We’ve all heard the declarations that the age of physical hardware or controllers is at an end in the production world, and that mobile devices and tablets like the iPad will become the primary way that musicians make music and perform it live. But how realistic is this claim? Today, we’ve asked an expert in the iOS live production and performance world – Rheyne – to share some of the apps that make jamming on an iPad more fun and significantly cheaper than buying a ton of analog hardware. Read on to see what’s worth picking up – and to enter a contest to win one of the apps mentioned!
Were you linked here just to win some iOS apps? Feel free to jump to the giveaway entry by clicking here.
WHY PRODUCE OR PERFORM WITH IOS?
Having played piano and other keyboard instruments for most of my life, but only been using iOS apps since Dec 2011, I’ve given equal attention over the years to both hardware and software instruments, realizing both have their strengths and weaknesses. To my ears, playing sawtooth wave on my Moog Prodigy with the filter fully open, and playing a sawtooth wave from NI’s Reaktor, it’s hard to tell them apart. You can assign knobs and sliders from a controller to the various synth parameters in something like Reaktor, giving me an approximation of that hardware synth feel.
There are inherent differences in real analog keyboards vs. software instruments which justify owning both, and I couldn’t be more than thrilled at the recent uprising of the affordable “new wave” analog instruments from companies like DSI, Moog, Arturia, and Korg. However, being an owner of keyboards which were manufactured before I was born, all I can say to the hardware purists is if you haven’t given iOS music apps a spin, you have no idea what you’re missing. It took a lot of convincing for me to give it a try, since I was never an “Apple guy” and still stick to my PC roots. But when I was given an iPhone as a birthday present a couple of years ago, I really started to see how smooth and expressive music apps were becoming.
Before we get started, here’s an exclusive video made just for this article – a performance with iOS tools. It’s a live looping improv jam using the DJ TechTools Midi Fighter 3Dfor note input, and a KMI 12-Step for live looping in Ableton. The four banks of the MF3D are controlling four separate instruments: Native Instruments Kontakt for drums, NI’s Massive for bass, Sunrizer on an iPod Touch, and Animoog on an iPad.
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