Loops are wonderful little things. With judicious use of these musical snippets, you can construct entire albums of material from tiny building blocks -- or just scatter a couple over your compositions for flavor. GarageBand comes with a pretty healthy assortment, but spend enough time in the Garage and you may find your songs starting to sound an awful lot like everyone else's.

Learn how-to make your own loops after the jump.

This combo metronome/tuner provides both a flashing dot and optional audible click for the tempo. Rather than focus on guitar tuning, Orfeo lets you drag notes up and down a treble and bass clef from notes C2 to C6 and plays the tone for the selected note.

With seven types of guitar tunings available, two modes either auto-detect whatever string the input is closest to or let you choose which string to tune (with reference tones played in the earphones). A unique “waterfall strobe” tuner picks up very sensitive pitch fluctuations. 

Choose from eight tunings, including standard guitar, banjo, cello and chromatic. Tones mode plays tuned reference notes for each string to listen to as you tune your instrument, while Tuner mode detects the pitch of the sound coming from the mic.

The highs and lows of instrument tuning

See the detected pitch in four ways: as a standard note (G2, F#4, etc.), as a string on a guitar (a green string indicates the correct pitch), as a note on a music clef, or as a waveform with its frequency in Hertz. 

Metronome keeps time with a flashing red dot and an audible click. You can add presets to the eight included classically-named tempos (Adagio, Allegro, etc.). Buttons set the tempo to quarter-, eighth-, 16th- or 32nd-notes, and another button switches to double-time.

Selecting the string to tune on the app’s guitar headstock, TyroTuner’s meter shows whether you’re too low, too high or just right and as you tune. An alternate mode measures the tone coming in and highlights which string on the guitar you’re closest to tuning properly.