Metronomica.blog
jamuary 22, 2025
Often I have an idea, then chase that idea so far down the rabbit hole that, by the time I come up for air, the original kernel of the idea has washed away. I start with a question and end with a 10-part to-do list.
The other day I connected my iPad to Macbook via USB cable, and after some frustration, I managed to find all the settings that allowed the two to talk to each other. I suddenly had the midi sequencing power of Fugue Machine available to direct my Kontakt instruments — samples obtained over the past decade of music-making, samples that I had sought out for their quality.1
And so I started sequencing an Olafur Arnalds piano and Olafur Arnalds strings, which is when I ran into an issue. First, the song:
What I really want — really want — is to send midi to these lovely Kontakt instruments on my computer and send the resulting audio back to my iPad so I can process and mix it live with AUM. In practice, I couldn’t send the audio back to the iPad. I bet I could with an audio interface, but my Apollo Twin is pre-patched on my desk (and doesn’t play super nicely with midi), so I don’t want to use that. And I don’t want to buy an interface for just this purpose. So I struggled with a single USB-C cable tethering the tablet and computer, as though it would work.
Ultimately, I recorded a loop of the pianos, strings, and drums in Bitwig, bounced them down, uploaded them to Dropbox, downloaded them to the iPad, and looped them as audio files in AUM. I think the mistakes in the resulting track — the hard cut at the end, the off-time muting of the piano as the song nears its terminus — are borne of this process. It wasn’t smooth, in the end. I wanted it to be smooth. Why does the song need to be smooth if I had to find a hacky way to it?
In the future, I want the iPad to primarily be a self-contained instrument. I’ll keep working towards how self-contained I want it to be. Can I bounce stems and bring them into Bitwig to mix? (Probably.) Should I grab iPad-only channel strips and mix bus plugins? (It’s tantalizing.)
Will I connect it to my Macbook and use it as a midi sequencer exclusively, controlling awesome instruments in unique ways? Maybe, but then, suddenly, the workflow shatters when I can’t muck up the result with Weeping Wall and Other Desert Cities, when I feel tied down to an arrangement view rather than a live mixer?
Maybe I’ll end up with a new interface one day. Things, as usual, got way more complicated. I just wanted to hear the cool sounds.
I’ve been really enjoying Decent Sampler on the iPad, and the quality of samples is quite good. I’m going to keep using that, primarily. But the Olafur Arnalds instruments from Spitfire, the drums and drones and cinematic instruments from Heavyocity, the high-quality pianos… it’s nice to be able to access those.↩︎
// tags: making music jamuary