iPad synths & sequencers, how does it fit in the workflow?

[Jay Vaughan]

> Last weekend at Gert's, we were talking about all these cool new synthesizers and tools like the iMPC for iPad. One thing I've been wondering quite a bit, how do people use them?
> 

Great question.

I have an iPad, an iPad2, and an iPhone5.  I also have this:

http://www.belkin.com/us/F8Z274/p/P-F8Z274

.. and all the Akai LP* things, like these:

http://www.akaipro.com/lpk25
http://www.akaipro.com/lpd8
.. and a few of the older Korg thingies too, but whatever.  You get the point.

So I can set up any of the iDevices either in individual synth mode, or as drum machines, or sequencers, or even as the master DAW .. and record from the other two devices (and anything else I plug into the Rockstar thing) freely.

I don't do it much these days because I'm going back to the mini-analog boxes for 2013, but through the beginning of the year this was my alternative to lugging around the Indigo2.  It gave me effects, synths, drums, toys, all sorts of things to play with in a little micro-studio.

My only wish is that the Rockstar thingy had sliders, was powered, and was instead a proper mixer rather than just being a line-jack chain thingy, but on the plus side it can be used in both input and output mode (you can plug in multiple headphones, for example) and I think that's pretty neat.

The whole kit packs up in a little bag, and if I want to I can bring powered USB speakers to top off the collection.  Its a veritable mini-studio, and quite powerful.

> Or do you just MIDI it up, and record over analog, like an old fashioned hardware synth?
> 

I've been treating it as a studio - drums on one channel, two synths on their own channels, and recording a master track on another channel.  I would *love* to have a dedicated Raspberry-Pi set up to just seamlessly add MIDI over Wifi to the mix, and get the whole setup in sync with my DAW+Rack system, but thats still on the TODO list for now.

> Or audio over WIFI? Or export wave date (copy paste) from the sequencer in the synth and paste them into a bigger DAW, like GarageBand or...?
> 

I hate all this inter-app crap pasting techniques that have evolved from all this, it never worked for me, for example, in the early noise.io days .. its too fiddly.  If it had some way of working through a common interface, maybe through the pulldown thingy of iOS that provides message updates for example, then it'd be a lot more fun and intuitive .. but every time I learn how to paste recorded tracks from one iApp to the other, I forget it almost immediately by the next session and have to re-learn it.  I hate that.  Its like Apple just don't want to make their UI better for the Audio users.

> Right now I find that I like to toy with them, but that for making any production I just run AU's in Logic...
> So what do you do with them? :)

Treat 'em, for the most part, like any other digital synthesizer in the room.  They need cables, but beyond that: turn it on and play.

;
--
Jay Vaughan