Songzap is a songwriting and pre-production mobile phone app designed specifically with musicians in mind. In this blog series, Mike will take you through a bunch of approaches to recording, practising with, layering and mixing the upright piano using Songzap!

Songzap is designed to enable quick and easy multitrack recording of acoustic instruments and voice, and to, quickly and easily, turn those recordings into a mixed demo that can be shared with friends, band members and contacts. In the video below, Rob, singer-songwriter and Songzap’s lead developer, records a multitrack cover of All Along the Watchtower by Bob Dylan. The song was famously recorded as a rocking cover version by Jimi Hendrix too, and Rob’s version falls somewhere between the two approaches, retaining Dylan’s acoustic vibe but with some intensity and lead guitar licks inspired by Hendrix.

Here at Songzap we know it can be a challenge to become acquainted with a new piece of software and to master all of the advanced features that are available to you. We’ve designed Songzap to be truly intuitive, with simple interfaces that are controlled by powerful algorithms and code behind the scenes. We kept the most important features as simple as possible to access and control, but we also wanted to include numerous advanced features that emerging and professional music artists will need to call upon as they develop their sings and take them to a real studio.

An audio interface is a critical centre-point in most music studios, from the World’s greatest studios down to the everyday bedroom musician. The audio interface is the physical connection which allows sound to be recorded into a computer system and equally allows sound to be played back out of a computer system. It can take many guises, having one or multiple input paths (allowing one or more microphones to be recorded at once) and one or multiple output paths (allowing many loudspeakers to play audio at the same time), it can even be built into the computer system itself and not be so obvious (for example, the iPhone has a built-in interface chip that connects to both the iPhone microphone and the built-in loudspeakers).

With all music software, it’s important to know how your sounds are played back to be heard, and of course how to configure the software to correctly capture the music you are making. We often refer to these as the input setup and the output setup – with input referring to sound going into the software and output referring to sounds coming out of the software. We can also have different physical inputs, microphones, loudspeakers, headphones etc, so the hardware in the system is quite relevant too.

When recording someone sing or performing a musical instrument, if a poorly chosen setup is in place, it’s very possible to cause feedback or capture a poor quality microphone signal. In this blog post we look at how poor quality recordings can be avoided, particularly by the simple solution of using headphones

A common question asked by users of music recording software is “why does the software not work with Bluetooth headphones?” So, in this blog post we’ll delve into the answer and touch on some good advice for audio recording in general too.