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Comments
That’s why I have described how things are changing and where they still have some way to go yet. For full song production at this time, a DAW is still the best option unless you record in other ways.
The modular approach I’ve tried to describe is not completely a reality yet. It’s getting closer all the time, but iOS AUs and hosts are lacking in some areas.
Some people like more experimental apps, yet iOS still makes it somewhat difficult to fit that experimental nature into a reliable recording experience that can go hand in hand with the usual DAW style approaches. The modular ideal will eventually get to the place where the two can co-exist by nature of design rather than ways to force them to.
So no, I can’t show you any songs made this way, because the apps to do it, don’t exist as I’ve described them just yet - I have no doubts we are getting closer though.
And to add: it’s not about one approach being better than the other - it’s about choices - the more we have, the better
Yes completely and also possibly other factors too like genre of music being made, level of instrumental skill of producer etc. I just know that personally I like to have an overview of my entire composition via a dedicated timeline as I can then see where the ebbs and flows, builds and drops etc are happening. You can gauge a whole sense of the track when you pull out for an overview. That’s just how my mind works best and everyone I’m sure Is different.
Yes I like that overview too, yet I get frustrated with other aspects of a DAW approach. Ways of inputting notes especially are frustrating. Take WaveMapper, probably my favourite synth - I’ve made some sound packs for it I love playing on the inbuilt keyboard as the X and Y axis are linked to altering specific settings. Put WaveMapper into BM3 and that input control disappears. My sounds simply are not as playable in the way they are designed as BM3 does not have the same input device. Why can’t I use a keyboard like WaveMappers or another design entirely? Because BM3 won’t let me without input from an external midi input - then I lose the ability to save the whole project!
This is just one example. There are many reasons why I find the DAW approach limiting.
Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this it the war room!
Talking Heads / Life during wartime, live 1983
Just to add though. I have described an approach for a host that could still have that overview, but it would still be modular in design - in fact, you could have many differing overview designs and choose what suited you, without having to change the rest.
I enjoy jamming on the iPhone sometimes. Aka "making music" (noise?). But I always wanted to make "songs", not just music. Sure, sometimes some music can become a song. Maybe one factor is the end goal?
"Music" and "songs" - one is a superset and one is a subset.... Typically.
Some of the tension in this excellent thread SEEMS to be, in part, related to both the words and the words as end goals. Maybe.
You’re possibly onto something. Not for me. But I’m always open minded to new methods so happy to be proven wrong.
Re x y pads with wavemapper, did bm3’s inbuilt x y pads not map to that synth ?
Yes, I agree. I think we have to remember this is a discussion thread that’s not only discussing what we have, but what we could have.
We simply don’t want to get in the place where we are not trying to think beyond what we already know - it’s just great to expand our horizons. Language though is always a barrier to ideas. Pictures often help and wished I had an iPad and Apple Pencil lol
The WaveMapper keyboard uses a system where each key is basically an XY pad, even using off the actual keyboard itself. It’s a bit hard to describe, but simply put I can’t replicate this within BM3 itself and play in the same way. Yes, there are workarounds, but why should we need one when it would be so much better if we could load in AU Midi apps to control the input needs.
Imagine controlling midi input (which is all a keyboard basically does) in any way you can think of. Imagine a KRFT like Interface in an AU window that sends midi note and controller information that you have designed yourself!
I get you now. Cool.
But then i still have the question why it is a problem to use an external midi app.
DAW´s like Bitwig also have these kind of control surface and there are also third party apps where you can build your own control surface and so on.
I can use the trackpad as XY controller and even multi-touch as well. On iOS (and that is indeed a great thing in iOS) most apps can be used as midi controller as well.
But i agree that there could be much more. When i look at the pencil and an iPad i just think how great it would be if i just could use it to draw exact my dream control surface and then could define which control makes what.
So kind a child of midi designer and lemur on steroids.
Damn, draw your own GUI for synths and stuff would be just freaking awesome.
Another let down of iOS that there isn´t any chance to skin your GUI like in some desktop tools.
F.e. i really never likes to use Zebra with the GUI (but the latest in 2.8 is really great) until i got the plugmon skins which doesn´t change anything about the sound but makes things so much more easy to work with for me.
When there is one thing where iOS could be the king, it should be about GUI for to perform and visual feedback.
Visual feedback is another thing many apps lacks. But on a touch screen this is a very important thing for me.
Like i said, sometimes it´s a reversed world for me and some tools with superb visual feedback are not to find for multi-touch and some great multi-touch apps could be so much better if they REALLY would take advantage of multi-touch.
Even if i´m critic here i still fight here and there for iOS in other more non-mobile forums.
But then i often ask me if developers are willing to take it to the next level (not that some not doing it already in some corners).
I even think at least once a week about to order an new iPad but then i watch all the videos and see what apps are available now and when i hear about things that switching apps can do crackle and stuff even on the latest hardware due to iOS priorities and so i´m scared i would regret it.
I also need a bit of organization in presets browsers and a better file management which is also not there yet.
Of course you can do awesome things and i guess it will grow for sure (even if i heard some people think it will die in some years...but i don´t think so).
I would be the last to not want iOS to be a lot more successful in terms of music apps since that would means i maybe get the high fidelity stuff for iOS one day.....i don´t care to pay as much as for desktop even then if they are not limited in any way (like most iOS counterparts yet) and deeply integrated as AUv3 (also as full apps and not like some more limited AUv3 versions of their standalone apps) in most iOS DAW´s.
Indeed a kind of modular GUI thing was planned from the developer of my dream synth P900....but then it was all a too big project and now even the synths seems as it is (which is O.K. as long as it will get bug fixes and updates for new OS).
I reason i don´t like to build things in Reaktor. The audio engines are superb and so but i wish creating an own GUI would be much much better and also more like a modular set-up where i could build my dream GUI in some minutes with my colors of choice and whatever without to having a master in coding.
If i would be much younger and had more time i even would try to code myself something like this for iOS and mac
Too late for me since i´m trapped in a job i have to do until i will die, lol.
I’m totally struggling with the relevance of DAW vs DAW-less?
In both scenarios we want stable, full screen AUv3 with frictionless UI. Correcto?
The problem is much of music producing software simply isn’t very fun or pleasurable to use in and of itself. We derive the pleasure from the music we end up creating it with. But no one really loves the aactual act of poking around in settings menus routing things here and there. No one is jonesing to do a lot of scrolling around setting markers on a timeline. No is falling over themselves to engage in the act of labeling tracks and busses or finding the place where you can vary the record count in, etc. we like the results we get from doing these things. There are simply many activities in a modern music production workflow that aren’t actually musical at all, some of which have nothing to do with the music itself. This needn’t be a problem, if the software were designed as though designing a musical instrument, but it’s designed like software. Like we’re making music in an excel spreadsheet. Apps like Soundprism, Figure, iKaossilator, etc promised the potential to have a great touch screen instrument married with some sequencer under the hood and out of the way with which you could play and record somewhat seamlessly without all the trappings of a daw, a simple pure experience. But no one really ran with and expanded on all of those great early ideas that were designed around the strengths of the touchscreen and were fun to use. And now we just get ports of desktop plugins. Or apps that might as well be desktop plugins. We should be able to move in a direction of “less is more”, of using the strengths of the touch screen to vastly simplify and make more immediate the entire modern music production process. But that will require new GUIs that might be unfamiliar at first, and apparently that’s a scary idea for some. As great as the Moog apps sound is there anything more ridiculous than following up Animoog, a wholly original masterpiece built for iOS, with not one, but two painstaking recreations of decades old hardware on iPhone and iPad? Think about it. They spent SO much time getting those module wires to wriggle on Model 15, an interface so big and awkward they had to design their own little navigation system for users to scroll and zoom around. Model D with it’s almost unreadable labels. Great sound, but really exemplary of the whole problem which is blind adherence to established GUI trends, something I feel developers will have to have the balls to abandon if we ever want apps, no, instruments that offer new musical experiences.
Correcto
I can see the point of a move away from the current DAW ideal, but that doesn’t mean that a modular solution could not do what we have now and much more. Yes, the most important point is that it all works well and is stable. It really is early days though. iOS music making has already come along way. It’s probably the pace of change though that is making some of it unreliable at times
It really is elegant. I prefer it to the desktop version.
In AUM you can record each channel of a jam as a separate audio file. Import those into your DAW timeline and tweak away. If something doesn't work, delete and replace.
Man, this is all something else! Really a fine collection of fine, thoughtful minds. As a guy who was born the same year that the State of Israel was founded I have to say all those SF stories I read as a kid about the floating brains of Mendoolak have come true!! You guys are just out there on the edge of Orion when it comes to this stuff. I feel it a privilege to read such a momentum filled cacaphony of well considered opinions from every different viewpoint about what many might consider an arcane field of endeavor (but is so downright faskinatin' as Popeye would say.).
So what can I contribute? Certainly very little as far as the technology is concerned. It will just have its way with me, like that poor taste joke, I may as well lie back and enjoy it.
Still, a couple of questions or observations.
Db909 says that people don't like the engineering aspect of music production but I am not so sure from the detailed experiences I read here on the forum. It would make an interesting poll to see how much the music engineering appeals to the creators here and how much they would be disappointed if they couldn't architect their own music making assemblage. This is an absolutely legitimate way to spend one's time and, to me, as a jazz musician, equally creative, with moments of inspiration, insight, aspiration, and sheer pleasure (as well as the agony of defeat). If music generation became as seamless as ordering a cup of Earl Grey, hot, how many would miss the good old days of tinkering long into the night just as Edison did once upon a time.
It has never before been possible for the amateur and expert to mingle at such a high level of technical sophistication when it comes to music making. There was a time, and Edison is a good case again, when inventors and creators all had a piece of the amateur in them. Edison's lab in Menlo Park NJ was the first of its kind to get people to work as a team for technological advancement. Edison's idea was to produce one new invention a month! Strangely, what Edison achieved marked the end of the technological tinkerer and now we are so used to think tanks that game changers, like what Gates and Wozniak did in a garage now seems impossible without a big corporation involved. Well, maybe that is changing again since the individual can now have the world's great libraries, so to speak, at his or her fingertips and components for any new design can be located or designed on the Internet. If this were a forum on antigravity it seems very possible that a single individual might brew the stuff up in his or her basement, like that old kid's book "Danny Dunn and the Antigravity Paint"!
And so, as someone mentioned earlier, all the accoutrements the Beatles and George Martin required to make groundbreaking music is available, democratically in the truest sense, to everybody great and small. Even to patzers like me! And the first ever, biblical in importance, system of global communication is available to one and all, free and equal! So that basement tinkerer can get support and elucidation for his or her work to become realized (as many forum members acknowledge wouldn't be possible otherwise). BTW, I say the Internet is of biblical proportions because the Book of Revs states the Messiah will appear when the entire world can hear of tumultuous events at the same moment! I guess the question is will the Messiah be making his or her music in iOS or on a desktop... With or without a DAW? That may be the real question!
Finally, in this regard, musicians of the highest quality have always been involved with the accompanying technology, even if it was limited to bridge placement, string manufacture, varnishing techniques and rosin composition for the great 18th century violinist. No great musician is ignorant of the physics and technology of sound or the intricacies of his or her chosen instrument. And today it is all, literally, at our fingertips.
So, to all who seek sustenance here I say, life is not a cabaret but rather a buffet. Let all who hunger come and eat. There is plenty for everyone and no shortage of generous, music loving souls to share a bowl with.
With respect, that’s a creative-flow breaking, huge hassle. Hence the need for a daw.
My first intro to 'modular jamming' was using Audiomulch on the PC about 20 years ago...
It was great for quick happy accidents and committing to audio that I would then chop up in Samplitude...
So I have always been audio centric for the most part with midi and synths simply being another sound source where I would not labor over noodling and tweaking cc values etc etc. The goods came from audio manipulation, like Amon Tobin, Meat Beat Manifesto, FSOL etc
Anyway, coming to iOS 7 years ago I ideally wanted what I had loved most on PC but in mobile form. A great awesome audio chopper. Nothing like that existed until BM3 last year. For a good six years though I did get way more into synths and midi than I ever thought I would, given that it was so prevalent on iOS. It was a good run where I was exposed to and learned a lot (whether I wanted to or not
). I amassed tons of live loopy jams care of AUM, Modstep and even Cubasis that I always intended to finish on PC but never did as they were too long to sift through. KRFT was a close contender but lacked seperate audio streams and routing to a host was a pain/impossible (on the Air 1 anyway). Last year I got a 2017 iPad... wow/fast (maybe I will try KRFT again). Then BM3 came out. Wow/potential. It has now taken almost a whole year of getting comfortable with BM3 to be at a point where now I just jump in and think only about the creative side (in a daw timeline like fashion, not clip launching). The tool has become very transparent to me as I have boiled down all it has to offer to probably only less than 10% of the app (same thing I did on PC with Samplitude all those years ago).
Anyway, is there a general trend for iOS music as a whole? For me not really. You can still pick and choose and figure things out in the varying workflow archetypes. Whether or not someone is content with it I think has to do with their perspective as an individual. Walled gardens / daw hosts / plugin hosts with routing or automation tweaks... there are just tons of paths. In fact these workflows are even modular components in and of themself in terms of making a recorded track (ooooh Gus getting meta now).
On my desktop DAW (Saw Studio) I can cut/stich snippets from IOS audio sessions so fast and effortlessly that it feels like 'playing the sequencer'.
But I fail completely on BM3 or Beathawk...
Hehe yah, precisely (pun intended)
Well, it took almost a year to get actualy legitimately happy with my BM3 ability, which admittedly is slower than desktop daw chopping, but yah, tiny screen, single touch, no mouse, no keyboard shortcuts. I feel like I learned to play the spoons with two celery stalks on my leg while blowing into a bicycle pump strapped to my head but I also feel a sense of pride at having got pretty good at playing two celery stalks and a bicycle pump.
It is a huge hassle to do it that way if you have more than a couple of channels. But you can also route each channel of your AUM jam straight into its own Cubasis track. Best of both worlds.
Ok that’s interesting. It’s all personal at the end of the day. I prefer keeping it all in one place ie a daw as all those other options seem so fragmented to me and my brain isn’t wired that way. But who’s to say I may not explore that path in the future.
+1 There have been some cracking desktop software deals recently, plus there are a whole bunch of free ‘Lite’ DAWs and plug-ins that offer decent functionality.
Taking into account hardware costs, I’ve spent less on desktop music making than the iOS platform when broken down into yearly spends.
Same here. I just get an 8 bar looping section in the DAW time line and then start throwing AU’s at it
Ha that’s my flow too exactly. Then once I have a tight groove. break it down further into a song structure
As far as I know, most sequencer apps that record midi do it one track at a time. Xequence will merge all the incoming midi to a single track when recording.
There may be some that can record multiple tracks, but I never needed to so I haven’t looked for that specific feature. I will keep an eye out for it now and let you know if I come across any.