Flat: Sheet Music & Tab Maker

This app is genuinely amazing. I started composing music on this app and thought it was great. Upon subscribing to the premium features, the capabilities blew my mind. I’ve now started writing original piece for my orchestra class at school. The interface is clean and easy-to-use, and the intuitiveness is seriously impressive. One thing I must note is that the sound quality could use a bit of work and tweaking and some of the instrument sounds could be more realistic when compared to other notation apps like MuseScore or Dorico. Furthermore, on older iPad models, this app can lag and be slow (annoying when you’re composing or even listening to a large piece of music with a ton of parts) and is really irritating and I hope this can get fixed. I feel like some other features found on the computer version should be transferred to iOS, such as the ability to change and customize the font found on the text, not just the music. Also, please add the following (if you can, hopefully easy to program!): Arpeggio down (piano pieces mostly), tremolo between two notes, nested tuplets accessibility, and, finally, please make stuff like dynamics, crescendos, and ritardandos more obvious or audible, since a lot of it sounds the same. Overall, great app and I almost always recommend it to friends and other composers. Thank you.

This app is great for if you just want to write something out quick. Obviously the phone isn't going to be most ideal method of composing music, but I feel like there are a few things here and there that could use some tweaking. Particularly with the guitar interface. I know I'm probably a minority when it comes to this, but I would like to use this so I can transcribe songs accurately, most of them being rock/metal songs, which are sometimes in different guitar/bass tunings like D standard, Eb standard or drop C, and while you can write in lower notes than what's accessible with standard E, it won't show up on the tablature, which, if you're someone who uses tablature primarily, can be a little inconvenient. So lower tunings for guitars/basses I think would be a welcome addition. Also, many of the guitar techniques that you can write out on the app won't happen during playback. For example, palm muting doesn't change the guitar sound, it just says that the notes are palm muted, bends and pre bends sometimes won't even appear in the music even after repeated attempts to add them in, and even when they do get added in, the notes will not bend during playback. Letting notes ring also doesn't do anything during playback, it just says to let the notes ring. Otherwise I'd say this is going to be fine for everyone else, which is why I gave it a 4 star rating even if I personally had some problems with it.

I’ve been using this app for probably around two years now (the free version up until last week). It works great for arranging simple harmonies or accompaniment, but is seriously lacking for someone who has to consistently arrange and transcribe orchestral music. Specifically, in my own experience, the audio playback is VERY laggy (and sometimes a half or full beat off in instruments but not others) when there’s more than 5 or so instruments and I have to restart the app every time I add an instrument because the sound doesn’t play for that particular instrument (even if the volume control is up). Also, the touchscreen aspect of it sometimes doesn’t work for selecting measures or moving articulations (slurs, for example, and no amount of zooming into the measure helps). It’s manageable, and could honestly be a lot worse, but it does get frustrating when you’ve got a stroke of brilliance in adding a part but can’t hear it or it takes you 9 tries to make a slur more than two notes long. I hate being the person that just leaves negative comments, because seriously aside from the things mentioned above, this app is great. I love all the different functionalities (like writing in concert pitch!) and the ability to add different articulations. It’s been a life saver for a lot of my classes. There are some other suggestions I’ve thought of in the past, like instruments to add (wood/temple blocks!!) but I can’t remember all of those suggestions at this point in time. It really is a wonderful app, especially for those just getting into composition or arranging, and I’ve already highly recommended it to my classmates. I think just a few bug fixes and additions to make the app more user-friendly (and musician-friendly) would be spectacular! Thank you!