CREATING MUSIC ON THE GO
The tech world is growing day by day and
its impact on music has been so heavy
that people can now almost stop carrying
instruments for certain shows and depend
just on their laptops. We have now come
to a point where even iPads are used for
shows and are used to emulate various
instruments like violin, nadaswaram, big
synths and even drums. can achieve realistic guitar sounds that
bend, stretch and manipulate the sound
into endless possibilities. The bending
and stretching has made this popular
for indian musicians that play Carnatic
music on it.
In this article we will be covering 5 Apps
that can be used to play music via iPad. • Echo, a unique looper and multi-tap
echo
Animoog
This is a fun synth emulation with a great
design. It has a lot of engaging animations
on-screen which make it fun to play. The
best part is its XY pads which are of great
use. The presets are pretty good and
there are a lot of options. This app also
has an option that allows us to record
upto 4 tracks on it.
Model 15
This is an emulation of a Moog style
modular synthesizer.
It has the following features :
• Virtual Keyboard
• Sliders
• In-built arpeggiator.
It also has a lot of presets which have very
good tones and can be very useful.
The stand out feature is that it can be
used for educational purposes because it
teaches the basic flow of a synth.
Geoshred
This is one of the most popular apps for
iPad music. Almost every other musician
uses this and has become so popular in the
indian musician circuit as well because
of its highly expressive capabilities. You
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Some of its features are :
• Multiple Modeled effects
• Finger vibrato, slide and fret scraping
• Unique mono mode using intervals of
multiple strings.
• Built in arpeggiator
• Alternative tunings
• Intelligent pitch rounding
Alchemy Synth
This might sound very familiar to the
producers who use Logic Pro or Garage
Band. The iPad version of it is pretty good
as well. It performs pretty well in the iPad
as well and has pretty good animations
on the interface. While it's obviously not
as functional as the plugin version, it is
pretty good for using it through an iPad.
ThumbJam
ThumbJam is a sampler that has a
good amount of instrument sounds
and unique playing interfaces. Just
like the other synths, ThumbJam has
note bends, vibrato etc for expressive
playing. ThumbJam uses shaking and
tilt to add expressions such as vibrato,
glide etc. There are also effects like
reverb and delay to add depth. The best
aspect of ThumbJam is that we can load
different instruments and handle them
simultaneously with its split screen
feature. This is a fun app that can be used
in live performances.
Author Vishal Ramakrishnan, Global Peace song of the year award winning and music producer.
He is also a music production trainer. For more details, visit www.vishaladitya.com