Best smartphone apps for budding and pro musicians

All praise the mobile phone. Because without it we wouldn't have thousands of dollars' worth of all kinds of equipment cheaply available literally at our fingertips. This goes just as much for music enthusiasts as for camera buffs. These days both budding musicians and complete pros use apps on their smartphones to achieve exactly the kind of effects they want.

Here's a look at some of the best Android and iOS apps for musicians:

PitchLab Guitar Tuner

For novices and professionals both, this app features hands-free tuning for guitars, ukuleles and other musical instruments. Work out chords to new tunes, visualise the pitch and consistency of the human voice, violin and other instrument, or get answers to questions like, "what notes am I humming?", "what are those chords?", "am I hitting all the notes in tune?", "is my vibrato consistent?", etc.

GarageBand

If you are on iPad, GarageBand is the best app to start with, with a simple and helpful interface. It has a huge collection of touch instruments including a drum kit, organ, guitar and piano. Because the instruments are touch-based, you can learn faster and more easily than usual. Create up to 32 individual tracks on this app.

NanoStudio

This app acts as a virtual recording system for the iPad, facilitating the layering of six instruments, which includes a built-in synth and TRG-16. The app supports the music recording with the help of iOS microphones. It also has a built-in mixer and enables uploading on SoundCloud.

Music Maker Jam

If you believe in experimenting with music, this app, with a huge library of professionally-created loops, is for you. Explore base tunes, rock, metal, house, dubstep and more, and play with the 8-channel built-in mixer and 'shake to remix' feature. Available on iOS and Windows 8.

HD Audio Recorder

Android phones come with a pre-installed voice recorder, but for the best recordings you need the HD Audio Recorder. The interface is good-looking and easy to use, and you can record 16-bit audio even while you are on the move.