First lets get this out of the way: not everything here is full of technically sound information or fact, just opinions and a little bit of fun. Don’t go ‘OMG yer setup is total bunk use freaking Ableton and less Line 6 crap! LOLz BAI’ because 1) I just said that 2) I know there are other ways of doing things and 3) I kinda don’t care..
So anyway, before all of that the video above is a speedy live jam with some new toys I got today, by toys I mean toy. I’ve had a iPad for a few months now a despite its actual usefulness and junk, I really wanted to get some use out of it practically (other than finding comic book shops in New York, which I might add, it did admirably). The synth apps and such are fun, really fun, but I find I’m not a huge fan of the sounds I get from them and really, I’m not really down on that sort of thing. Sound generation can happen on a lot of different hardware these days but it is all much of a muchness and really I find it lacks character. Thats why I like things like Nanoloop, chip tunes and cheap hardware. It has character and a groove of its own. Thats something I wanted to capture In a live setup, hence not just using Ableton Live, great though it maybe.
Anyway, I hadn’t really done that much research into the iPad being used as a controller for anything, it seemed to require a fair bit of patience, and MIDI over WIFI sounds like a recipe for disaster. I then read an article on createdigitalmusic about the Genome Sequencer and everything just clicked into place. Use the iPad as a sequencer, not a controller. The hook for me was Genome has a similar layout, structure wise to Nanoloop, where, when in ‘song’ mode you can trigger the loops of samples rather than just pressing play and sitting back.
About this time last year I was playing with a similar set up with just the GBA, the MPC and the loop pedal, however I found that there was too much to do with my hands on the hardware that meant either less guitar, or less hardware. Using the sequencer on the iPad is not only appealing to my visual need for blocks of colour, but it also consolidates a lot of functionality into one device rather than several.
Anyway, so far I’ve been very pleased with the whole thing and look forward to seeing where I can take the setup and what I can get it to do, there is definitely a lot of work to do, that is for certain…
Anyway. Here are some links to bits of info:
Create Digital Music : Genome Article
Nanoloop
Genome MIDI Sequencer
Take care now!