Honestly, the most important program for me on the iPad is a boring one: AUM. It's an AUv3 host, a mixer, a MIDI router, and a simple multitrack recorder. It has a few quirks but is easy to use once you learn the basic ideas, and there's a big user community when I get stuck. I'm using it with my modular now and really liking it, though it'll be interesting to see when I get home if I can achieve equally good feedback going through analog-to-digital as I might using a matrix mixer.
What I did last night was something I'd normally do in hardware if I were near hardware, but I wasn't. In a sense, it was also nothing special. Anyway, I set up a channel in AUM with a synth drone with lots of overtones. Any VST will do. I used Volt which is a virtual analog that distorted nicely. I muted it and ran it out the send. That went to "bus A" which was on another channel with different EQs: I tried a graphic EQ in miRack which I find intuitive but fiddly (it's a port of VCV rack so a software modular), and then some resonant EQ in Drambo, which I find unintuitive but very solid and was a bit more responsive to my gestures. Then I ran it through Lunar Lander which is a simulated analog delay and plate reverb, and then out a send going to the A bus to produce feedback, that there's a limiter on the channel after all that for obvious reasons. Mix to taste. So it was nothing special but it did sound good and was fun.
In terms of actual iPad programs that I think are interesting: Koala is a great sampler but you must know it. I like iDensity for granular (Spacecraft and Quanta are tied for 2nd place, though Quanta will eventually be abandoned, I think). Fugue Machine is a fun sequencer. MIDI Tape recorder is an awesome MIDI looper that also takes MPE (attn: @steubig ). Mononoke is inspired by the Lyra-8 but is of course much less fun.
Today's concert included a guy with a fretless bass making all sorts of noises in dialogue with some kind of laptop AI system that was spitting noise out back at him. It was all sculpted but I was not particularly impressed with the AI element. I don't know what the ambient/textural "Jaco only needed 4 strings" is but I was thinking something along the lines of "
@uglybassplayer only needs a SP-404, some pedals and a mixer." It was still fun to watch, I was just unconvinced by the AI talk with that one.
One person was live coding, and that set was pretty interesting and actually used machine learning and corpus analysis. The third involved cellos wired up as feedback instruments interacting with one another and a guy with a neural network based on evolutionary computing rather than big data running effects. I really liked that one since I'm thinking a lot about feedback these days. Plus check out the gear:
Ingredients Again, I'm not sure the AI made an audible difference but I cared less because I was like "wow they installed a speakers in two cellos and then wired them together." Now I want to do that to a bass.
Hope you're feeling ok @ugly!
