In silence

Tinkering with digital audio, I love it!
A few months ago I was exploring the use of the Ipad as digital recording device.
A small tune came out of it.
nothing too fancy, just a piece made from scraps i created as test with various audio apps.
Great fun!

My plan was to draw a videoclip for it - also on the iPad.
Yes: ... draw ... even at 1 frame a second, it meant lot's of work and grew tired of it.
It's one of those things that end up on the "to do whenever I find some time for it" pile, which is dangerously close to the "never" pile.
This image is one frame of it. 



We'll see about the videoclip part, but here's the audio track already.

You can download the mp3 here
It's called "In Silence"

It's completely recorded on the iPad, only using iPad apps, the internal mic and a (real) acoustic guitar.
Why? Because making music using toys is fun!


The synths, bassline and effects are from Nano Studio


The drums are done with Beatmaker, which also functioned as copy/paste glue between apps.


The recordings of voice, guitar, final sequencing and mixing was done with multitrack DAW.

Conclusions: using the iPad as mobile music studio is fun.
Some pretty good results can be achieved, considering the cheap guitar I used and the internal mic.
There are some pretty awesome apps out there which make the iPad a valid mobile recording studio.

However, one has to jump through some really weird hoops if you want to combine multiple apps and get the most out of it.
The lack of (access to) a file system makes it sometimes daunting to get the samples and tracks from one app to another.
You end up spending as much time swapping apps and moving files around then to actually create some music.

It's Apples vision to prefer usability over features.
That's great, but sometimes they end up in the paradox that their quest for usability actually makes the product less useful.
As Einstein reportedly used to say: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." , right?

More on that later in my GarageBand for iPad review