Metronomica.blog
jamuary 4, 2025
When I committed this month to learning how to use my iPad as a music making hub, I also committed to a sample-based workflow. Before I settled on the iPad (versus piecing together a modular system, or buying a Soma Cosmos, or something), I realized that I had all these ideas — mangling audio! asynchronous loops! — but I never really figured out where the fundamental sounds would be coming from.
It seems so silly, but there was a reality: for all the delusions of grandeur I had, I just thought about what I’d be doing to sound, not how I’d be making it. I sat with that a while. Did I want to make these noises? Play them with the guitar? Synthesize them? Build a palette of strings and piano and then take it to the audio-destruction machine?
Over time, I think all of those will work for me. But for learning a new device, it need to be samples. I needed to get out of my way. I couldn’t spend a full day of Jamuary putting together a bad subtractive synth sound; I needed to spend it making music.
Today’s track is a full piece, somehow, and leans heavily on sampled piano and strings. I’m extremely happy with what happened in a couple hours:
This honestly feels like, with some tweaking and edits, it could be a complete song. I’m making a note for later: add guitar and scream. (TDLPA song incoming? Who is to say.)
In AUM, it looked like this:
- Fugue Machine plunking along, giving life to a Decent Sampler piano and violin, the former of which anchors the track and the latter of which comes in around halfway.
- A sampled piano melody, reversed and fed into Samplr.
- A drone, fed into two channels of Samplr, played in different modes at different octaves.
- Eos 2to swallow some stuff in reverb
- A kick drum added in post in Bitwig, with some automated distortion to match…
- …Rymdigare, for the insanity of the climax.
I continue to be stunned by what Fugue Machine can do when you feed its playheads into different instruments, and what Rymdigare can do every time you open the app.
I’d like to grab some more instruments for Decent Sampler, or, even better, sit down and figure out exactly what I’d need to do to feed Fugue Machine into my computer, let the midi control some Kontakt instruments, and feed that audio back into AUM for further processing and live recording. That, plus additional processing and sequencing tools on the iPad, might take me really, really far. I’m excited.
// tags: making music jamuary