iPad – Somewhat less than Amazing and Magical

According to newspapers people all over the world are queuing up for iPads. Some reporters say that it could be weeks before you can have your hand rubbing oil all over a screen. Lies.

On Friday I waddled into the Mac store on UNSW campus, plunked down money and waddled out with toy. If one other person in the whole shop buying some headphones is a queue then I guess the demand is insatiable. Note I said TOY. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by claiming some academic or artistic hoo hah. Yes, it’s going to used in classes and live shows but c’mon people – you can employ a rice shaker for kindy – it doesn’t make it a research investment.

If you’ve been using an iPhone you’ll find that most of the software you already own is wasted on the pad – it sits limply in the middle, or can be blurred up to fit, neither particularly magical. There are considerably less so-called HD titles – obviously the phone is far more popular. Not a great evil but something that will force you back to the shop to find replacements.

My first stop was GarageBand as Stewart is using it and we need to share some notes for upcoming gigs. OSX GarageBand is already a cut down version of a real tool, and the Pad version is the emasculated remnant of that. You can open up a sampled piano and plink away at it. The samples become obviously strained at the edges of each sample zone and it’s kind of 1988 AKAI, but good enough. Record your tinkles as best you can on a plane of glass and find that you can’t go back and clean up the effort. So you decide to add some drums. There’s a cute drum kit on screen – the kick is loud, the snare is soft, how can we adjust the difference? Within minutes of trying out GarageBand I was at a dead end – things I needed to do were just not available. It’s a toy, a great toy, and reasonably priced. But it’s going to end up in the cupboard.

Let’s go professional! One of the things that iPad has that seems ultra-cool is Reactable. Originally $20K and yours for only $10 (or $13 in Australia even though our dollar is worth more. Apple Australia – home of petty penny pinching). OK so you drag blocks on the screen and rotate them to make little webs of interconnected noise. This takes a bit of trial and error. Right, I’ve added a couple of oscillators, let’s get another… what? Two oscillators, one filter – no, it can’t be, but it is – the most elaborate 2 Osc through one filter synthesiser on the market. What is the DAMN POINT of all that modularity when the configuration simply come down to playing some loops and 2 oscillators through a filter? Why in God’s name do you even NEED to have this metaphor when all you can do is a small set of variations on a patch that could be put together in SynthEdit? It even sounds like SynthEdit. No, SynthEdit sounds better. When reading reviews of Reactable you get three facts over and over – it’s expensive – it looks cool – and Bjerk used it on a live show. Fuck it.
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Avoid that and get Jasuto Pro instead. Jasuto is much more complex, much more difficult and rewarding, and if it comes across as borrowing Reactable’s mode of operation, it goes on to actually USE it with grown up modular components and screen geography. You can get PC and Mac versions of it as well, so you can run your patches on real machines.

And that’s a fundamental problem. Take the iMS20. It’s a MS20 emulation – but on a computer you could have more than one running, each polyphonic. Here KORG have done the best possible cut down – you get one monophonic MS20 and a 6 part ‘drum machine’. The drums are all custom samples of the MS20, and all channels are driven by hyped up versions of the analogue SQ10 sequencer. So think about it – there’s 7 possible MS20′s running off 7 SQ10′s and while six of them can’t be modulated or evolving you can still make up quite an orchestra. As somebody who once owned 3 real MS20′s and a SQ10 I was able to get some good shit happening pretty quickly and this is not a bad replica of the good old days of cable madness.

KORG!
Never had an Electribe but the same goes for this 90′s KORG drum machine. It’s for fiddling little loopy bits of analogue sounding drums while drug whacked and while you are never going to use it for symphonic rock it’s pretty good value. Mind you so is Soundrop for much the same reason.

I’m tempted to get Fairlight CMI, for the same reason that people paid to go see Charlie Sheen live. It’s going to be a huge disappointment, you know it will, but somehow that makes it all the more intriguing. Will I be like Kate Bush? Actually I’d rather have a CVI. Fairlight? Actually where are the VJ tools on this thing? It’s so obviously the point of a lightweight video player with touch controls.

Maybe I should have waited for the EEE Tablet, which will run full applications – Pro Tools, Live etc. But I guess there’s the possibility of a musical style here, maybe some more minimal composition, some of the kicking against the pricks that happened back when musical instruments were very limited. I made music on much less than this, perhaps better music. Let’s hope so, before the credit card bill comes in…