Top 10: Creative tasks with an iPad

10 Best Creative Tasks with an iPad

When the iPad arrived in 2010, it was quickly embraced as the perfect device for surfing the internet from your sofa. Its low weight, solid construction and the touchscreen interface made the web feel like an interactive magazine. But while the iPad was great for consuming content, its aptitude for creating it seemed far more limited.

The past 12 months have proved this theory wrong. It turns out that a big touchscreen interface is just as adept at pushing paint around a canvas or twiddling knobs on a recording studio as it is at browsing the web. However, the iPad’s success is less about its hardware and more about the App Store – where the device’s popularity has helped create a huge variety of content.

The blooming app market has turned the iPad into a creative portable powerhouse

The trend is for simple apps at low prices, but with indie developers bursting with enthusiasm and fresh ideas, many of the apps recommended here put PC software costing 10 times as much to shame. With inspiring – and hugely successful – apps coming not just from the likes of Apple and Adobe but also from cottage industry developers comprising one or two people, this is surely a golden age of software development.

So if you’ve had enough of Angry Birds and are ready to rekindle your creative muse, here’s the place to start. We can’t tell you exactly what to paint, draw, retouch, shoot, record or play, you’ll have to find your own subjects, but we can recommend the best tools for the task. So whether you want to get the dance floor heaving, upload images shot live at an event, or make a last-minute change to your orchestral symphony, read on to discover how much fun the iPad can really be – and what a powerful tool the right apps can make it.

Use this index, and the page buttons below, to jump to the section that appeals to you:

Page 1: Intro and Index
Page 2: Painting
Page 3: Illustration and Design
Page 4: On-location photo shoot
Page 5: Fun Photo Editing
Page 6: DJing
Page 7: Virtual Sculpting
Page 8: Quick Video Editing
Page 9: Digital Sheet Music
Page 10: Music Production
Page 11: Guitar Amp and Effects

To buy any of the apps covered here, search for them at the App Store. Prices can change – often rapidly and dramatically – so our apologies if anything has changed since this article was finished.

1. Painting

Many of us carry our iPads with us regularly, so next time you’ve got a few minutes to spare why not try and paint something, such as the scene in front of you, or maybe just a single object. It makes a more creative change from the usual choice of reading materials and games we use to fill our time.

Painting on an iPad isn’t any better than the real thing, but it is more convenient. There’s no need to buy paint, wash brushes or lug an easel around the countryside. If this convinces people who haven’t touched a paint brush since school to get back into the habit, then that can only be a good thing.

Digital painting does have advantages beyond the practical, though. An Undo button is incredibly useful, and so too is the ability to duplicate a painting – just the thing for making a copy before applying some more daring final flourishes. Most painting apps support layers, which makes it easy to manage different elements. The iPad’s 10in screen can feel a little cramped but the ability to zoom in is another useful trick that traditional painting can’t match.

Procreate is one of the simpler painting apps around, but its brushes are deceptively sophisticated

Our favourite painting app is Procreate (£2.99). On the surface it’s pretty simple, with a choice of Brush, Smudge and Eraser, plus sliders to set its size and opacity. The smudge tool makes it easy to blend colours for some natural-looking paint effects. However, Procreate’s real power is the ability to choose from a variety of brush types and to edit them in meticulous detail. Options such as Grain Movement, Scatter and Wetness give a huge range of brush-like textures. It’s extremely responsive on the original iPad, while those with an iPad 2 can benefit from a larger canvas size, up from 960×704 to 1,920×1,408 pixels.

Another painting app we really like is Brushes – iPad Edition (£5.49). Its brush options aren’t as sophisticated as Procreate’s but it gets around the iPad’s lack of pressure sensitivity by making quick brush strokes appear thinner or fainter than slow strokes. The app can also play a stroke-by-stroke animation of the painting process – great for revelling in your finest artistic moments.

ArtRage (£4.99) is the most sophisticated painting app around. There’s a choice of 13 media types ranging from oil and watercolour to airbrush and felt pen. Picking one doesn’t just affect the texture of brush strokes – with the oil brush, for example, wet paint mixes together on the canvas and you can choose whether to clean the brush between strokes.

ArtRage is the closest the iPad comes to working with real paint

It can take a while to get to grips with its controls, especially as each media type has a different set of parameters, but there’s a range of templates to ease the learning process. ArtRage does prove a bit of a struggle for the original iPad, however, sometimes complaining of insufficient memory and reacting lethargically to brush strokes.

STYLUS OVER SUBSTANCE

Digital finger-painting is a vast improvement over painting with a mouse, but the downside is that your finger obscures your view of the canvas. That’s why it’s worth investing a stylus.

The Griffin Stylus (£9 from www.play.com) has a silky smooth rubber nib and works superbly – not just for painting apps but a wide variety of tasks. However, the stylus that really stands out for painting is the Nomad Brush ($24 from www.nomadbrush.com). It’s superbly weighted and its fibrous tip glides effortlessly across the screen. The iPad isn’t sensitive enough to detect the individual hairs of the brush so creating brush-like textures is still down to the app, but the Nomad Brush adds a great deal to the authenticity of the virtual painting experience.

A stylus feels more natural than painting with a finger, and gives a clearer view of the screen

Children will relish the idea of painting with an iPad, but it’s hard for them to avoid resting another part of their hand on the screen – in most apps, doing so switches from painting to zooming the canvas. The Griffin iMarker (around £20) uses a chunky, battery powered stylus that sends a signal to the iPad, and the accompanying Crayola ColorStudio HD app responds to this stylus and not to stray fingers.

Colour in with the iMarker and the picture starts moving

The app includes a range of brushes, pens and crayons, and lets children colour in animated drawings and design their own animations to colour in from a library of stock illustrations. There’s also a freestyle painting mode. It’s well executed, but the iMarker requires a bit of pressure for it to register. That makes it easier to avoid mistakes but it may confuse younger children. Then again, once the app has been unlocked with the iMarker, there’s still the option to operate it with a finger.

2. Illustration and Design

While painting apps emulate the natural textures of brush strokes, illustration apps are all about clean lines and smooth graduations. This is one area where the iPad’s screen size and resolution does feel a bit too cramped. However, illustrations often include freehand lines, which the iPad handles far better than a computer mouse.

Drawing, like painting, can be fitted into any spare minutes you have in the day. If you’re just starting out then you can always import an image from the iPad 2’s built-in camera, and then draw over that to get the basic structure of the scene. Here are our top choices for illustration.

Adobe Ideas’ no-fuss approach to illustration make it a useful sketchpad

Adobe Ideas (£3.99) couldn’t be much simpler. There are options to adjust the colour and opacity of lines, but they’re freehand only – there’s no ability to amend them other than with the eraser. It can incorporate photos, though, and its ability to create a colour palette by analysing a photo is an interesting feature. We liked it better when it was free, but its simplicity is as much a strength as a weakness.

Inkpad (£5.49) is more in keeping with Windows illustration packages such as CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator. It’s extremely quick to use, with a simple set of vector drawing tools for freehand lines and basic shapes. Lines can also be drawn and edited using nodes and handles to fine-tune freehand lines and modify regular shapes. It also supports graduated fills, drop shadows and dashed lines, plus options to group, reorder and align objects. We particularly like its Eraser tool, which bites chunks out of existing shapes, and the ability to place text on a curved path.

The iPad is perhaps not the obvious choice for full-blown illustration, but Inkpad makes a good argument in its favour

iDraw (£5.99) is a little more sophisticated, with better editing of curves, various options to combine shapes and the ability to place a bitmap image inside a shape or text object. However, it wasn’t as responsive as Inkpad on the original iPad. We also found that the arrange and align options are harder to manage; it doesn’t support layers so selecting two or more specific objects but omitting others often proved tricky.

3: On-location photo shoot

Just because the iPad 2’s camera isn’t up to much, don’t rule out the iPad as a serious photographer’s tool. Many photographers take a laptop on location to review shots, but the iPad is even better for this task. Its superb screen, tough design, small size and low weight are better than any £400 laptop can offer, and it browses and zooms photos extremely responsively.

One notable downside is that lack of a card slot or USB socket for getting photos onto the iPad. One option is the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit (£25), which includes two adapters, one for SDHC cards and one for USB cables. We balk at paying this much for something Apple should have included in the first place, though, and the adaptors are hardly elegant, protruding from the iPad’s dock connector.

Eye-Fi cards let your camera send images directly to your iPad

We prefer the Eye-Fi X2 range of SDHC cards with integrated WiFi adapters. With one of these on your camera and the free Eye-Fi app running on the iPad, photos are transferred wirelessly within seconds of being taken. It’s perfect for assessing shots as you go, and also for entertaining guests at weddings and other special occasions. Once the iPad is online, the app can send photos wirelessly to your computer or to sharing sites such as Flickr, Facebook and Picasa.

Sadly, Eye-Fi cards can’t currently transfer RAW files straight to an iPad – the 8GB Eye-Fi Pro X2 (£80 from Amazon) supports RAW transfers but only to a computer. However, shooting in RAW + JPEG mode provides a workaround, letting you inspect the JPEGs on the iPad and transfer the RAW images to the PC later.

We found the app a little clumsy for browsing photos, but double-clicking the Home button kept the Eye-Fi app running in the background, whereupon we could launch the iPad’s own Photos app to browse and inspect JPEGs.

Got an iPad and a copy of Lightroom on your PC or Mac? Then you’ll want to get hold of PhotoSmith

A better option than the Photos app is PhotoSmith (£12.99). It automatically jumps to the most recently added photo and includes comprehensive tools for tagging photos with colour labels, star ratings, keywords and a host of other information. It’s easy to sort and filter photos by date, rating or label and group them into Collections.

Best of all, it will transfer photos directly to the excellent Adobe Photoshop Lightroom across the home network, with all these tags synchronised with Lightroom. Previously used keywords are synced from Lightroom to the iPad, which saves typing them again.

Sadly, using an Eye-Fi card along with PhotoSmith to pass images to Lightroom doesn’t work for RAW files – we tried to synchronise the JPEG file’s tags with the RAW files copied separately, but the iPad’s penchant for renaming files put a stop to that. However, there’s talk of a fix in the pipeline, and RAW files work fine when using PhotoSmith and the iPad Camera Connection Kit.

4: Photo editing

Even the best photos can benefit from a touch-up or just a little cropping, while more artistic compositions can be played with extensively for more unusual or surreal results. If you do this on-the-spot with your iPad, you can instantly return to the subject if you need a slightly different shot, or are struck by inspiration in the edit.

If you’ve transferred photos to your iPad with the iPad Camera Connection Kit or an Eye-Fi card (see Onlocation Photo Shoot on page 4), or if you simply want to make the most of the iPad 2’s built-in camera, there’s no shortage of apps for manipulating photos.

First port of call should be Adobe Photoshop Express (free). It’s simple, straightforward and includes all the tools you’ll need to spruce up photos before uploading them to sharing sites: crop and rotate, basic colour correction, a few effects such as Soft Focus and Warm Vintage and a handful of borders. Noise reduction costs £2.49 as an in-app purchase, but seeing how most cameras apply far too much noise reduction while shooting, we wouldn’t bother with this upgrade.

The free Photoshop Express strips photo editing down to its bare essentials

Photogene for iPad (£1.99) is much more sophisticated. Its colour correction has the same exposure, saturation and contrast controls as Photoshop Express, but adds extremely useful lighten shadows, darken highlights and white balance controls. A Heal/Clone brush removes blemishes from photos, and the Masking Overlays section allows a range of treatments including lighten, darken, blur and pixelate to be applied in brush strokes across the image.

Photogene is much more powerful than its £1.99 price suggests

It’s extremely responsive, even when editing 12-megapixel photos on the original iPad. Best of all, adjustments aren’t applied until the image is exported, so it’s easy to tweak the various colour-correction tools in combination, or to undo any edit even after closing and reopening an image. When you are ready to export, it can save a new copy back to the Photo Library or upload to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox and Picasa, resizing photos before uploading if necessary.

We’d be tempted to say that Photogene is the only photo-editing application you’ll ever need – if it weren’t for Snapseed for iPad (£2.99). Its small set of processes are capable of truly stunning results.

Snapseed’s Selective Adjust mode lets you zone in on the parts of a photo that really matter

There’s the usual range of colour-correction tools, but the innovative interface – swipe up and down to change tools, left and right to adjust – and superior processing quality make it extremely rewarding to use. Its Selective Adjust mode allows brightness, saturation and contrast to be applied to a limited selection of the image using a combination of user-defined control points and automatic masking to follow the contours of subjects. Meanwhile, the small collection of creative effects go way beyond the norm, with dramatic HDR-style contrast, vintage film simulation and trendy grunge effects.

One limitation is that it can’t zoom into photos – it appears to generate a low-resolution proxy image, which helps to deliver lightning-fast previews but can make it tricky to fine-tune the selection in Selective Adjust mode. However, with dramatic, stylish photo processing that surpasses any other consumer software we’ve seen on the iPad or elsewhere, it’s the perfect complement to Photogene’s aptitude for precision edits.

5: DJing

Even small parties or events can benefit from someone cueing up tracks to fit the mood, so why not use your iPad to help you get the most from your MP3s.We’ve seen lots of DJing software for the PC, but without the help of specialist hardware, trying to perform professional staples such as scratching and beat mixing (where one track blends seamlessly with another) is extremely tricky to achieve with a mouse. Everything changes once you move to the iPad, where you can keep one hand on the ‘vinyl’ and the other on the crossfader.

The djay app by algoriddim (£13.99) isn’t cheap but it’s extremely capable and polished. It’s even better with help from the Griffin DJ Cable (£18), which splits the left and right signals from the headphone socket – sending one to your speakers and the other to your headphones – so you can cue up the next track.

Thanks to the iPad’s multi-touch interface, this is as close as DJ software gets to the real thing

The app faithfully emulates the Technics turntable experience, right down to the red power LED that can be pushed for authentic brake effects. The tactile spinning discs make it easy to perform scratches or to cue up the start of a track, and it’s even possible to pick up and move the needle. Accurate tempo detection and automatic synchronisation make it easy to beat mix, and tracks – taken from the iPad’s standard music library – are shown with their tempos when browsing. Three-band EQ, comprehensive looping facilities and cue points complete an impressive line-up of features.

We’re not sure that the sound quality and durability of the iPad’s headphone output is up to the demands of professional use, but the Alesis iO Dock (see page 10) looks set to address that issue. With the Griffin DJ Cable, we can’t imagine a better setup for parties. The djay app is a class act and the touchscreen provides a rewarding tactile experience. It’s also more resilient than a laptop to beer-soaked fingers.

6: Virtual Sculpting

Modelling with clay, or even just Playdough, is undoubtedly great fun. 3D modelling on the iPad might seem over-ambitious, and judging by the preponderance of one-star ratings from customers for iDough (£4.99), maybe it is. We like it, though – and there’s a free version called iDough! HD, which runs for five minutes per sculpture to let you make up your own mind.

There may be no higher purpose, but squeezing virtual dough into interesting shapes is certainly fun

While most 3D modelling software for the PC is highly mathematical, iDough’s touchscreen interface makes it feel more like sculpting with clay. It would help if the seven tools were labelled (the website informs us that they’re Push, Pull, Smooth, Move, Pinch, Spread and Flatten). However, with a bit of trial and error, we were fashioning wizened faces, strange fruit and an assortment of other occasionally recognisable shapes from a starting point of a perfect sphere.

Straight lines proved impossible to achieve and the underlying wireframe mesh didn’t lend itself to complex shapes such as a whole person, as it started to get quite blocky by the time we’d got down to the feet. However, as creative distractions go, it’s a fine way to spend £5.

7: Easy Video editing

There are few tasks that are more demanding for a computer than video editing, so we’re not going to recommend you load your AVCHD footage onto the humble iPad. However, the iPad 2 is powerful enough to cope with the 720p videos captured by its built-in camera.

Being able to edit your video on the same device you shot it on puts an interesting twist on the creative process. By dropping clips together in the edit as you go, it can help you realise what shots are needed to set your scene, tell your story or make your point.

Using the iPad 2 as a video camera has its strengths and weaknesses. It’s much easier to hold steady than a phone camera, and having such an enormous preview is literally a revelation. The downside is that wandering around with an iPad held at arm’s length is hardly subtle if you’re trying to shoot naturalistic scenes without passers-by gawping at you, and is a big invitation to opportunistic thieves.

iMovie is laughably easy to use

It might be worth running the gauntlet, though, as it’s hard to imagine a more user-friendly editor than iMovie (£2.99). Videos in the Camera Roll appear as strips of thumbnails, and are trimmed and dropped onto the timeline with a couple of prods. The simple editing tools make light work of truncating and reordering clips or adding transitions and text overlays. It’s also possible to record a narration or even video directly into the timeline. With uploads to YouTube and Facebook built in, iMovie is perfect for posting video bulletins while on holiday or for birthdays and Christmas.

If you just want to liven up individual clips, check out 8mm HD (£1.99). There’s a choice of vintage film effects including scratchy black and white, high-contrast film noir and the faded pastels of the 70s. All of which can be applied either to camera input or existing videos. Film jitter, vignetting and projector noise complete the experience. It’s all a little daft, but applying nostalgic imperfections is a great way to hide the less agreeable imperfections of the iPad 2’s camera.

8mm HD transforms the iPad 2’s cruddy camera into a quaintly flickering piece of cinematic nostalgia

Videolicious (free) takes the combined camera-editor concept to its logical conclusion, with a set of 25 templates covering topics such as Kids and Family, Restaurant Review and Sports Game. Pick a template and the app gives specific instructions as to what videos it wants – either from the Camera Roll or to shoot as you go. It then turns to the front-facing and asks for your thoughts on the subject. There’s no control over which clips are used when, but the automatically generated results are surprisingly convincing.

Stop-motion animation on an iPad is a stroke of genius – and iMotion HD delivers the goods

iMotion HD is a stop-motion animation program. It’s free but costs £1.49 to unlock its export facilities. More than ever, having the camera and editor in the same device makes perfect sense. Frames are captured one by one, and triggered manually, according to a timer, or even by using the iMotion Remote app running on another iOS device on the same network. It’s possible to adjust the playback speed and to delete individual frames after capture – useful for the occasional hand that creeps into shot. However, once you play back a scene, you can’t add further frames to it. That proved particularly frustrating when the app crashed on us mid-way through a scene. Still, it’s free to try out, and is a great form of family entertainment.

8: Digital Sheet Music

If you play an instrument, or you have one gathering dust in a cupboard, then the iPad is a great reason to get it out and tune it up. With your iPad you have access to a library of musical scores and it can even play them to you, should you get stuck with a trick section.

Avid Scorch (£2.99) is the musical equivalent of Apple’s iBooks app. It comes with a small selection of scores, and there are currently 250,000 more available from its in-app store. They’re browsed by instrument, chart position, new releases, recommended picks and a search facility. The likes of Coldplay and Adele are here – usually priced at £3 per song – and there’s lots of classical music, too, and many out-of-copyright scores are free.

Avid Scorch sells, displays, plays and lets you modify musical scores

The underlying technology is based on Sibelius, the industry standard notation software. As such, scores aren’t simply bitmap images – they use real notation data, and the app can play them back on its internal synth. You can change the tempo and key, solo, mute and adjust the volume of different instruments and switch between a full score and the parts for each instrument.

The app uses .sib files generated by Sibelius or Sibelius First so it’s easy to import your own scores, too, delivered via email, Dropbox or when syncing with iTunes. A composer can share the full score with an ensemble and let each performer pick the relevant part for his or her instrument. Kitting out an entire orchestra with iPads seems a bit excessive, but for smaller ensembles working on new compositions where there are lots of last-minute changes, it’s a superb system.

9: Music production

Damon Albarn caused a stir by recording Gorillaz’s latest album, The Fall, on his iPad. Head to http://thefall.gorillaz.com to see his list of apps and to stream the album. However, even if you’re not a renowned musical innovator, there are plenty of apps on the iPad that mere mortals can get to grips with.

One of Albarn’s favourites was Korg iElectribe (£13.99), a virtual incarnation of the Korg Electribe hardware groove machine. Its audio palette of gritty squelches, beats and burps sounds more digital than the hardware version, but the multi-touchscreen interface makes this a much more hands-on experience than software normally allows. There’s also an iElectribe Gorillaz Edition (£13.99), which lets you remix the album as well as come up with your own tracks.

iElectribe Gorillaz Edition is bristling with trendy noises

Another key app for the Gorillaz album was StudioMini XL (£6.99). This eight-track recorder couldn’t be much simpler. Each track must be recorded from the beginning of the project, and further editing is limited to setting relative levels. However, the ability to export individual tracks in WAV format makes this a useful musical sketchpad, with recordings transferred to Windows or Mac software for further work.

StudioMini XL is about as simple as music production gets, but it’s a useful musical sketchpad

Garageband (£2.99) was the app that brought iPad music production into the mainstream. Again, projects are limited to eight tracks, but these are pooled from a range of startlingly impressive built-in instruments: a virtual guitar, bass and drum kit, a guitar amp simulator for connecting a real guitar (see page 11), a drum machine, synth, sampler, ready-made loops and a live input. There’s a fully fledged sequencer for arranging performances, too. It’s great fun for messing around with and it’s polished enough for serious use, too.

VoiceJam (£2.99) carves an interesting niche for itself. It loops and layers live performances in real time, and its innovative interface falls somewhere between recording device and performance instrument. Head to tinyurl.com/voicejam to see what it’s capable of in the hands of a likeable yet slightly creepy man.

Who needs instruments when you’ve got your vocal chords and VoiceJam?

Another stand-out app is Yamaha TNR-i (£13.99). It’s based on the Yamaha Tenori-On, a futuristic electronic performance instrument that has achieved legendary status since its launch in 2005. Various apps have attempted to mimic it with limited success, so it’s great to see Yamaha step in and do the job properly. TNR-i uses its grid of 16-by-16 pulsating buttons to perform melodies, create short looped sequences, switch between its 256 sounds, layer up to 16 parts and lots more besides. The effect is mesmerising, both musically and visually.

Yamaha TNR-i looks and sounds like something from an art-house sci-fi film

One limitation for iPad music production is the quality of its built-in microphone and microphone input. They’re not terrible but they aren’t up to critical tasks. There are lots of other options, of course, but the product we’re most excited about is the Alesis iO Dock (£139 on pre-order from www.dv247.com). The iPad slots into this wedge-shaped box, which adds phantom-powered XLR microphone inputs, a high-impedance guitar input, balanced line outs, MIDI in and out and various other handy features. We’ve not yet tested it, but unless Alesis has fallen from its usual high standards, this will be a fantastic way to augment the iPad for music production.

The Alesis iO Dock raises the iPad’s standing as a serious recording device

It’s also worth noting that the USB port in the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit (£25) isn’t just for cameras. It can also accommodate a USB microphone. There are dozens of these on the market, with many coming from professional audio companies such as Blue, Rode and Samson.

10: Guitar amp

The guitar, in its numerous forms, is still the most played musical instrument in the UK, and so we thought it deserved its own section, with a wealth of apps and kit dedicated to pairing your old stringed friend with your shiny new iPad.

It’s probably not the done thing to take an iPad on stage if you’re the lead guitarist in a thrash metal band. However, if you can get over the incongruity of guitars plugged into iPads, it’s actually quite a successful partnership. It makes perfect sense for headphone-based practice, and if you’re in a band that plays synth-heavy music there’s a good chance you won’t get bottled off stage.

IK Multimedia leads the field with its iRig adapter (£22 from www.dv247.com) and AmpliTube for iPad app (£13.99). The iRig plugs into the iPad’s headphone socket and transforms the microphone input into a quarter-inch jack guitar input. It also includes a minijack pass-through socket for connecting to headphones or speakers.

iRig turns the iPad’s microphone socket into a guitar input

Its quality is limited by that of the iPad’s internal audio components. This can lead to noise and feedback problems, particularly when lots of distortion is applied and when headphones are used (plugging into powered speakers works better because their higher impedance reduces leakage from the iPad’s output back to its input). We’ve nothing against a bit of wailing feedback in its right place, but when it carries on after the guitar’s volume knob is turned down, that’s a bit worrying. The app does a good job of addressing these issues with a Noise Filter effect and a No Feedback button in the Setup options, but they’re not entirely successful and they interfere with sound quality a little.

There are other hardware options. The Apogee JAM Guitar Input (£80), the Alesis iO Dock and the astonishing-looking Digitech IPB 10 (£410 on pre-order from www.dv247.com) all connect to the iPad’s dock and so aren’t constrained by the headphone-microphone socket’s audio quality.

The AmpliTube app (£14) is based on the same technology that’s found in the Windows and Mac software of the same name, which sells for around £190. There’s a choice of 10 effects pedals, five amps, five speaker cabinets and two virtual microphones to put in front of the cabinet, with up to four pedals available simultaneously. The touchscreen controls are far easier to grab while strumming than they would be with a mouse or trackpad. It’s even possible to control the wah effect by tilting the iPad.

The AmpliTube Fender app produces deliciously raucous distortion as well as gentler blues tones

Sound quality is generally excellent, and the familiar controls mean that guitarists can quickly find the tones they’re after. However, we were less convinced by its clean and gently distorted tones than we were by its more distorted amp models. We’re told that, while the technology is the same as in the Windows/Mac version of AmpliTube, the algorithms have had to be made simpler because of processor power restrictions. Then again, a £14 app that gets close to delivering the quality of a £190 professional quality plug-in is no bad thing. It’s slightly annoying that there’s no compression effect pedal included as standard, though – but it only costs a further £1.99 as an in-app purchase.

Latency can be a problem in virtual amp software, where the small delay between playing and hearing a note can be distracting. AmpliTube gets this down to a reasonable 15ms, or 8ms in Ultra Low Latency mode. While this mode worked fine on an iPad 2, it introduced glitches on the original iPad.

Transform your iPad into a fully fledged stomp box with the Digitech iPB-10

There’s also AmpliTube Fender for iPad (£10.49), which specialises in Fender amps and pedals. The choice of modules is smaller than in the main app, but to our ears they sound better. The Twin Reverb amp captures the sparkle of gently overdriven valves, while the Fender Blender pedal produces wonderful gurgling distortion that sounds bang up to date – not bad for an effect that’s modelled on a 1960s classic. It also includes compression as a free upgrade on registering.

For the best of both worlds, the Fender modules can be added to the main app as an in-app purchase, as can a huge range of other effects and an eight-track virtual tape recorder. There are also free taster versions of both apps at the App Store.

The iRig’s noise and feedback problems and the fact that the Fender app crashed a couple of times during our tests – and not forgetting the high likelihood of ridicule from the baying audience – mean that we’d be hesitant to take them on stage. However, for rehearsing and song writing – whether it’s on the tour bus or on the sofa – we thoroughly recommend it.