iPhone App Directory

How did you get started in mobile music?

This is a bit of a 'introduce yourself' request. Basically I'm looking for your story on how you got into mobile music making. The how, the why, the whole what you're doing with it kind of thing.

Love to hear your story.

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9 comments:

Unknown said...

I was at a friends house and His girl friend came threw and whipped out a 12" Powerbook. Ripped a CD closed it and went about her business. No cords, no charger. It was so small!

I bought one a few months later. The last Version. Put Protools, Recycle, Wave Editor, Sample Manager, Reason, MPC Editors, VST's and Plugins. I was set.

Bought a Battery powered MPC 500 with a MIDI M-Audio UNO and after that. I was Making Mobile Music.

Tried out a few UMPC's like Sony Vaio UX and Viliv S5 after that but Screen Size, battery life and performance were issues. (1024x600 SUCKS ASS) Hated that res on the ViliV.

Finally Replaced my Powerbook with my iPad and my MPC 500 (which I still use) with a iPhone4 and 3Gs.

I choose Apple for recording. I still use a Dual 1.8 G5 for home recording.

I had the first Compaq iPaq with a Silver Slider and a few other Windows Mobile devices like Motorola MPX200 (Still got 2) that I souped up before all that, but never made music on them. I was using FL Studio in those days.

I always embraced mobile tech. Pagers, 2-way Pagers, StarTac Motorola, Motorola Accompli, T-Mobile MDA. I saw it evolve.
Motorola & Compaq birthed the iPhone.

Pierre said...

I've always been fascinated by synthesizers and electric keyboards thanks to my love of Progressive Rock music. Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman and Tony Banks were huge influences on my music making.

I've been making music on my PC for a few years when I stumbled upon the website "Create Digital Music" website. There was an article on "Griff" for the Pocket PC and I had to try it out. I purchased a second hand Pocket PC off ebay and I haven't looked back.

I'm now intrigued with using mobile devices for all sorts of creative applications, from drawing and painting to music composition.

I've managed to cobble together a representative from most of the major mobile catagories for my experimentation so I now have a Pocket PC, iPod Touch 2G, Nintendo DSi, and a very cheap Android Tablet (which is really no good for music making but makes for a passable mobile sketchpad).

I'm really interested in exploring Android as a platform but am waiting for something a bit more powerful to really experiment with.

I may purchase an iPad sometime in the future but I have a terrible time justifying such an expense. Nearly everything I've purchased to date has been under $200, which makes the occasional, well researched purchase available within my budget limitations.

Now, when I travel I usually just bring my Nintendo DSi and iPod Touch, both of which are very capable of creating some wonderful creative pieces on the go.

formal said...

Been making music a while, but I think when I really saw the potential of mobile music making is when I got milkytracker working on a HP Jornada720. Up until this point I'd always loved gadgets, but never put the two together. After the Jornada my quest for a mobile setup began. Got a HP TC1100 tablet and an Axiom49. It was effective, but I hated the tablet experience on the HP. Thanks to your site I discovered Bhajis Loops and picked up another Sony Clie (had sold my old one). I did the homebrew sony music stuff and the lsdj on the gameboys for a while too. About that time iPhone came out and the whole jailbreaking thing. Once I played with the old MooCows Drummer app I knew the potential of things to come. Now for most of my portable work I stick to my iPhone and my SP404. Recently I acquired an old PowerBook G4 so that fits in the mobile setup nicely as well. Along the way I have also managed to get some of my other hardware samplers to be battery powered too :)

formal said...

Oh yah, NitroTracker DS played a roll somewhere in there too!

robman84 said...

I was always a fan of synth music as a kid. In the late 70s or maybe 1980 a kid at school brought in a calculator that could make musical notes and i think even white noise. I was hooked. Then a mate got a casio vl-tone and that was incredible, although sadly i never got my own (he did let me borrow it though). My own first device was a programmable calculator (maybe 1985) that could make notes so i wrote a little sequencer on it. I imagine i probably got it to play Da Da Da. Then it all went quiet (ho ho) on the mobile front due to getting powerful computers like the Amiga and then PCs, and trackers became the weapon of choice. Fast forward until I got an iPaq in about 2000 and started to collect music making apps and having instant on fun sessions for a few minutes at a time rather than epic days at the PC with Cubase. Griff then stole my heart until the iPod Touch ripped it back and i've rarely looked back.

I never complete tunes, never release anything and consider myself to have extremely limited musical talent, hence the name of my blog!

Anonymous said...

I have been creating and releasing music for nearly 30 years and have always been interested in advances in sound creation process. The Nintendo DS Lite with Korg DS-10 software was one of the first devices I used.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIDvgJC9KS0

I had previously used a Sony PSP for loop playing but it was pretty limited and my device quit working. After I picked up an Ipod Touch I started exploring the apps being created, looking more for sound manipulation type of programs. A lot of things that I never would have imagined have been developed.

My first song was created with Way Out Ware's iSample.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw-lTY-iknk

I recently used Sonic Wire Sculptor and Multitrack DAW as part of a live performance. I really like the ease of use of Multitrack and ended up using it to record an entire album (except for 2 tracks) and also using those tracks for a surround mix.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzuBHG6qhSA

I would still like to see more development of apps that are influenced by hardware samplers like Roland's SP-555 as well as software such as Ableton Live and Native Instruments Reaktor. It would also be nice if Apple made audio interfacing a bit easier. It's disappointing that I have to buy yet another device or interface to use Multitrack DAW with my Ipad.

I still intend to use hardware synths for both recording and performing but the new devices available certainly make things easier and open up new avenues of creativity.

You have a great site that has been very helpful and informative. I stop by daily and rely on Palm Sounds when making my app purchases. Thanks.

My top ten...
10. Beatmaker
9. Sound Yeah
8. iSample
7. iSequence
6. Electrify
5. Jasuto Pro
4. Pro Loop
3. Nano Studio
2. Thumb Jam
1. Multitrack DAW

http://patienceisafuse.wordpress.com/

Unknown said...

back in the early 80's i had a casio calculator that i could enter numbers and play back a little sequence's. or play the number keys and play tunes.I still have it !

then i got a vl tone dont know what happened to that ?

various synths through the 80's and 90,s bring me up to date.

i have an iphone 3gs running various synth, sequencer and drum apps. these are usually recorded/over dubbed into cubase 5 running on my Acer 1810 TZ.

The Acer is a wonderful 11.6" windows 7, 4GB dual core notebook...... truly portable !

Anonymous said...

I have been around hip hop all my life from rapping to breakdancing you name it so I had done everything with hip hop except for producing so when I really got interested in producing I thought I'd try my hand at it by getting a MV8000. Big mistake. It was so hard to try and learn so I sold it a few months later but my desire to produce was still there so I bought a laptop and put Reason on it. It was cool but still for someone who hadn't done that much producing it wasn't my cup of tea. Plus my laptop crashed. In comes the Itouch and a special app called Beatmaker. I loved it from the start. I was making decent beats in no time. Plus right now I've got a track I did playing on the radio in NY. I just bought an Ipad and can't wait for Beatmaker 2 to be released. I don't think I'll ever buy any big hardware equipment again. If it's not portable what's the use. You wanna be creative anytime , anywhere.

michael nervous said...

First mobile recording I did was on a read along style tape deck using whatever to make sounds and noises. I started using that with my sisters boombox and her portable keyboard. I started overdubbing when I had the two by each other and thought I had invented the greatest thing. When I started working and purchasing goods I found a portastudio at a guitar shop, the world definitely stopped there, next was the portable drum machine, next a sampler, started djing in high school (90ish), bought a better four track, sometime after that is when I was in bands with delays and the good effects, nanoloop and lsdj in early college, I had been rewiring synths but never knew it wad a thing until someone told me about circuit bending, at this point I had collected some crazy amount of speak and spell/ sk 1,5 etc / bought my first computer in 98 ( not including apple 2e, atari etc from the 80's because they were not really "mine". Installed cakewalk, next was pocket pc, then a laptop, all the newer gameboy/ Ds .... After typing this on my iPhone I realize why I'm broke... Anyway break is over at work. Don't if my timeline is accurate and I know I forgot a lot already, but it's fun tryin to remember this stuff