When I was a toddler, my parents introduced me to music-making through a cheap plastic recorder. Later came a secondhand violin and the tireless efforts of my school’s choir teacher. It was all fun, even if I found it so hard to learn violin the “traditional” way. All I could produce for ages was a horrid squeaking.

I’ve nevertheless loved music ever since, and happily my two children seem to have inherited the same passion. Nowadays there’s a technological trick for getting them to play music, one that gives them the different sounds that an orchestra of instruments can make: smartphones and tablets.

Hence my 2-year-old and 4-year-old are your part-time reviewers this week.

The first and obvious candidate is Apple’s $5 GarageBand app for iPad and iPhone. It’s powerful and can deliver a rich musical output. You can also record your playing, and there are lessons for playing guitar and so on. But it is complex and probably best suited to older children. My two toddlers do love the realistic drums section for the din they can create, but it takes a lot of supervision to keep them from activating a menu function they can’t operate themselves.

A simpler app you may like to try is the free iOS app Music Sparkles, which has a cartoony interface with big buttons for children’s fingers. The xylophone and drums section are free, but you must pay (through the app) to unlock an assortment of other instruments, including saxophone and pan pipes. The cartoonish playable instruments sound good and there’s the option to have simple backing music from drums, piano and other instruments. There’s even a section that has interactive musical notation with voices singing the musical scale. If you are a musical expert you may doubt its educational value, but it’s definitely a fun way to introduce children to the idea of making music. My one complaint is that it is easy (and tempting) for children to tap on the “locked” instruments that you have to buy before playing.