YouCompose

This app can be used in a variety of ways, but certainly encourages independence and creative skills through composition, offering support to beginner musicians, or complexity to more developed composers. It offers you a short tutorial at the beginning, before letting you loose on the equipment, starting with composing a simple melody line. As you navigate your way around the app, you find much more to help you make your composition become more complex and interesting. As you first start to record your parts in via the keyboard device, it accurately recognises your touch on the screen, and records this in just like a sequencing software. From this, you can then edit these notes to correct any mistakes, or alter any compositional ideas.

The app offers you simplicity to start with. It shows you how to harmonise a simple melody, and harmonises your music for you! This really helps beginner musicians understand how to harmonise, giving them confidence in their ability, before editing the pre-made harmonisations, or then creating your own. As you progress through your composition, you can select from a huge array of instruments, offering different sounds in order to spark further creativity. It offers changes in rhythms and note durations so you can continue to manipulate your recordings or note editing. As you develop the structure of your piece, it offers you to select different keys. The huge benefit to this for beginning composers, is that it the shades out any notes that aren’t within the key you have selected, so that it makes composing more simple, for those that feel unsure or lack confidence in their creativity. So for example, if a composer would like to compose in D minor, you simply select this key, and it only offers the notes of that scale. Of course this can be edited in case you would like further chromaticism in your piece. This is fantastic for syllabus composition exams that are focused on simple compositions demonstrating progression throughout the piece, and appropriate functional harmony on most occasions. 

A major benefit is that it also provides the opportunity to share your work via a range of platforms, via AirDrop, email, exporting data files or audio. However, compositions also require a score. This sequencing software also allows you to export as a pdf for full score or just parts, again offering ideal suitability for composers. Students are also able to look into more complexities by offering movements, identifying changes in sections, adding lyrics, dynamics and expression. 

A fantastic feature of this app is the  understanding of different styles of music through the use of harmonisation. The app also offers you to select a style of music, and it will create a symphony, classical or jazz, that you can then read, manipulate and edit, in order to develop your own understanding of composition and structure through the modelling used on the app.

This app requires no further purchasing and has no advertisements throughout, which is very helpful when you are trying to play the piano at the same time!

However, there are some drawbacks to the app. When considering students who must submit their own work, it is very easy for the app to harmonise your work, therefore demonstrating a lack of independence, and this could cause issues with plagiarism that would be difficult to identify. Despite this, it can be so helpful for beginner musicians or composers, that this surpasses this slight issue.

Despite this, it is a very successful app, particularly when trying to encourage students to develop their compositional skills, which can often be such a difficult skill to develop, particularly independently. This app provides the independence for students, in order to develop their resilience and creativity. It enables students to work independently without your frequent intervention and teaching, and certainly will help them to learn and progress with their compositional skills.