Have you seen the commercial on TV for the new iPad Mini that shows a full-sized iPad with a piano app playing “Heart and Soul,” and next to it an iPad Mini playing the melody part for the song? If you’re like me you paid less attention to the fact of the iPad Mini than to wondering what app was being used to play the piano.
There are several good piano apps for the iPad. The one I had most recently downloaded was the iGrand Piano, which is very cool. It’s free for the basic piano, then you can pay for additional kinds of pianos as upgrades. But that isn’t the topic here is it? We want to know what piano they were playing on the commercial.
That one, it turns out, is one of the many instrument apps in the Apple GarageBand app, which costs just $4.99. The computer version of GarageBand, which is included in the iLife software package on OS X (for Macs only), is an amazingly powerful audio recording and production software program. It is easy to use, does multi-track recording, and comes with tons of great-sounding virtual instruments instruments built in that you can trigger via MIDI tracks. Getting back to the iPad version though – in order to get to the piano used in the commercial, just open the app, and click on the instruments button located in the top left corner of the screen next to the My Songs button. That will go to a screen with gigantic and obvious icons representing the instrument categories. Keyboard is the category you want. Just tat the giant keyboard icon and the piano from the commercial will open on the screen. You can also choose from among a bunch of different pianos and keyboards such as Grand Piano, Classical Grand, Electric Piano, Whirly, different organs, etc. Other instrument categories include guitars, strings, and drums. I had so much fun playing with these instrument son my iPad that my wife had to tell me to put the toy away so we could go to bed:).
So now you know what piano app was used in the Apple iPad Mini TV commercial. Don’t you feel smarter? Now go download it and have some fun. Just make sure it isn’t close to bed-time.
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