Friday, December 22, 2017

How Apple made me put together 'The Road Rising'

Making The Road Rising (December 2017)

I'm a PC sort of guy, all the music I make is pretty well all done on PC's.

This tune 'The Road Rising' was made totally on Apple hardware. I used an iPad (borrowed) and my very old iPod 3 to make the tune. I did however use my trusty DAW on the PC to compress and EQ the files for more punch. I chose deliberately to stick to the iPad and the iPod because sometimes you find 'restrictions' force more creativity.


I downloaded free synth and looping software just to try and learn how to use the iPad but found some of it sounded so good, I decided to make a tune.

I need to be clear at this point, as with a lot of electronic music, I used preprogramed loops to make the biggest chunk of the song. So I'll list the programs and you'll recognise how I did it....quite frankly....because you'll find the same loops. So if you want to do it yourself it is not that hard.

As a rule I tend to start from scratch when I write music (and I will mostly do this) but this is one time I thought it sounded so good, it wasn't worth reinventing the wheel.

What I -did - add manually were the 

  • 'bass'
  • background 'drone' and 'ambient' notes.
  • I also manually played an iPad Synth lead parts on a couple of synths 
  • and manually played the iPod 'piano' parts.
  • I also manually twiddled knobs and crosshairs and dot charts on the iPad and iPod to get freaking electro FX sounds underneath.
I didn't know how much fun was to be had in an afternoon.
Here are the software programs I used -they are all downloadable for free from the Apple Apps store (at the time of writng this):

Blocs Wave - this is the main one full of loops that made the majority of the tune







Tonepad 



 









 Core Synth



 





  



Virtuoso (piano)
 


 









Sylo Synth



 











Synthmaster












All of this bing bang bam electronica turned out into this film clip:




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