If music be the food of love, is Lady GaGa's Born This Way a hamburger or a prime fillet of beef? Our occasional round-up of new and notable apps for the Apple iPad and iPad 2 tablets takes a closer look at some of the best offerings available to anyone who's interested in making music - whether they know what they're doing so or not.

Give us your views via email on the apps we've tested, and let us know about at apps or categories you'd like us to look at in future.

APP OF THE MONTH: GarageBand
PRICE: £2.99 inc. VAT
RATING: 5/5
How do I love thee, GarageBand (£2.99)? Let me count the ways. Eight-track recording, a selection of quality Apple loops (percussions, guitars, keys, synths, strings) live instruments like drum kits, pianos, organs, synths, and a sampler, as well as amps and stompboxes for guitarists; each instrument configurable up the wazoo - drums and keyboards are touch-sensitive, you can switch octaves as you're playing, widen the keys for fat fingers, display five octaves by stacking the keyboards, fiddle with a synth's resonance and filters in real time, pull drawbars out of the rock organ as you play, set the arpeggiator to make you sound much better than you really are and much more.

Of course, that's if you can play a bit. If you can't, there are basses, guitars and keyboards each set up to play eight different chords that you can stroke or strum manually or set to one of the four auto-play settings, which play sequences of notes for each chord that increase in complexity as you wind up the setting.

These 'smart' instruments never play a bum note and mean that anyone - literally anyone - can put together a simple song. There's a drum machine too - basically a square into which you can drag individual drums from the supplied three kits and three drum machines - and then move them around with your finger, depending on whether you want them to be loud, quiet, simple or complex.

Like all the smart instruments, drums take their rhythm from the tempo of the song and can be altered on the fly, so it's possible to create a drum track that sounds like it's being played by a real drummer. Finished songs can be synched with iTunes, opened in the Mac version of Garageband or emailed to friends. People should be made to buy GarageBand for iPad whether they want to or not - it really is that good.

StudioTrack
PRICE: £11.99 inc. VAT
RATING: 3/5
Unless you're entirely wedded to electronic music (in which case, skip straight on down to Fruity Loops) it's likely you're familiar with cassette-based multi-track recording which allowed generations of bedroom musicians to create demos that featured more than one instrument playing at a time.

Sonoma's Studio Track (£11.99) re-creates that experience, courtesy of an eight-track portastudio complete with faders, pan controls, mute and solo buttons, effects sends and even the infamous 'bounce' control which allows you to record many more than the physical eight tracks by 'bouncing' what you've already recorded on - say - tracks one to six, onto tracks seven and eight, thus allowing you to record over the first six tracks.

More suitable for recording real acoustic instruments and vocals, this is a great musical scratchpad for working up ideas, trying out harmonies and so on that preserves the immediacy of the original machines. This version imports WAV, AIFF and MP3 files and you can grab finished songs or works-in-progress via your browser over a wireless network. We don't care for the way faders and the FX Bypass button disappear in landscape mode, or that tracks are numbered right-to-left by default (and yes, we know you can re-order them) but we love recording like this, making mistakes and having to re-record instead of being able to edit individual notes to within an inch of their lives - it's just like the old days.

FL Studio Mobile
PRICE: £11.99 inc. VAT
RATING: 4/5
The dance aficionado's weapon of choice makes a smooth transition to the iPad, preserving the instant loop-making gratification that's won the desktop version so many friends but taking the opportunity to re-jig the way loops and samples are organised.

The result? A more intuitive Fruity Loops than ever before. You can still create music using the step sequencer to 'drop' notes or beats onto a grid, but there's also a full screen keyword for playing 'properly' and a wide range of software instruments like synths, pianos, horns, strings, guitars and so on to go with all those loops.

As you'd expect, there are great drum kits too, and unlike GarageBand, FL Studio (£11.99) lets you go in and edit individual notes on the piano roll; you can also quantise dodgy performances to make sure they're right on the beat, add filters as automation tracks and then export all or part of the finished track as a WAV or MIDI file, which makes it great for creating quick loops to add to other songs.

FL Studio makes good use of the iPad's interface - we particularly like the way you can use the top section of the display to move the on-screen keyboard up and down, and the way that you can use the pinch/splay gesture to alter the size of the keys. Not much cop for sensitive singer-songwriters, but fans of electronica will be beside themselves.

Songwriter's iPad
PRICE: £5.99 inc. VAT
RATING: 3/5
It's word processing for lyricists, with a built-in rhyming dictionary, random word and phrase generator for when inspiration just won't come and a straightforward dictionary/thesaurus, to check that all your flowery language actually means something.

The screen's divided into the main typing area (complete with pre-set song section headings like intro, verse, chorus and bridge which are more useful than you might think when it comes to completing a lyric) and a recorder at the foot of the screen so you can hum melodies for particular sections as they occur.

Stuck for a rhyme? Just tap the Rhymes button, type in the word you want a rhyme for, and the app will return a list of suggestions. Want a fancy word or phrase? Tap the Word or Phrases button, choose an emotion (love, hate, fear, silly and so on) and then spin the wheel with your finger to see the result (sample phrase for 'desire was 'just a victim of love', sample for anger was 'count to 10').

Suggested words, rhymes and phrases are stored on sticky notes that run down the side of the screen, so you can refer to them as the song develops. Songwriter's iPad (£5.99) could use more rhymes but if you're stuck for a phrase beneath the critic's harsh gaze, and there's no place to go because the words won't flow [Thanks, we'll let you know - Ed].

TNR-i
PRICE: £11.99 inc. VAT
RATING: 3/5
Tough to describe, but undoubtedly fun to play, this is the iPad version of the innovative Tenori-On electronic instrument created by the Japanese artist artist Tohsio Iwai and Yamaha's Yu Nishibori.

Here goes: TNR-i (£11.99) displays a grid made up of 256 dots where each vertical row represents a major scale of 16 notes. Press play, and the columns are lit in sequence from left to right - tap and hold a dot with your finger to switch it on and it'll play a note. The cycle is four bars long and loops repeatedly so you can build up a melody (tunes in Tenori-on have an appegiated feel to them) quite quickly.

Then, while the first instrument loops, you can add a second, third, fourth and so on, building your sequence up layer by layer and using the - frankly - barmy interface to change instruments on the fly, alter octaves, note lengths, sequence speed and much more.

Some layers have different characteristics - playing notes randomly, 'bouncing' them up and down the screen or allowing you to solo in real time - and once you've filled the first 16 with notes, you can save it as a block and move on to the next; TNR-i supports up to 16 blocks with up to 16 layers in each, making it possible to produce complex passages of music without really having a clue what you're doing.

Explore the settings a little and you discover it supports ten different scales (major pentatonic, anyone?) reverb and chorus, quantising and much more. The interface is deliberately opaque, but frustration eventually gives way to wonder and although it only saves files in its own, proprietary format, TNR-i is nevertheless rewarding.

Scorch
PRICE: £4.99 inc. VAT
RATING: 4/5
Finally, something for all you 'proper' musicians - sheet music. Scorch (£2.99 until 30th July, then £4.99) lets you buy, practise and perform music that's been created by the popular Sibelius music program. Sign up to the Scorch store, download some sheet music and then play it back on the iPad.

You can alter the tempo, change the key to something friendlier, switch instruments, mute and solo individual instruments in an arrangement (particularly useful for solo piano pieces) and take everything out of an orchestral score except the instrument you play, so you can follow it on the stave.

The ability to mute instruments using the included mixer means you can use Scorch for live performances too - in fact there's a music stand mode which removes all the menus and turns the pages of the score for you, leaving you to concentrate on playing your instrument. There are one or two performance hiccups - screen re-drawing is poor and searching the store doesn't always work - but aside from that, this is a great purchase for musicians who read music.

All apps available via the Apple iTunes Store.

Tags: fruity loops music creation creative audio ipad garageband