Fender Studio: Easy-peasy play-along and recording for the guitar player in your life

This free guitar-focused recording app and amp sim is handy indeed for quick takes and practice, though it lack features such as MIDI and loop recording.

- BY JON JACOBI

Fender Studio is a cross-platform (Android, iOS, Windows, macOS) combination 16-track audio recorder and guitar amplifier simulation app.

Plug your guitar into your interface or device, fire up Studio, start a'pluckin, and record the results. It's very cool and rock-solid, and it's useful for practice and capturing ideas. However, it's missing quite a few features whose absence might have you looking to the company's far more capable (and far more complex) Studio One (fave.co/4cGYADI).

What, an upsell app from a major vendor? Tell me it ain't so. All joking aside, as a free amp sim that records, Fender Studio is fantastic.

Fender Studio supports recording and playing back up to 16 tracks of audio and includes a bunch of the company's effects (FXs) to make it all sound good. Most saliently, it offers amp sims—effects that simulate the sound of a real guitar amplifier.

These effects, including the amp sims, can be applied to the input signal. You hear them as you play, though they aren't printed to the track when you record. Most DAWs only apply or let you hear FX post recording.

FX being audible on input (with monitoring turned on) is what allows Studio to function as a Fender-centric amp sim (guitar and bass), an app that turns your device into a digital guitar amp.

That makes it much like Native Instrument's Guitar Rig (fave.co/49CnHcn), IK Multimedia's Amplitude (fave.co/47G9zxb), Positive Grid's BIAS (fave.co/4qYqL8H), and a host of others.

As to the recording portion of the program, it features the aforementioned 16 audio tracks plus a surprisingly capable set of clip editing features: cut, paste, delete, split, start and end points, transpose, tempo, gain, and crossfades. These are nondestructive; the underlying audio material remains unchanged.