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Most of the emphasis in reviews of Amp Sim apps these days seems to focus on tone, and the application’s ability to achieve, with flawless accuracy, the nuances of the classic gear we all love.

This obsession with perfect tone in software is a bit misguided at times. With the $60 I spent on AmpliTube for iPhone and iRig, I was mostly interested in a practice solution that didn’t disturb my neighbors, or wake up my girlfriend late at night.

I got exactly that, and the tone was pretty decent considering that I was playing my Gibson ES-135 into my phone.

In addition to being able to upload your own songs and loops, one extraordinary feature that caught my eye was the SpeedTrainer slider. This allows you to slow down the tempo without changing the pitch of whatever song you are working on, perfect for uploading and practicing with Aebersold tracks.

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Tags: aebersold, amp sim, amplitube, guitar, iphone, ipod touch, irig, practice, tempo

All of my previous projects have come to a dramatic halt these days while I spend more time educating myself with some real programming skills.

Not having a lot to show for the past couple months, I thought I’d simply share my opinions on some of what I believe are the best book/tutorials available for those looking to dive headfirst into computer programming, creative code, and/or interactive media installations.

First off, the book that is essentially responsible for allowing me to think that I have any business whatsoever writing any kind of code:

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Tags: Interactivity, iphone, jitter, Max/Msp, oF, Open Frameworks, Processing, processing.org, Pure Data, SuperCollider, tutorials

A combination of being on vacation, and having the graphics card in my 15.4″ MacBook PRO Laptop Computer fail shortly after I returned, provided an unintentional opportunity to get to know my iPod Touch a little better.

Jasuto gave me plenty to keep me busy while my computer was at the shop. I really enjoy having so much modular synth power on a handheld device, and I found it’s usage to be fairly intuitive.

Have a look at some more detailed tutorials and descriptions of Jasuto’s features at the app’s webpage.

Here are a few exmaples of what I could do with Jasuto after a few days of experimentation.

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Tags: DSP, iphone, ipod touch, jasuto, modular, modular synthesizer, plugin, samples, sound, synthesizer, vst

I’ve been having entirely too much fun with this awesome iPhone/iPod Touch application by Intua. I put off buying BeatMaker for a long time because of the 19.99 price tag. When there are so many good music applications for much less, why bother, right?

The reason I bothered was that you can upload custom sounds. I searched and searched for a cheaper application that has this same functionality, but in the end I just gave up and dished out the 20 bucks — it was totally worth it!

I don’t really want to make this a review since there have already been plenty of great reviews on BeatMaker, (you can find a very thorough review here) but I do want to show some of what I have been doing with it.

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After playing around, making beats on the train like the one above, and learning the ins and outs of this app, I finally got around to creating my own kit. I used a collection of samples that I downloaded from freesound.org, (attribution page included in download) and I also made some samples using my keyboard and guitar.

I wanted to have an amount of variety with each sample that I created. The C7_Rhodes, Organ&GuitarVamp, and OrganBass samples are probably all best used after slicing down the audio file to a specific section that you want to use. This isn’t a problem because you can crop down any audio file within BeatMaker easily. Here is a little beat I created with my custom set.

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Tags: BeatMaker, berimbau, drum kit, electric organ, free, guitar, Intua, iphone, ipod touch, rhodes, samples