making music with an iPad

please list key apps, I have not been paying attention. I've got Figure and Take and that's about it.

I would like to make the $200+ I'm about to spend on getting my ipad mini screen replaced feel like it'll be worth it

it depends what you want to do and how you want to do it. Are you a keyboard person? A draw patterns with your finger person? A type things into boxes person? Personally, I have some trouble with the apps that have keyboard interfaces because a lot of them feel too small/narrow -- though one of the korg ones has an option for larger sized keys (that for me still feel a bit narrow). I pretty much just use mine to make "cool sounds" that I then record and edit and put on a sampler. The size of the interface designs make it less appealing for me in live performance, though I know Milty P. is quite fond of using his in a live setting.

tom: there are now too many apps to safely recommend only a few without knowing what your musical tastes are, but Tera Synth is a good all-in-one, Patterning is a touchscreen drum machine GUI with very little precedent, and TC-11 has a steep learning curve but it's often the one I show people first -- under the hood it is a 40 year old FM synth engine but you control the patch with the XY positions, distances & angles between your one to ten fingers instead of moving individual knobs and faders

part of this was noticing just how widespread the response has been to Patterning and Fugue Machine; it's not just dev sites & message boards, sites that normally only cover new record releases & interviews are now covering app releases

http://www.factmag.com/2015/08/23/patterning-drum-machine-app-ipad/
https://www.xlr8r.com/features/2015/10/interview-fugue-machines-alexandernaut/

I wish he would hurry up and release the iPhone version of fugue machine. His previous sequencer, Arpeggionome, is a favorite. I have an exciting WIP where Arpeggionome is midi controlling a melody line while Xynthesizr midi controls a battery of orchestral percussion samples with differing pattern lengths

I'm working on a list of recommendations but it's hard to keep it concise

Patterning looks amazing. Also iPad only, gah.

how do you guys generally get sounds from a phone/tablet to a computer DAW? record out of the headphone jack, or...?

depends on if the app I'm using has its own recording capabilities or not. If it does (like Magellan does, for instance) I record my bit and export it to iTunes file sharing, then pull it out of there by docking my phone to my macbook

If it doesn't, I record it through Audiobus into Audioshare, then export the clip from audioshare into itunes file sharing (audioshare can also send the clip to any of the other apps on my phone that can open wavs, or send it to gmail to be attached to an email). (Audioshare and Audiobus both utterly obligatory if you are doing anything with sounds on an ios device)

Or you can record your app into ios garageband (which is quite fine if you use it as a simple multitrack recorder of other apps) and export it as an aiff to your desktop daw or a garageband project file to desktop GB.

word, thanks. in my case i would use Audioshare > Dropbox > download on my PC that's connected to the internet > put it on a usb stick > transfer it to my music PC that's not online. :)

i don't know any Apple products besides my iPod Classic, but i'm really tempted by the possibilities of some of these apps.

could you countenance having itunes on your not-online music PC? Then you could just dock to that and transfer shit directly?

Hopefully Android will catch up, I understand that some of the inbuilt latency challenges are starting to be overcome on certain phones? Sunvox and Caustic both exist for Android already but obv one would have to focus on tracker-based or piano-roll-based composing rather than live writing bc of the latency...

Android made a big deal recently of reducing their latency, all the way down to... 40ms. still basically unusable for music. I also have heard from some developers that in practice they still can't get anywhere close to 40ms. this explains why it's still mostly an iOS game.

sorry for the rookie questions but does it matter what version iOS/iPad you theoretically have, or can i be ok with a cheap used one that's not the newest generation?

thats a tough one

i think that ios 8.x or higher (maybe 7.x or higher?) is fine and a lot of ppl definitely haven't upgraded to 9 yet (myself included)

My understanding is with phones the 5 can p much handle whatever app you throw at it. IDK with ipads though. Mine is only one generation old. Audiobus forum should have some good threads on this subject.

Whatever generation you buy invest in as much storage as you can afford. My prior phone was 32gb and that was constantly stressful in terms of music making. You want to be able to throw whole sample libraries on there without giving a fuck. Also, when it comes to samples/wav files etc the various apps DO NOT share with each other. E.g. I have the same 330MB orchestral soundfont in the itunes sharing folders of four different apps. So that redundancy eats up memory fast. It's also nice to be able to do tons of Save As variations on projects without worrying about size.

Gadget is pretty frickin' amazing. And now they have released their high-end piano (with sympathetic resonance and everything) as a virtual instrument.

iMini is also neat, and pretty powerful.

the iphones that just came out are the first ones with '3D touch' which can be taken advantage of by apps for aftertouch sensing. BS-16i already updated with this feature. I guess it's not as good for velocity sensing, but there are already apps that use the accelerometer and/or finger contact area to interpret velocity with reasonable success (BS-16i, Magellan, iFretless Guitar, and Garageband are the apps I have that include velocity, and you can program Jasuto to run the accelerometer to whatever parameter you want).

xpost--

speaking of sympathetic resonance one thing i haven't explored is the physical modelling apps like Laplace and ZedSynth, but their reviews are super enticing to me

i think i might not be apollonian enough to thrive in physical modelling synths though

sorry for the rookie questions but does it matter what version iOS/iPad you theoretically have, or can i be ok with a cheap used one that's not the newest generation?

― lil urbane (Jordan), Thursday, October 15, 2015 1:00 PM (13 minutes ago)

depends what you do with it. mine is a first generation hand-me-down (none of my other computers are Apple either) and I am limited as to what apps work with it, unless I am a big dummy and there is a way to get older versions that I don't know about.

http://discchord.com/blog/2015/10/20/fieldscaper.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp88NkJpy2M

Yep was gonna post to this thread about that today! I'm almost certainly buying it today.

Also on the Russian mad genius dev front, I am working on a track based around Virtual ANS right how which I'm rly happy with

Have you used fieldscaper yet Milton?

That looks very, very cool.

So I guess you can do up to a 90 SECOND LFO on this thing! Want.

Probably of interest to anyone on this thread and particularly anyone about to go crazy with fieldscaper, someone on reddit posted a huge dump of found-object samples to their public Dropbox today:

https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/10596/guy-on-reddit-shared-a-dropbox-folder-of-cool-samples

~300mb zipped

nice! I screwed around with Fieldscaper for a few minutes the other night and I'm definitely into it. Fun and intuitive but with a whole lot under the hood, too.

EZ you need Virtual ANS too, trust me on this

Oh man! That looks cool, too.

not recommending this one, more just continuing to track the fringe media coverage that is slowly noticing what happened (specifically regarding the last sentence)

https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/we-tried-imaschine-2-the-digital-audio-workstation-that-makes-making-music-feel-like-a-game

I have not fucked with the imaschine apps but they get poor reviews from the boffins (no ability to import own samples; doesn't play well with other apps). But yeah it's the coverage itself and its venue which is interesting.

And the blurring of the line between gameplaying and art making. I veer back and forth myself -- sometimes I'm playing various iOS synths into an iOS DAW trying to put together a semblance of some notion I had (but running into too many happy accidents to get there) and other times I'm whole hog for the generative semi random aspect and running with some strange germ I never would have thought to write.

Making music on my iPad and phone is seriously endangering my ability to do a solid job at anything else rn. It's a godsend and a demonic matter at once.

thinking of pulling the trigger on an ipad mini 2, that should be good to run the cool apps you guys are talking about (Fieldscaper, Tera Synth, TC-11), right?

should be

btw http://discchord.com/blog/2015/11/30/app-sales-cyber-monday-2015.html

whoa thanks. i pulled the trigger on the thing and some of those apps!

Don't forget audioshare, you'll need it

From that sale list I can highly recommend from personal use:

Elastic drums
Virtual ANS
Magellan
Addictive Synth

Also highly recommended and I think it's on sale? is Midisequencer (one word) for driving your synth apps

i'll be this guy in no time:

https://youtu.be/qkko4fBwHmY?t=89

Midisequencer looks weird to me, i'm not a big fan of step sequencers in general. are there midi composing apps with more of a piano roll layout? Chordion looks cool too.

or no, i was looking at something called ChordPolyPad.

chordpolypad is supposed to be awesome. I haven't been able to afford it yet. Soundprism is another good virtual MIDI polyphonic controller. You can also use Guitarism the same way if you want to trigger chords in a synth using strum gestures. Also, check out a really fun and complex controller app called Firo which is free and in addition to nuanced chord triggering, lets you get different length loops cycling against each other.

Yeah midisequencer is definitely no stand-in for a piano roll DAW type app. And you have to have at least one of those. Which opens up a huge subject. There are a lot of good threads on the audiobus forum about the virtues of different ios DAWs; I'd say that on there, the consensus favorite would seem to be MultiTrackStudio (important to note that's all one word - there's an app with almost the same name which is garbage) or Cubasis. A lot of partisans of Music Studio by Xewton, Beatmaker 2, and NanoStudio as well. I personally have finished the most work in Caustic, which is basically very similar to Reason (you get an array of different virtual synths each with its own piano roll) but it has its considerable drawbacks too. Basically I keep coming back to Caustic for MIDI/sequence based construction and Garageband for live audio-in/pretending like I'm actually editing tapes. But neither are ideal by a long shot.

I have lots of tl;dr to deliver re: ios DAWs. Will have to type it offline and post later.

thanks Jon! Cubasis is super appealing to me because i use Cubase as my main axe, but i'm hoping it won't be necessary because my goal is to get everything off the ipad and into Cubase. it would be nice to have Cubase's midi programming to trigger apps though.

btw Tera Synth was making me feel insane because none of the knobs or sliders were working. they would light up and then not move, but the keys and buttons worked. eventually TS wouldn't launch because of an error, and i restarted the iPad and everything worked like a charm.

and Fieldscaper seems to have some random and inscrutable behavior, like my loop keeps playing and not respecting my oscillator parameters, until it does, and then stops doing it again. i just sat on Audioshare and pressed record when the right version triggered and managed to get some fun sounds into Dropbox.

ha, the current #2 vote 'ableton link' is not even commercially available yet, it is only in beta

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2015/12/01/whats-the-best-new-mobile-music-app-of-2015/

There are bugs in the current rev of fieldscaper and a fix is awaiting approval by the App Store, so I hear.

What is ableton link supposed to do? Just another option for a midi in ? Controller?

Also curious about Jon's iOS DAW thoughts ... The Jon I don't know irl that is

I think it's so two (or more?) people can collaborate on the same session (wirelessly).

Or, maybe not:http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2015/11/06/ableton-link-makes-live-unnecessary/

I know it's kinda old but the korgi polysix lets you upload to soundcloud which is a nice alternative to running the sound out the headphone jack

The Curtis app is cool . Works on phones and the oldest of iPads too

this thread makes me feel like a fogey

Speaking of the korg ipolysix, today is the last day of its half off sale (15 instead of 30 bucks). I broke down and bought it. I like that it includes a multitrack sequencer with automation.

Sarah what kind of recording are you wanting to do? Multiple tracks of audio? MIDI piano roll synth stuff? Sample triggering and mangling? The iOS daw apps I've used have distinct strengths and weaknesses depending on what you want to do

(Though right now everyone is going crazy for the new Auria Pro app which is supposed to be the best al around daw yet. It's too pricy for me rn)

I played with Music Memos this afternoon for about 15 minutes and was really impressed. I recorded a simple arpeggio guitar track, I-IV-V progression, then clicked the bass and drum buttons and had a little demo. The drums matched up automatically with my rudimentary riff, but more impressive than that was the bass note selection and rhythm, which was more complex than I was expecting.

oops https://soundcloud.com/nd9/937-1a

I made most of this in Beatmaker 3 on an iPad (not the live bass though). I recorded Nord into it for the Rhodes, and used Sunrizer and another AU synth for the other bits.

Eventually dropped all the stems into Ableton to finish, though, and got a couple of analog synth tracks and Ultranova stuff for the coda.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIVoQG1bg1w

got a couple of analog synth tracks and Ultranova stuff for the coda

from a friend.

got the ikaossilator app on my phone and it’s super fun

buying this today based on this article. The dev’s other apps are great especially Tardigrain.

Damn, that makes me want to try incorporating an iPad into my DAW workflow again, even though I know it will never happen

i bought a hi-spec iPad Pro last night and i think it's gonna be a game changer for my music making. holy shit, so fun to jam on this thing.

so far i've got Novation's Blocs Wave & Groovebox, Propellerheads' Figure, Patterning 2, Sugar Bytes Drum Computer, and AUM to mix them all up.

Tardigrain looks very cool.

btw, speaking of incorporating iPads into the DAW workflow, I bought TouchOSC as well, and set it up to communicate with Ableton... Seems like it could be very useful, but I couldn't find any readymade Ableton templates around the web, so I'll probably have to make my own

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnVbx-3U7zU

I bought all five of them too. They’re a steal.

Logic Pro for iPad announced. There are some cases (like EQ curves), where a stylus/touch interface would be really helpful.
https://www.apple.com/logic-pro-for-ipad/

Right now you can get the entire Moogerfooger effects suite as one big bundle for $40. Kinda worth it

https://apps.apple.com/us/app-bundle/moogerfooger-effects-bundle/id1701612243