Musical Instrument Apps for the Android

We all listen to music on our Android smart phone, but how about making music? With these musical instrument apps on Android, you can now create music on your Android phone.

DrumKit by nullapp, transforms your Android into a functional drum kit with drums and percussions. There is a bass, snares, toms, crash and ride cymbals, kick-drum and more. It uses real drum sounds and some cool animations to give you a nice finger drumming experience. With the latest feature, called Composer, you can create a base rhythm and then play finesse beats as the rhythm plays. The app works well with a high-end phone which supports multi-touch. It is amusing and free, so give it a whirl.

Robotic Guitarist is a feature-packed guitar simulator app for your Android.  The interface is simple- choose the chords from the left and play on the six guitar strings, to produce the realistic effect of an acoustic guitar. There are options for right or left handed play, a realistic chord change option and an option to change the instrument to electric guitar or piano. There are chord presets, a tuner for your real guitar, and a metronome.  This app will be useful for musicians and also for those who are learning to play a guitar.

xPiano is one of the most popular piano apps for Android. The free version has 4 octaves and 12 instruments. Clever ideas like adjustable keyboard width, the auto scroll feature and the piano strip at the top of the screen allows seamless movement across the keyboard. You can record and playback tunes, save them in sound files and sync up with your computer. The pitch setting can be changed with a continuous slider and tested on the go. The paid version, xPiano+ has 5 octaves and 128 instruments and more sample songs to play.

PocketBand Uloops is a refreshingly new concept, a cloud-based social music studio. The app has 125 different instruments and 35 drum kits. Using these in audio loops, you can create tracks. You can also add live audio recordings and apply analog modulators and arpeggiators to your track. You can edit the track using the pan, pitch, volume and reverb controls. The application works totally on the cloud, uploading everything to an online account. It offers features to share your music with the app community under a variety of licenses. The paid version has more instruments and support for unlimited audio loops.