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Which seven types of iOS musician are you?
Did I say seven? I meant two. Sorry.
You buy a few apps, feeling a bit lost, then you read up (here, or places like it) and discern which apps people are using, then you buy some of these 'hot' apps under discussion, and use them according to discussed techniques and methods.
Now, it can go two ways -
- You get good at those hotly discussed apps and work that way, joining in the discussions, being part of that 'way'
- Or you discover less popular apps that offer something you specifically value, and slowly progress alone
The first way, you race ahead and produce stuff at about the same rate that everyone else does and life seems good
The second way, there's loneliness and chasms, but you persevere and gain understanding, but are not necessarily prolific
Comments
I'm in the seventh category
Just a musician who sometimes uses iOS here. Sometimes I do not.
Can I be boring and say both? I have no problems with mainstream apps and the hype in their wake (current Gadgetathon) but I have a particular liking for quirky seemingly obtuse apps that do unique things (SoundScaper, Dhalang, etc).
I don't work towards finished products which helps flexibility. Sometimes I'm happy to jam some canned stuff in Blocs/Launchpad and some days I'll evolve some wierd background thing and Shoom it over the top.
All days I'm happy that the technology and developer creativity/vision exists to choose.
I'll lean towards the latter, can't stop supporting the indie underdogs.
Agreed and +1 to all checkboxes in this survey :}
Or you discover less popular apps that offer something you specifically value, and slowly progress alone.
This ^^^ and the only way to find out is to buy them all and only use what fits your needs. Feels a bit like Lego and use all the blocks you have to create that final piece you like.
I think I am more a (bad) tester ( or just a curious appdicted guy) than a musician ...I don't post on SoundCloud anymore, but I like to discover new indie musical apps or from major company (Korg, moog, cubase ). I am impressed by independant dev like Liljedahl , Colson , Menzer who are pure genius ...I like to read app' reviews from John Walden, dischord, Soundtestroom (Doug And Jakob) and this forum's threads but I will never be a musician . Im bad with music theory, with code and English lol .
Without music , bipolar disorder would be a mistake . F.Nietzsche
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo
"Bip,bip,bip" Bebot
Red apple/green apple fallacy Captain. As you well know
I operate on the mechanisms of passion, fear, and laziness—often in that order.
It's my passion for music that drives me to discover, emulate, and (gods willing) invent. This last piece, invention, is of course the trickiest of all, since the blueprint isn't laid out before me. It requires a lot of trial and error, which plays into the second mechanism: fear. As I attempt to put something together that is entirely my own, I discover that I'm not nearly as good as I'd hoped to be. By setting my personal standards unattainably high, I'm repeatedly disappointed and discouraged. This repetition—throwing something at the wall and finding it just doesn't stick—wears on me, leading to the final mechanism: laziness. If genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, I must be an utter blockhead. Rather than pushing on, building and refining and building and refining, I give up and search for more passion in the hope that this time it will be different and I'll magically find the perfect cocktail that will lead to some amazing gem I can share with the universe.
Many times, I'll turn to this forum in my search for just the right spark. If a hundred kindred musicians are talking up a recent app, chances are good I'll look into and download it, hoping again for that magic. Really, it's just a mire. I guess this puts me behind Door Number Three.
Actually I have an autism spectrum disorder (Im not kiddin) and I'm not sure this musical appholism helps me a lot . But I know they are true musicians who use IPad for concert or their album like Redskylullaby for example and few others ...
Neither, I'II use whatever gets things done - populist or esoteric.
At the moment I get excited along with the masses about the latest shiny thing, sit on the fence, talk myself out of it and find an existing app on my iPad I'd forgotten about that does the same thing
Bipolar
Number 2 usually.
sucky
Is this going to be another thread that Ian starts and doesn't participate in?
FWIW, I don't follow the herd. If the app sounds good or seems like it will be useful to me, I buy it.
This forum has been immensely helpful for discovering apps, and for that I am grateful.
I'm an Auria user at heart - I tend to record pieces with multiple parts, appy some processing, and mix. I write in notion, import the midi to Auria, record the guitar parts. Rinse and repeat. I buy things that will help me with that, like various plugins, or external libraries and apps that are part of that process, like Thumbjam and Sampletank; if people are talking about good stuff there, I'l add it to the arsenal.
On the other hand, I like to monkey around, so will pick up the occasional extra piece like Animoog, which is just fun for me to mess with. Not being a keyboard/synth guy, it's mostly just that.
I'm concentrating on things that fit the first model, mostly. I could truly say I'm done, I have more than enough parts, way beyond my wildest dreams of five years ago.
Sorry, could you repeat the question?
I've almost cut out everything except Auria. I still buy apps and tinker, but when I am feeling creative, Auria is always the app I open. Bless AB and AUM and all of those lovely apps, but Auria provides me with what I need. I couple that with Mr. Sonosaurus's apps and only a couple of others and it gets me where I need to be. I'm a guitarist and a pianist, so I lean toward more of a natural workflow that lets me capture and manipulate those. To each their own, and I'm sure there are plenty of other "right" ways to do it.
No
Thought this would be a Cosmo-like test or a Foxworthy “you know you’re an iOS musician when…”.
Interesting distinction. As is often the case, there’s a lot of room between the two options and around them.
Have yet to become good at any app, whether they’re hotly discussed or more obscure. Been dabbling in quite a few, making some of my own discoveries (which may have been made thousands of times in the past). Until discovering this forum, my path was quite lonely, actually. Even now, can’t say my musicking is that in line with other people’s. Partly for lack of skills on my part and partly because of my quirky tastes.
To me, appaholism is a serious issue. Not just in terms of money and time spent on so many apps. But because the “embarrassment of riches” makes it hard to focus. As we’ve discussed in other threads, there’s so much we can do that we end up doing less. Part of it is also that we have very different approaches to music creation and many apps only reveal their full potential after you’ve spent quite a bit of time with them.
Adding desktop apps to the mix makes matters worse. Especially when you get into the big DAWs or into music-centric programming environments like SuperCollider, Pure Data, Sonic Pi, and ChucK.
Then again, it might be about distinct phases. Anyone probably needs to spend some time exploring diverse affordances and some time focusing on one “instrument”. Some of that time can be similar to what Murray Schafer might call an “ear cleaning”, when you stop expecting things to sound a certain way. For me, reading Analog Days and Traité des objets musicaux has been having this kind of impact. Hearing things differently, now. Gaining a new appreciation for a number of techniques and sounds which surround me. So, my musical life is expanding again. My use of iOS apps is just part of a broader process.
Indeed. With me, it's not about the process of making a song. I thought it was, but I have to remember that I got interested in electronic sound (and by extension, electronics) as a young child purely because I wanted to make silly noises. I don't think there was a thought in my head that said "that thing he's playing on stage, what a superb musical instrument" but rather more like "I really want one of those to make silly noises with!".
And so the whole drudge of toolchain puts me off again, as it frequently does in this technological world of today. Tape recorders were all well and good, but now you have to have a sequencer that can record audio (a door, or something) and it doesn't stop there, you have to have all the correct effects, and not the ones that come with the workstation software, oh no, those were crap, you have to get others, they're better. Wait., all I want to do is use the audio workstation software as a tape recorder, that's all. Really - that's all.
I now realise what I want to do with these bits of music creating software is, yes, to make silly noises with. But, not in a childish way, but in a very analytical way. In fact, I can give it another name - not silly noises, but making silly noise machines. Machines that will end up making a surprising and often funny noise. These are machines that take a bit of time to build (ie to patch) and then once the first domino is pushed, the result is a surprising and often funny end result sound.
Consequently the more like a musical instrument a synth is, the more it looks like I was supposed to use it in a song. However, the more like a state machine a synth is, the more like a thing that I 'arrange' and then set in motion, the more it appeals. Hence, I find myself gravitating to things like iVCS3 and SunVox and Oscilab, which are like little machines that you set up and then it all happens like you knew was going to happen, yet also, a surprise emerges. Hopefully a silly noise.
Dunno if you've ever tried this, but a cool tip I picked up fairly recently was to turn record on and cycle through various presets -- be they synth patches or effect presets. Sometimes you can catch interesting "silly noises" during the transitions between the changing of the presets.
Silly noises soothe the savage beasts
I suppose it is the difference between production and R&D.
I often do this with something like Fugue Machine or Oscilab driving.
And Concentric Rhythm switching MIDI output channels on the fly ... coming soon peeps.
I am a randomizer. I enjoy doing that with bloccs wave. I find parts/sections/sounds I like. Build from there.
Too easy to forget this. In a way, it’s similar to the famous Ira Glass quote on “The Gap” (between our taste and skills), but it goes in the other direction. Part of what we really want to do is much simpler and requires much less skill than what is being considered “good work” by those who have “good taste”. Part of the point is that, if it sounds cool to you, that may be all that matters. Unless you’re trying to impress other people (as in the macho stereotype about male musicians attracting some women), much of music’s power resides in doing stuff which feels good to us. Individually or in groups.
And if you’re into taking “silly noises” seriously, you might have a lot in common with people like Laurie Anderson, Don Buchla, Pauline Oliveros, and Pierre Schaeffer. Very different people, using very different means to broaden musical diversity.
Luckily for us, iOS musickers, there are many many apps to do all sorts of seriously silly noises.
Good one! People who hate on presets may think of the busy work of finding the best one instead of playing with them as a very broad palette. Even the lousiest presets can create nice and silly noises in such a context.
Maybe we could use the Workflow app that Apple just bought, to automatically cycle through various presets in different apps. Not all of them respond to patch changes or, at least, not in the same way.
It will be very interesting to see how Apple's acquisition of Workflow will facilitate/shape the ability to create automations between apps, iOS devices, and other resources in the context of music creation. It could potentially create the option to program some music Workflows that require much less knowledge and time investment than creating traditional music apps. Perhaps Audiobus 4 will incorporate hooks into this system so it can be part of a larger system. This would seem particularly useful for generative musicians or for doing repetitive tasks that can only be done manually on iOS versus being able to do them in an automated batch way on a more traditional OS.
Workflow could become part of a way to address the lack of a traditional file management system while at the same time preserving the sandbox/security stability aspects of iOS, more easily integrate cloud based resources, give users more tools to customize how they do tasks, and still preserve the user friendly GUI.
Absolutely. The key, here, is that the Workflow team did things in the way Apple expects people to do things on iOS. Still curious about what Sal Soghoian has to say about this but this might be a case where the current “Apple Way” doesn’t jibe with the type of automation Soghoian is known (and praised) for.
So, without holding my breath about Apple enable creative uses of iOS by “power users”, the signs point to an interesting future on the platform.
Yep! The fact that we got a new filesystem is in itself kind of interesting. And, if Apple really wants to position the iPad Pro as a device for creative professionals, this is one spot where they could really improve things.
The Apple-centric world talks more frequently about creative professionals on the visual side of things. But Apple isn’t forgetting musicians. Logic Pro X and MainStage show that Apple still cares. And we often admit that GarageBand is rather decent for what it is. So, it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine iOS 12+ having some affordances for professional work. It’d also be really neat to have a version of MainStage on iOS (or, at least, the full Alchemy).
In terms of workflow, AB and AUM have demonstrated a real need. Beyond sales, Apple surely notices that these offerings take part in broader systems which really bring a lot of value to iOS devices generally and to the iPad more specifically. Adding some ways to communicate across apps would benefit us greatly and further deepen the iPad’s position in the music creation world.