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otem_rellik

Gadget picked the name and I kind of liked it. I don't usually post my stuff here but I just 'finished' this track and wanted to share. Almost everything is from gadget and then imported into cubase on my pc for arrangement/mixing. I also used imini for the de-tuned synth towards the end. Werkbench was used for some extra texture stuff and I recorded some background ooooh vocal stuff through improvox which play through pretty much the whole thing. Haven't recorded a rap song without a singy element in it for quite a while.

JohnnyGoodyear

'armed with a broken bow....' good line and better sentiment.

I particularly liked the lower-case, spoken words, less forced, more, I dunno, honest and exhausted. Good bio-bit at the start. To my rusted ears too much of rap can be the shouty folly of 'aint really done much', I don't believe the talker/singer. I love Raw but I love Real even more...heard some of that here.

Matt_Fletcher_2000

Hi.

I really like this. Very impressive. Nice energy to it. And I like the detuned sounds. Also the slow start.

Improvox huh? Nice you can get something good out of this simple app.

Matt_Fletcher_2000

What are the other tracks on your soundcloud made with please? iOS?

otem_rellik

Thanks for the feedback dudes! The other songs on my soundcloud are kind of a mix of stuff. The friday/saturday songs were straight exports from gadget created when I first got that app. Lots of the other stuff is quite old and made with a variety of things, mostly not ios. There are also a lot of remixes on there which were just friends remixing some of my older stuff. My next album is almost entirely ios stuff though and I think it's some of the best music I've done. Not sure when it will come out, been working on it for the last couple years.

MrNezumi

Nice. Liked the non-standard beats and overall vibe.

Matt_Fletcher_2000

Thanks Otem. Right, I'm gonna check out your other Gadget stuff. I use Gadget a lot.

What do you think of Gadget as a serious production tool that you can use to produce credible stuff? Be interested in your views given the quality of your work.

otem_rellik

Oh man, I love it! I definitely consider it a serious tool. I've made quite a few songs that will be on my next album with gadget. I do admit feeling a bit canned sometimes using it, but it can be a great tool for getting a song started. I've been really impressed with how many unique sounds you can get with all the automation and tweaking. I try to leave a little space in the song while I'm using it so it can bring in other instruments later when I'm arranging on my computer. I often don't like to use just one app (or one device) for a song. I really hope it gets audio tracks. I feel like that would alleviate that boxed in feeling I get sometimes.

Matt_Fletcher_2000

Yep, I know what you mean about boxed in.

I've been cheating and slicing audio into segments, then importing into Bilbao, then putting back together on the piano roll. But it's a pain. Proper audio tracks would be amazing. As would better, and more effects on every channel on a par with, say Cubasis. (And maybe IAA and midi-out). One day maybe .

Good to hear you think the quality is good enough. I swing between thinking it can make great sounds - and then playing with Z3ta, iMini and Thor presets and thinking they are in a different league to Gadget. I guess it depends on what sounds you want to make.

Currently I'm finding that I get some nice bass stuff out of Miami, Chicago and Dublin - and some nice organic weird pads and tones by heavily effecting Marseille sounds with ring mod, comb filter and/or lots of reverb. Wolfburg is also pretty nice for analog sounding stuff and making risers. And Chiang Mai for bell / pianoesque stuff.

It gets sh1t done though . And for structuring a track I love it...

Really hope it gets another update sometime.

JohnnyGoodyear

Love Chiang Mai, would have bought that as a standalone just for the softness and textures you can find in it....

shortbus

@Matt_Fletcher_2000 said:

I've been cheating and slicing audio into segments, then importing into Bilbao, then putting back together on the piano roll. But it's a pain.

What are you using to slice audio into segments?

Matt_Fletcher_2000

iMPC pro

shortbus

@Matt_Fletcher_2000 said:

iMPC pro

Oh, just chopping manually then? I thought there might be some automated app that slices audio into intervals of a defined length, like every 5 seconds.

Matt_Fletcher_2000

Think somewhere in this long thread @xen goes into detail:

http://forum.audiob.us/discussion/comment/81435#Comment_81435

But iMPC will cut into even slices automatically. Any number you want. Eg 4, 8 or 16 or whatever.

The trick is not to cut into 5 sec pieces because you have to stick them back together perfectly and the piano roll has no concept of what 5 secs is.

The process I use is to use bars of your track so:

Work out how many bars fit under 5 secs. Normally I use 2 or 3 bars chunks.

Record whole sequence into audio share because it's great at creating a perfect number of bars with it trim and snap features.

So say a 32 bar sequence. Make that a perfect 32 bar audio file in audio share.

Import into iMPC pro. Chop into 16 x 2 bar chunks and export to audiocopy,

Import into 16 pads of 1 Bilbao instance.

Stick back together in the piano roll of Gadget.

In reality a 32 bar sequence might have a long FX tail that you also need to capture so often Id addd another 8 bars for that too. That's fine because iMPC can slice 40 bars into 20 x 2 bar slices and you just use a second Bilbao instance to hold the tail.

Bit of a pain but if you love Gadget and want it to hold external audio tracks it's possible.

I made this thread to showcase tracks that use this technique (kind of 'see if you can spot the clicks' ). Have a listen. All my tracks on this thread use this technique extensively and I think it sounds pretty seemless.

http://forum.audiob.us/discussion/5928/your-korg-gadget-tracks-using-external-audio#Item_86

otem_rellik

A little off topic but last night i dove back into nanostudio (which is the first app I bought for my ipad many years ago) and man, that app is so amazing! Eden is such an incredible synth. The amount of modulation and tweaking you can do with very little effort is so much fun. File management and the sequencer are top notch. You can even easily share projects and export individual channel mixdowns. I already knew all this (as I'm sure many do) but for some reason I haven't been using nanostudio much in the last year or so. I think I'm falling in love all over again though. So great. I also feel like bringing in samples and getting actual audio into it is a much less claustrophobic experience than in gadget.

shortbus

@matt_fletcher_2000: Yeah, your technique works well to my ears. Still, can't wait until Gadget gets the promised audio tracks. Hoping Korg will increase the sample length limit for both Abu Dhabi and Bilbao too.

@otem_rellik: Lovely track, by the way. Nanostudio was also one of my first apps. I was running it on an iPhone 3GS docked into Akai Synthstation25, which made me very productive on it due to it feeling like a tactile hardware groovebox. All the controls come mapped by default in Nanostudio so you can quickly push buttons to navigate to all the different pages in Nanostudio and have immediate access to the keys: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfep2nZWzao

otem_rellik

@shortbus: Thanks!, Nice, I used to have the same. It was a really nice set up, went on a couple tours with the synthstation. Then I got a new phone and eventually sold the synthstation. It was definitely a gatway for me into ios music though.

Matt_Fletcher_2000

@shortbus. Thanks.

Gotta thank @xen and @kobamoto (I think) for suggesting it to me in first place when those new Gadgets came out.

++1 for longer sample lengths but maybe Korg are worried about memory issues?

From constraints also comes creativity sometimes. For example having to chop audio into small sample chunks allows you / encourages you to play with them a bit more like samples. For example glitching a sequence with some double hits, reversing a slice or effecting a slice or two (in Gadget, or using Sector to warp certain slices before you import). Rather than just thinking about a 32 bar sequence you've imported. It's just nudged me towards a bit more creativity on some tracks.