.
If You Want to Make Techno With Your Friends
Endlesss is a new, free iOS app designed by artist, technologist, and all-around audio madman Tim Shaw. It’s got an intuitive layout that makes it feel as much like a game as an audio workstation, making it easy for users with little to no musical training to jump right in. The basic functionality involves looping drums, bass, and other sounds—including audio recorded on your device’s microphone—and layering those loops on top of each other.
Endlesss really distinguishes itself with its sharing feature, which allows other users to jump into your jams and contribute their own loops, or add effects like reverb and distortion. Because your inputs can be quantized—essentially locking them to the existing tempo of the jam—you don’t have to worry about your spotty internet connection (or lack of rhythm) keeping you from staying synced with your partners. You can share your creations as videos, or, for the more technically inclined, export stems to keep building on them in your favorite digital audio workstation.
If You Want To Share New Ideas Quickly
If you’re more into guitar than gabber, check out SoundStorming. This iOS app lets you record audio one minute at a time, making it well suited to getting down melodies, chord progressions, and other musical scraps in the moment of inspiration. You can publish those recordings to your profile, which opens them up for collaboration with the entire SoundStorming community, who can take what you’ve made and build upon it for themselves—adding vocal lines to guitar parts, basslines to drum loops, and so on. If the thought of strangers riffing on your work doesn’t sit right with you, don’t worry—you can also set your posts to private and only share links with trusted collaborators.
If You Don’t Have an iPhone
Music app developers have long scorned Android devices, but there are still a handful of solid entries in the Google Play store. One such app is Bandpass, which claims to turn “mobile music production into a… social network.” In practice, that means a stripped-down, loop-based version of a digital audio workstation (DAW)—the sort of multi-functional programs that are at the heart of most home studios—that comes with the ability to collaborate on projects with other users. The Bandpass interface takes some time to get used to, but underneath its layers of menus, it features a powerful sampler with a library of over 3,000 sounds, effects processing modules, and even MIDI support for power users who want to hook up an external keyboard.
If You Want to Get Into Recording
Bandlab is a free DAW that runs directly in your desktop web browser, providing a free internet-connected approximation of home studio programs like Pro Tools and Ableton Live. It’s a good fit for musicians who want to try their hand at recording or production without having to download and install any additional software, and comes with a surprisingly robust library of effects plugins and sounds from different genres, including hip-hop, city pop, witch house, ambient, and a lot more. You don’t need MIDI keyboards or an audio interface to use Bandlab, but if you have them already, you can use them to control virtual instruments and record audio directly into the program. (Users without an interface or external microphone can also record with their computer’s built-in mic.) Every Bandlab session can also be made collaborative, so other users can jump in to tweak ideas or lay down new ones from within the session without having to bounce audio or worry about data transfers with large file sizes. Bandlab has its limits compared to pro-level DAWs, but it’s a great way to learn how to do essential production tasks like drum programming. If you end up enjoying the Bandlab workflow, the company also offers a full-fledged DAW called Cakewalk—formerly known as SONAR—as a free download for Windows.
If You Want to Graduate From GarageBand
Just in time for the social distancing era, Apple has launched a 90-day free trial of their $199 Logic Pro X DAW software for the first time ever. This industry-grade recording suite has everything you need to start making music, including virtual instruments, effects plugins, loops, and more. It’s great for musicians of all genres who are looking to make the jump from starter software like Bandlab or GarageBand to something with a little bit more functionality. Ableton Live, a popular DAW focused on electronic music production and live performance—which has the added benefit of being compatible with Windows, unlike Logic—also touts a 90-day free trial with full functionality.
Unlike Bandlab, professional-grade DAWs like Logic Pro X and Ableton Live don’t have built-in functionalities that allow you to share project files with collaborators over the internet. To make music together in self-isolation, you’ll have to rely on digital file-hosting services like Dropbox or Google Drive to share sessions and audio clips. The cloud-based music collaboration platform Splice offers a service called Splice Studio, which lets you upload unlimited Ableton, Logic, or FL Studio sessions into the cloud and add collaborators for free. For advanced musicians and producers, collaborating remotely on DAW sessions may not be quite the same as working together in a studio in real time, but it’s probably the next best thing.
