Mobile Music Production
November 28, 2011
Over the holiday break I devoted a few hours to watching some interesting documentaries about the history of Electronic Music. To my surprise, it was very inspirational to drive me to get back into music production.
Watching these documentaries left me with nuggets of info and made me appreciate how powerful and abundant technology is in today’s music. Electronic music has made its way to the masses and can be found in almost everything created today. So it was shocking to find out when it all started, it wasn’t well received, accepted or adapted until musical prodigies saw the potential. I find myself wondering how it would have been in the ages of tape, or the time sound engineers were still discovering new sounds no one had ever heard before.
I’ve seen technology evolve in music before my very eyes. Over 15 years, we’ve seen and experienced the medium go from vinyl to tape to cd and now to mp3. From the output to the very tools it takes to make music. We’re now going from only listening to music on small mobile devices to actually creating full length music on these mobile devices. Detached from the conventional DAW setup, I started experimenting with Nano Studio on my iPhone. It all starts with initial patches. Hours into the first untitled project, the sound was so fluid and vivid, I knew then I had to make an entire album on this.
More of a “tune smith” approach to music, I previously wasn’t mush of a sound engineer. I hadn’t created my own sounds from scratch before. Miniaturizing the complexity of a traditional 2 oscillator synth, I quickly wrapped my head around the basis of blending these two together to generate sounds I actually wanted to make. I had made a batch full of thick beefy saws and high range crisp arpeggios with heavy automated LFO rates with just 2 oscillators! I was blown away how good they sounded.
“Back then, we didn’t have synthesizers…”, Well, Now we all do. Everyone has one in their pocket and it can also make phone calls (among 100,000 other use cases). After watching those documentaries, I thought to myself, “Man, well whats next then?” Technology is abundant, processing power is almost unlimited and all that leaves us humans left to do is use our imaginations and creativity to make some awesome music. I really believe the next step in music is mobile production. Still in an infant stage of becoming anything of a standard, mobile DAW’s are becoming more powerful with every mobile device improvement and iteration. By creating my next album completely mobile, I’m resonating with this concept and embracing the mobile music production movement. My only concern is becoming too comfortable where I won’t go back to the desktop. Haha, well maybe someday, maybe someday…
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