IPads, too, never really stepped up to the plate in production terms. You don’t, for instance, see people fine-tuning their latest tracks on the Tube. But laptops - in what can only be a cruel joke on the part of the people who coined the term - just aren’t that portable. Apple have nailed it with Logic Pro - the bedroom has become the source of some of the world’s greatest hits. Producing music on your laptop is amazing. The solution? A massive iPad with a pencil. And as natural a stylus as your finger is, most of them are too fat to get the precision you need to put a small black dot on a millimetre-wide stave. They’re just too small - composers write on A4, or even A3. Composing on your computer at the piano is like sitting on a mountain, painting the landscape in front of you on a discarded radiator you brought along.īut iPads, for all their promise, have never really cut it either. Not to mention the fact that there’s not a music stand in existence on which it feels good working on a laptop. Sibelius is the best program out there, but crotchets and quavers weren’t designed to be selected from a toolbox with a mouse and dropped into place - they were designed to be drawn. And that group is musicians.īecause everything we do just got easier. But there’s one group of people for whom the usual sarcasm that surrounds an Apple growth-spurt announcement has been replaced by genuine excitement.