I've had Garageband on my iPad for quite a while now, so naturally I've made some tunes using nothing but the iPad. Naturally the tunes don't sound as professional as they would if I created them using a full DAW like Ableton or Cubase. The process of making music on the iPad is fun, it's great as a musical sketchpad and a great way to create and develop ideas on the fly.
I've uploaded an album of five tracks to my Bandcamp page. All of the music on the album was created using nothing but my iPad 2; I even did the artwork in Photoshop for iOS.
Overall the tracks are pretty short and mixed pretty rough. I used Garageband to do the main arrangement and some of the instrumentation but I also used quite a few other apps that have the audio copy feature.
You can buy the album for £0.99 (or more if you want to give a donation to Voltage-Controlled).But if you like, I've embedded a player below so you can also listen online for free.
The iPad is one of those gadgets that I just love to use when making music. I was a bit bored earlier so I decided to have a little recording session. Here’s the outcome.
The iPad synths are played live exept from the drums. iElectribe effects modulated live.
Moog Music inc. Have updated their popular Moog Filtatron iPhone/iPad app. The update includes HD Retina retina graphics which greatly improves the look of the GUI on the iPhone 4 and the new iPad 2. However their are no other new features included in the update. We can only hope that some cool new features will be included in future updates of the app. If you don't already own the Moog Filtatron app then I highly recommend heading over to the apple AppStore and and grabbing yourself a copy of this powerful little beast. You won't regret it. Moog software for just £4.99, it's hard to beat!
1.1.2 update: The Filtatron now works with iOS 3.0-3.2. The app now also uses a retina icon and retina iPad app cursors.
Ok, I’ve been messing around with the Moog Filtatron app again. My first post on the filtatron app was really more of a mess around to see what it can do on its own. This time I set out to take samples the VCO so that I can use it in some of my own music and productions.
Since my first post Moog have updated the app to include a few new features. The main feature was the ability to lock the VCO on the pad page so that it can be played like a keyboard (sort of).This helps a little and gives the app a lot more potential than just a sound processor but the keyboard on the pad is very small and hard to use (I’m using an iPhone 4).
I’ve also noticed a few other problems as well. The first Problem that I found was very annoying; you have to make sure that before locking the VCO that you have to get the pitch exactly on C. If you don’t do this the keyboard will play in the wrong key. It sounds obvious but I would have thought that moog would have put a keyboard in the app that was always in tune so that you don’t have to mess around with tuning it every time you want to use it.
Other problems I’ve found are: the audio from the VCO dropping out completely, a small amount of latency when using an external audio signal and various crashes. These can be fixed quite easily by restarting the app.
However despite the various minor flaws that the app has the Moog Filtatron is one of my favourites. The VCO has a nice rich sound to it and the VCF is really useful when recording external audio.
I’m hoping that Moog will look at some of these issues and sort them out in a future update. A full sized keyboard would be nice and the addition of a modular style sequencer would be an awesome addition.
Let’s get back to the samples.
I recorded a few samples from the VCO in the app and loaded them into the NNXT sampler in Propellerheads Reason 5. I then sequenced a few simple bass lines and added a small amount of compression to the sound.
I also decided to beef the sound up a little with a second oscilator from the Thor synth in Reason.
Below you will find all the samples available to download and an audio demo.
The audio demo also contains drums from the Synthetic Bits Funkbox drum machine (another awesome app) and a bit of synth/percussion from Reason.
I’ve uploaded the samples for you to download. As always the samples are royalty free so you can use them for whatever project or track you like and not worry about copyright.
The new Moog Filtatron app is now available in the appstore. Filtatron is a replica of the famous Moog ladder filter that can be found in most of their legendary synthesizers. Along with the filter the Filtatron also offers an oscillator, LFO, sampler, delay and overdrive. Ideal for mangeling live audio or creating your own sounds using the on-board oscillator, the filtatron can be used in may creative ways.
The Moog Filtatron app is available now from the Appstore for just £2.99
I found the Moog filtatron app fun and extremely easy to use. The sound of the filters and VCO are brilliant, it's hard to replicate analog hardware exactly but for an app running your phone it's very close. It's cheap too, for just £2.99 you can own your very own moog filter. Combine that with the Amplitube iRig adapter and you have yourself a portable, analog modeled filter and effects unit.
Overall I'm very pleased with the filtron. It sounds nice, looks good and fits neatly into your pocket. Go buy it, It's well worth the £2.99 price tag.
Below I've made a quick track using only the moog filtatron app. The sounds were quickly mixed and I added a small amount of compression. Enjoy.
Edit: Below I've included another sound demo. This time the Filtatron is processing external audio from my Yamaha digital piano (on the E-piano setting).
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