You need an iPhone, iPad, or Mac if you want to use Apple’s GarageBand. But Fender Studio just asks you to bring an instrument and potentially some talent, and works on nearly every major device.
Musicians have a fairly wide assortment of apps, but like most things in their industry, they tend to cost money. Lots of it.
A solid recording and engineering app such as Logic Pro and its Dolby Atmos support tends to be on the pricey side, and that applies to pretty much anything else if you plan to try your hand at being a rock star, pop star, or anything else in the world of professional music. It costs extra if you add it to an iPad, again, seemingly like everything else.
Great electric guitars don’t tend to come cheap, and neither does the anything else made by a particularly decent brand.
Earlier this year, however, guitar and bass specialist Fender started changing that in the computer hardware field with a link from computer to phone, tablet, Macs and Windows PCs, offering the Fender Link I/O, a $149 connection that brings any guitar to one of those other devices.
That’s part of the solution, but software is clearly the other part — an app — and Fender has recently announced the other aspect.
Coming in the form of a free app, Fender Studio is a tool build for phone, tablet, and computers that run Windows, Mac, and even Linux, offering a software solution that can capture sounds and provide tools to let you make something out of them.
The software works on iPhone, Android, iPad, and more, and while designed to talk to hardware such as the Fender Link I/O, it’s not the only thing it’ll play nicely with, and shares its approach to Fender’s paid piece of software, Studio One Pro.
As a free app, Fender Studio focuses on one-tap recording, allowing you to just get stuck in and capturing an idea or even a song, and comes with 20 pre-recorded jam tracks made in multitrack audio sessions that can be edited, set to solo, or slowed down, allowing you to turn them into your own masterpieces of sorts, or just learn with.
Some of the tools on offer in Fender Studio include an equaliser (EQ), reverb, delay, compressor, vocoder, and a de-tuner, and if you plug a guitar in, Fender includes amp and effects models even without an amp or effects pedal, covering its Mustang and Rumble guitar amps and software versions of several FX pedals.
There’s a tuner in there, as well, though Fender already has a decent one of those on the phone, too.
Fender Studio isn’t quite like its other major mobile app, Fender Play, a music learning service that can help you start off or become more confident, but it does aim to let you capture your sounds at 24-bit and 96kHz maximum, giving you the option to export high-res audio.
It’s available now, free, and like the Link I/O, is now sitting on our reviews desk waiting for the chance to turn us into music stars. It probably won’t, but we’ll give it a good go all the same.
