Dusty iPad!

Just felt like posting since most of my recent efforts in music making have been back to my iMac. For quite awhile I've been doing tons of iPad music creation but lately not as much even with some very cool iPad releases such as PPG Wavegenerator, Magellen, Impaktor and Drumjam.

So what gives? Have I given up on portable music? I don't think so, and truth be told, I have about 10 works in-progress that might someday see the light of day. I think what is happening is that I am obsessing on two products: Noatikl and my EWI USB. Noatikl lets me "program" musical scores and control as much or as little of the resulting work as I want which I find incredibly inspiring.

On the other end of the spectrum is my old desire to perform or play music. My trumpet chops are far out of practice and the EWI MIDI controller lets me use my breath and technique to control either virtual instruments, software modeled instruments or even synths all with a sort of "sax"/"recorder" type instrument. It really makes MIDI feel more like playing than ever before for me.

Another factor is that I really want to use all of the major new synthesizers on the iPad but the workflow, frankly sucks! I have to audio-copy/paste everything from app to app - try to get parts playing in the background etc. etc.

If you want to hear some amazing sounds from someone mastering the "only on iPad" music, check out   Michael Wadlow on soundcloud. He manages to produce and master some great electronica completely on the iPad - no post-processing or DAWs at all! Even more minimalist - (meaning iPhone!) is some of the work by Galaxyexplorer. He does all of his pieces on iPhone. Both of these musicians have far more patience than I !

There is an emerging standard that may help called AudioBus which should let iPad apps share audio in realtime and process record over the shared "bus". I can' tell you how excited I am to see this develop. As things stand today, unless you are using an "all in one" type DAW on the iPad, putting together various sounds into a cohesive piece of music is an exercise in patience!

Maybe once this is in place and all the apps upgrade to use it, I will be back to more mobile music. Hell, I will probably bang out a few in the meantime.