RT60 Songzap 3

Songzap aims to turn your iOS device into a compact demo studio — and the latest version promises headphone‑free recording.

There’s now some truly innovative audio software for smartphones and tablets, with apps to cover everything from simple jobs like note‑taking (digital replacements for your notebook and pen) or memo recording (a digital dictaphone), right through to full‑blown DAWs like Cubasis and Logic Pro for the iPad. Somewhere between those extremes sits RT60’s Songzap, which was initially conceived to make the ‘pre‑production’ phase of a record intuitive and efficient. The first two versions impressed us, but now there’s Songzap 3, and it’s claimed this makes innovative use of AI to enable headphone‑free recording on your phone, amongst other things.

Core Features

We reviewed Songzap 2 in SOS October 2024, and for those unfamiliar with the app I’ll start with a brief recap of where that version left us — all its functionality remains available in v3.

Spread neatly across a compact set of main pages, Songzap offers both audio recording and a trio of compact virtual instruments (drums, bass and keyboards). There are also basic mixing options, an arrangement environment for experimenting with different song structures, and a note‑taking option for lyrics. And, once happy with your demo, you can export a mixdown and/or the individual track elements as WAV/MIDI files, plus a PDF with lyrics.

There were already some clever features in v2. For example, the audio loop recording and virtual instrument patterns operate in conjunction with your arrangement decisions, so you can define audio loops or instrument parts (essentially a MIDI loop) for each song section. If you change the arrangement (for example, by adding an extra chorus), then on playback these looped elements can follow that arrangement change automatically. Of course, you can add a new song section, record additional audio/virtual instrument loops associated with that section, and slot them it into your arrangement as required too.

When you’ve recorded audio in a section (or sections) in your arrangement, Songzap can (it’s your choice) analyse the musical content and automatically generate suitable accompaniment parts for the virtual instruments. It’s certainly a very quick and effective way to get a vibe going, and while options are necessarily more limited than in a DAW, you can perform basic edits on these parts, and fine‑tune the chords that Songzap automatically identifies, to refine the ‘performance’.

Once you have the musical arrangement organised to your satisfaction, if you want to add further audio elements you can turn your focus to the four‑track audio tracking feature. This supports the continuous recording of additional audio layers across the length of the whole arrangement. If all you want to do is capture a song idea in its most simple form (a guitar plus vocal track, for instance), this section of the app can also be used on its...