The iPad is fast becoming a legitimate music composition tool—thanks in large part to its own version of GarageBand, Apple's seminal, entry-level music app. Earlier this year with version 1.2, GarageBand gained many professional-level features, including piano roll-style note editing, an expanded sound palate, and additional recording tools. The latest version, 1.3, adds several new features—chief among them the ability for GarageBand to work smoothly in the background while you play other iPad music apps on top of it. And as always, GarageBand for iPad sounds great, and it remains as easy to dive into as ever. There's serious competition when it comes to music-making on the iPad, but for just $4.99, you simply can't go wrong with this Editors' Choice app.

User Interface and Recording
For this review, I tested GarageBand 1.3 on a 16GB Apple iPad 3. First, a quick recap: Start up the app, and you'll be presented with the Instruments page. Swiping left and right reveals different touch instruments you can play, including drums, bass, and keyboards. There are also several "smart" instruments that assist your playing (more on that later), plus some audio recording modes for sampling your voice or hooking up an electric guitar. Tap on an icon, and you'll see a customized interface designed to reflect the chosen instrument or recording tool as closely as possible. All touch instruments are velocity sensitive; the harder you tap the screen, the louder the note plays. You can configure the sensitivity level, or turn it off entirely to make every note the same volume.

The instruments on the main menu aren't only ones you can play, either. For example, the keyboard instrument defaults to a grand piano sound, but you can tap the icon and choose from a selection of over 70 other keyboard and synthesizer patches. The drum instrument offers three acoustic kits and three electronic kits, the latter of which you play with a pad-style interface instead of a visual representation of a drum set. When recording audio, you can record full-blown vocal or guitar tracks, or sample short bursts of audio that then automatically map across a virtual keyboard on screen. The guitar amp offers nine different amp models and 10 stompbox effects (though for these, you'll need to plug in a real electric guitar, using a device like the Apogee Jam).

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GarageBand's claim to fame, aside from its excellent sound quality, is its easy live playback and recording modes. For example, the Smart Guitar defaults to a series of chords that sound good together; strum the on-screen strings, and it's impossible to make a mistake. Beginning in this version, you can now customize the chords, which lets you program your own (such as a seventh or a ninth), or add in the ones from a songbook and then jam in the right key. The piano mode is more freeform and like a regular piano to begin with. But you get plenty of customization options here, including keys of three different widths, a second tier of keys, and the ability to choose your octave, scale, and whether the sustain pedal is pressed.

At any time, you can begin recording by setting the tempo and tapping the record button on top; this will create a new track, and let you stack instruments one by one in true multitrack fashion (up to eight tracks). Once you've recorded something, you'll want to take a better look at it. The Tracks page works like a desktop sequencer's Arrange window, and lets you shorten, copy, or drag around parts on each track. GarageBand's recording modes alone are enough to vault it ahead of IK Multimedia SampleTank ($19.99, 3 stars), which also offers expressive, nice-sounding instruments, but is sorely lacking in the recording department.

Across the various smart instruments in GarageBand, you'll also find hundreds of auto-play loops and arpeggiated patterns, often with three or four choices for each sound. These also map automatically to GarageBand's new 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures in addition to 4/4 (though they obviously change a bit when that happens, since you can't fit as many notes into each pattern as with the other time signatures). You can tap with two or three fingers and bring up variations, and also record these loops and manipulate them, just like other song data.

It's almost impossible to overstate how easy all of this makes it for a beginner to just jump in and start making music. That's probably GarageBand's biggest appeal on the iPad just in general, and that trait is preserved, and arguably even enhanced, in this latest version. It makes GarageBand a great tool for teaching you how to make and record music in a variety of styles. It won't teach you how to play an instrument, since you can set it so that you never make mistakes, and that actual finger positions are hidden on some of the instruments. But since it's an iPad, that's understandable—and GarageBand '11 ($14.99, 4.5 stars) on the Mac desktop actually does have dozens of tutorial videos available, if you want to go that route.

Jam Session and Note Editor
Jam Session lets you and up to three other players jam together over local Wi-Fi or Bluetooth using the same tempo, key signature, meter, and set of chords. It works with any iPad, any iPhone 4 or newer, and any 4th-generation or newer iPod touch. Whoever sets up the session is the band leader, who can then decide to record the session at any point; from then on, all devices begin recording. Once recording stops, all three additional recorded tracks are sent automatically to the band leader's device for further editing and mixing. I got a small two-person session going with the iPad 3 and a nearby iPhone 5; the two devices locked up perfectly, and my electric organ recording on the iPhone appeared instantly on the iPad, on top of existing tracks, when I was done.

The Note Editor, introduced in version 1.2, brought GarageBand for iPad much closer to the desktop version, as well as other iPad recording apps like Blip Interactive NanoStudio ($19.99, 3.5 stars) and Image Line FL Studio Mobile HD ($24.99, 3.5 stars). It allows basic after-the-fact note editing for pitch, velocity, and duration. This means you no longer have to record an entire part after making a mistake. Double-tap on a recorded track, and then tap Edit, a piano roll-style editor opens up that you can pinch zoom in and out of. Whenever you tap on a note, it highlights; you can then cut, copy, or delete it, modify its velocity, or drag its position and length. The note editor is also context sensitive; edit drums, and you'll see a pattern-based grid view with icons on the left representing each drum, instead of piano keys.