In defense of the iPad

John Walden, for Sound on Sound:

Of course, instead of an iPad, today’s aspiring music technology junkies could buy a computer-based system. Whatever route you take, there is still a bunch of other ‘stuff’ (mics, headphones, speakers, software) you have to acquire alongside the computing platform itself and I’d absolutely agree that the laptop (or desktop) system is likely to be more powerful than the iPad. That said, I love my mobile iPad-based music workstation and, despite its more modest grunt, it’s still a capable device for crunching zeros and ones.

However, price and power aside, lots of today’s aspiring musicians have bought into mobile devices for other reasons. For them, and for their overall IT needs, it is simply their computing platform of choice. The fact that it can do music technology is, for many, a bonus, but one they can happily exploit with relatively low additional costs for software.

The last part is tricky for schools.  For many aspiring musicians “the fact that it can do music technology” is simply not enough.  They want to “do music technology” the way the pros do, and that’s with “computer-based systems” (probably meaning laptop or desktop computers – technically stomp boxes are computer-based systems).

But yeah – when you sit back and think about it it’s pretty amazing that you can just plug a guitar into your phone and lay down tracks.  The world is crazy.

 

Headline of the day

Pro Tools 11 Announced: Do we Care?

We’re certainly not saying there aren’t any dance producers who use Pro Tools, but, in comparison to the likes of Logic, Ableton Live, Cubase, FL Studio and Reason, the size of Pro Tools’ dance music user-base is negligible. Version 11 doesn’t look like turning that situation around.   What do you think? Is Pro Tools relevant to dance music?

No.

Via Attack Magazine

▶ Listen: Porter Robinson’s Set from Ultra

Porter Robinson, the OWSLA-signed wunderkind who was at one point a student of my TI:ME friend Matthew Etherington brings some hard hitting EDM music from his set at the ULTRA music festival with a lot of attention paid to the little details.  Can’t wait for a proper release of these tracks:

 

Ableton Push First Prototypes

Great interview with the Ableton Push co-creator, Jesse Terry:

That’s right, I used Lego and sugru (a silicon putty). We attached Lego pieces to MIDI buttons with LEDs, connected to a Livid Brain. So, there were many burnt fingers and burnt Star Wars pieces along the way. My wife would always hear me digging away in the Lego bin and she’d wonder if I was actually working up here! The Lego prototype made it very easy to test out ergonomic setups as we could move the buttons around. We tried all kinds of different layouts and, we were able to user test the entire thing and learn to play it before we had a hardware version to play with. I’ve been playing this Push Lego layout on plywood for 2 years now.

Read the rest for a great view from people who are trying to redefine the idea of a Musical Instrument.

Fresh Tracks Friday: Seven Lions

Hello friends,

Today we’re going to go into what I am going to call “minimal-step” land.  We have in Seven Lions’s track what is obviously structured as a dubstep song, but the sound is more unique and nuanced.  If Ghostly released dubstep music, we might get this: