Best Apps for Classical Musicians

Polychord is a music app made exclusively for the iPad.  It's essentially a chord maker, great for singer/song writers and composers.  The app allows up to 10 fingers at once functionality to create "chord progressions, melodies, and harmonies."

Cleartune is a great music app for musicians that allows users to tune their instruments quickly and accurately.  The Cleartune music app can tune a variety of instruments including the acoustic guitar, piano, bass, strings, woodwinds, tympani, and more, using the built in mic on your iPhone and iPad.  iPod touch users will have to use an external mic.  The app also includes a pitch pipe.

With a tempo range of 30 to 208 beats per minute and a variety of preset rhythms, this metronome boasts a lag time of less than 1 millisecond.  The metronome can be set by either dragging the pendulum weight or by inputting the desired tempo into the app.  Preset rhythms include 5/4, 7/4, 9/8, 12/8, Son Clave, Rumba Clave, Bossa nova Clave, and Tinku, and you can also manually adjust the time signature.

Pro Keys is another useful music app for composers.  This highly rated music app is able to record your compositions as well as your own voice.  The app features a variety of instruments, pitch bend, drum pads, adjustable keyboard sizes, and more.  It can also be played in dual mode with your friend.

Vocal students and opera lovers will really appreciate this app.  OperaBook holds a wealth of information for 50 different operas including the composer, premiere date, librettest(s), duration, setting, character descriptions as well as the synopsis broken into acts.