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Who moved my paradigm?
I’ve realised that the iPad is the instrument, not the individual apps we have on there.
The old mindset was that a synthesiser is a collection of modules bounded by a box or rack or cage, or a single circuit board with pots mounted through a panel, presenting the same collection with a normalised connection.
The extension of this mindset was to emulate hardware synths inside hardware synths. There’d be a box running software that emulated a different box that ran hardware. The Access Virus, the Korg Prophesy, the Yamaha AN stuff, and an interminable diarrhoea of “beat” boxes emulating X0X boxes to help your dance music conform to the government standard thinking on dance music, lest the maker’s character showed through.
The extension to this was the “plug-in” into a Digital Audio Work “station”.
The logical path to follow, if we’re not concentrating, is to do the same on the iPad, however, not as plugins but rather as standalone apps. The whole app is the whole synth, the whole product, with real boundaries and no care about what else you owned or didn’t own on that iPad, and no dependency on there being anything else at all.
I now see this as the old way. The new way isn’t this path at all. It’s to see the iPad itself as the whole synth. Each product is a component, much like the modular synths had a separate VCO module and a separate VCF module that you could buy at different times, perhaps even from different manufacturers, and put it all together. I was getting a bit irritated recently at the amount of things that are trying to appeal to us synth-heads, but when it comes down to the tone generation aspect, there’s almost no synthesis to be had. Things that provide a simple tone sound with not many or no variable parameters. The strength lies elsewhere, perhaps, in a fancy user interface, or in a novel presentation of document data to play music on.
I now realise that there‘s room for a simple tone generator app and the lack of synthesis capabilities isn’t a disappointment. After all, a VCO alone isn’t much of a synth. This unfeasible tsunami of insane effects apps that we’ve been ecstatically suffering from from lately, is simply another part of the chain. They’re effectively like the VCFs in a modular (only different). I think that the way forward is for componentised apps that are aware of other apps, support them, depend upon them, and enhance them.
For example, I was playing with Wilsonic, which seems like it has a pathetic excuse for a synthesizer. However, I shot it into Dædalus, and it all became apparent. This is the way to work. Don’t encourage apps to do everything within the walls of the app alone, encourage them to be part of an eek-a-system, that is contained by the iPad (and probably even goes beyond that boundary).
Comments
Audiobus.
expressed in few words; concise; terse.
characterized by conciseness or verbal brevity.
compressed into a small area, scope, or compass.
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+1 for too the point!
and virtual MIDI...
@u0421793 yes. The old way is the new way, and the new way is the old way. I realized that awhile back and it all makes sense now. Instead of having a master DAW with a bunch of plugs running hierarchically, we are now back to the good old days of having many little magic boxes on our table with colored cables connecting it all to make one big custom octopus. It's a more democratic, less dedicated world, the horizons have become much broader. The table is now the iPad, and an app can fill multiple roles; midi, tone gen, 'voltage', control, effect, ..., all depending how we wire it up that day. In my opinion the possibilities have become exponentially greater. Good on ya for the Wilsonic hack (wink wink), you see-? It's CV-!
OP- thanks for sharing the thoughts. It really helps people like myself wrap our heads around this fast-evolving format.
I use my iPad mainly as "one big custom octopus" and instrument for my desktop DAW; the Line Outs and Midi Out of a M-Audio Fast Track Pro (connected via powered usb-hub and CCK to the iPad) go to Line Ins and Midi In of my PC-audio interface and the Midi Out of the PC-audio interface goes to the Midi In of the M-Audio (and to the iPad). This works very well. I can use midi from iPad's StepPolyArp to trigger notes from a PC-VST-synth, and midi from Reaper (my favorite DAW on PC, which has a very nice midi-editor) to trigger and record Nave or Mitosynth. I can record sound from radio-, tv- and youtube-apps from the iPad into Reaper, et cetera, et cetera. Very nice!
I think of using ipads and tablets as a way to eschew the traditional keyboard/mouse model of interfacing with technology. Technology to me is a tool, a power multiplier.
Removing the sometimes awkward interface of qwerty and point and click can be such a freeing notion. The loss of these familiar tools is, however, a constraint in itself. One that I am fascinated by.
We have a long way to go before things are truly interoperable, but apps like audiobus and midi over bluetooth is a huge step in the right direction.
Totally agree with the apps-as-modules philosophy and that AB (and virtual midi) made this a possibility. Standards of interconnect are essential for smooth modular interoperability.
That said, there is still room in this world for the SEM-8, Matrix-12, Prophet-5 and DX-7 all-in-one view on things. Happy to devote my iPad to such purposes as needed. And, really, happy that I can choose at a whim. Magic days.
Also don't think the novelty and possibility of the iPad's playing surface should be ignored. Yes, we're talking about 0s and 1s just like VST or other computer based music but the iPad comes with a playing surface other platforms did not provide. There have been many posts here enumerating the joys of only-on-a-touchscreen musical surfaces like TJ, TC-11, SP Pro... Indeed, referring to an earlier post from the OP, it's one of the few instruments that is designed to allow a musician access to notes between the 12 traditional western notes and, somewhat amazingly, the ability switch back to a fixed chromatic scale as well as any subset of those 12 notes at the flick of a button. I love apps, er, input modules, that exploit this.
Yup. Good. Easy to forget that little extra issue of the touch screen. I would miss it horribly if it were all to go away and it's the thing I look at my 12 year old freaking away with on TJ and am envious of most as regards a childhood without etc. Lucky bugger.
yes. yes. yes. All the above. Plus the iPad can be more than the synth - it can be the complete studio. More than one person can play their parts live together, and I don't just mean those Apps with mirrored keyboards, I mean real controllers with real knobs and keys for each performer each playing a different Synth App.