Imagine 30 brand new ipad2 machines neatly sitting on tables inside an ex-industrial building in the heart of east London’s Shoreditch neighbourhood. All of them connected to tiny keyboards and running the latest music making apps available today. This all happened last night at CDR knowledge‘s event – Create music mobile, and I was lucky to be there.
The event aimed to reveal how musicians and producers use these new tools, which products are out there and what’s it all good for. And that’s the main question. Among the apps were the famous iElectribe Korg Gorillaz edition (The Gorillaz claim to have made a full album just by using this app), Amplitude for ipad (guitar sim), imaschine, Soundcloud, Garageband and more.
imaschine demo
There were lots of producers, musicians and general geeks checking out the apps and trying to make some instant music with them. The event also featured talks and demos by industry people.
The most interesting new product seems to be the new Lemur for ipad app. The old Lemur was a product way ahead of its time, with a large touch screen and amazing features but with a price tag of about £2000 (ouch!). This time they put out an ipad version that should be just as cool and would only cost £35 in the app store. One of the developers of the Lemur was there to show off what it can do. Take a look at this video:
Among the app lovers (and haters) I met this cool London music producer/songwriter and Youtube sensation Estelle Rubio. I also met Ace, guitar from Skunk Anansie (Are they still active?) and saw him demoing the Amplitube for ipad app:
After a long event and many demos and lectures there was a raffle and I was lucky enough to win a bundle of “everything that was demoed that night”. My ipad will soon be smiling with lots of new music making apps.
My take on all this ;
The ipad is an awesome piece of hardware and a lot of the apps I saw seemed to be going in a good direction. More features, more genuine sounds and more options to share them easily with your computer based projects. Still, it all feels a bit gimmicky, toy like, great for education or for beginners but not as a serious tool for “grown up” musicians.
A lot of the apps are cut down versions of their sister Mac/PC apps and to me it seems like there’s not much point in that. I felt like some of the presenters were almost apologizing for the toy like features of the apps they were showing. I mean garage band is truly amazing for kids but not much more than that in my view.
That being said, if you take a transatlantic flight or even just the Eurostar train and you have those apps available you could make a lot of useful sketches on the go. You could put down new ideas, beats, melodies and lots more.
Digital music has been changing the way producers make music and has produced a lot of creative new music, but at the same time so much junk music is being produced everyday because of the sheer ease of production. Therefore I’m a little skeptical about another few million people instantly sharing their automatically made music from their apps straight to soundcloud. I hope these apps would serve to bring more talented people closer to music and allow musicians to control their laptop applications or make cool sketches on the go, but as a “new serious production tool”? hmm, not yet.
Well written. I’ll add that besides the issue u quite rightly pointed out, another problem is that essentially we can only run on this piece of hardware 1 app at the time for music making…
That’s why I find that the possibilities of using it as a controller are more interesting the the option to run a stan alone music program. For example the Amplitube (or any other amp simulator for iPad) – why not get a micro-amp like the one korg makes for virtual amping on the go? This keeps the iPad free for other (recording) applications.
Hence, I believe the next jump will be with multitasking with these tasking at the same time, and having an easy, GUI friendly, system to move between the current running apps, as if u were switching between open vsts.
I agree, the Lemur controller looked amazing. I always wished I’d have one of the old ones but they were so expensive. Now when it’s available for the ipad2 and quite cheap..I’m sure a lot of DJ’s are going to look into this. Good point about multitasking, you’re right, it does make it all less attractive if you can not use a few apps together.
I was there too and was lucky enough to win the new Lemur app! Now all I need is to get an iPad lol! I’m trying to hold out for iPad 3 though!
Oh, that Lemur looks amazing. Makes me wanna go back to Djing or making some crazy controlled set…Can’t wait to get that one.