3 thoughts on “The Journey Begins”

  1. Those of us who are involved in electronic music are living through a great era. $500 iPads are plenty strong enough to make amazing music, and there are many hundreds of amazing programs available for practically free. Those of us who have been around since practically the beginning can barely restrain our broad grins at the diversity and quality of apps that nearly rain down from heaven. Never has musical creativity been so nurtured and blessed.

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  2. I have no real objective in floating this blog. I have been greatly benefited by several existing music app blogs, and have no desire to in any way detract from or compete with them. I particularly love Discchord, which is a great source of app reviews, announcements and discussion, as well as tutorials and performance videos. I also like the Audiobus site, which has lots of good discussions. iPad loops and App updates are also good day-to-day sources of information. The Soundtest guy is also excellent, providing often deep reviews and demonstrations of practically everything. There are lots of other places with useful information. These ones I’ve listed are just the most consistently helpful to me, particularly re: IOS music making. For the time being, I intend to put up occasional bits of music, and to rave about software I admire. I invite anyone who feels like it to do the same.

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  3. When the iPhone came out, I really didn’t see much attraction to it. It all seemed to hinge on apps, and I didn’t expect them to be much good for anything. Maybe games, but certainly not anything very powerful. Otherwise, the idea of a 600 or more dollar phone just didn’t have any appeal, especially when you had to commIt to two years of AT&T phone service at $60+ dollars a month.
    Three years later they brought out the first iPads. For no particularly good reason, I cruised over to the local Apple Store, and put down my 500 bucks on opening day. I have been doing computer music for a long time, and already had computers and quite a bit of mostly Windows music software. I also had a bunch of Mac stuff, but it was older, from the 1980’s. I also had a lot of synths and drum machines, rack mount modules, and audio effects.
    I was impressed with the iPad immediately, just for general computing purposes. I loved the fact that you could turn it on in one second, and I found all sorts of things to do with it right from the start. I played games, used it for social media, and rented movies. The initial music apps were not all that powerful, but it looked obvious enough that there was potential there.
    What was really lacking at the beginning was the sort of infrastructure that allowed multiple apps to communicate, and to work together. Still, there were individual synths that were pretty good, and from the start it was impressive how inexpensive they were.
    The hardware got noticeably faster and stronger every year. After a few years there started to be a lot of synths, and audio effects, as well as DAW programs. Pretty soon InterAppAudio started to materialize, as well as standard USB MIDI.
    Eventually the hardware synth makers started making versions for IOS, notably including Moog, Korg, and PPG. Eventually the Ipads themselves got to be comparable to MacBook pros, and the whole scene got more groovy than anybody had really imagined it would.
    AudioBus made the IOS world more interesting, and then eventually AU arrived. AU was a plug-in format brought from Mac, which added certain additional capabilities.
    In recent years the IPad pros are faster than MacBook pros every year when they come out in the fall. Then the MacBook pros are faster the next summer, and the cycle repeats. There are hundreds of IOS synths, most of which get updated fairly often. Some of the updating is to keep up with the OS updates, but much of it also adds power and function to the programs themselves. There are countless audio effects, DAWs, and all kinds of other tools. There must be 100 drum machines, both sampled and synthesized. There are samplers, and sample players, many of which are first rate.
    This is just a brief introduction. In the days to come, I’ll attempt to describe some of the best stuff…

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