Great for creative projects but pretty lousy as a phone.

I was thinking when Rachel and I started to look at recording an album, how with such a busy life we could make that happen. I travel often up and down to London and started to look into how I could do some composing and recording on the train. I longed for an Ipad as I'd been impressed with the quality of the recording Damon had done on it but couldn't justify the expense along with all of our other commitments so started to look into how to record some demos on my iphone. I'd fiddled around with making music on my iphone previously but now I wanted to find some programs that had more options and were more flexible.

I'm completely stunned by what's available and we've managed to make some high quality demos which will I'm sure include performances that will be on the album. Its also great to get away from that 'right lets go. Are you ready? Now we are going to record'  thing that happens in the studio and often inhibits a natural performance. So the process has been me playing around with ideas and constructing a backing track which we then add guitars to at home. We will then take these demos and transfer them to something better (to be decided) and add and subtract programming and live performance.

So here is a list of apps that we have used and all very cheap!:
Garageband- we use this for multi tracking, recording live performances by plugging straight into the iphone and processing through one of their amp pre-sets. You are now able to record on 16 different tracks and bounce them all together and start again as long as you have enough memory and don't need to make calls!  It has some great and very usable sounds as well though.
Nano Studio- unbelievably great synth pre-sets and programming capabilities. I very rarely sequence on this as I get tide up with the detail and that slows my creative juices down. To get performances onto Garageband I use:
Audiobus- this links lots of music apps together plus effects if you want. However the latest ios7 upgrade lets you do a certain amount of this within garageband.

Akai iMPC- rediculously great sequencer with an audio copy facility that enables sequences to be copied to Garageband
Rhythm- all the old greats TB 3, DR 8, FM-3 all together
Alchemy- a very powerful but odd synth.
Midi Synth- great pre-sets and programability
Manetron 2- very out of tune in places but sounds great in a track and all of the best old Mellotron sounds.

I will be adding to this I'm sure and I have ditched a lot of great apps that I just couldn't work with for one reason or another.