Above and Beyond

This track was a drunken collaboration between Noimspartacus on kaossilator and fx and Spookyfruit on Garageband guitar.

 

Fruity Apple

Now this is more like it…

I’ve downloaded a fair few music apps on my iPad, some have been good (Bebot, Filtatron, Thumbjam), some not so good (iHolophone, mujik). The idea of having a mini studio in your pocket is really appealing, especially when I’m away from home and feel the urge to make some noise. I’ve tried Xewton studio, akai Synth Station and ims-20. Out of these I would say that ims-20 is the best simply because of the ability to tweak everything and jam but so far all these apps have had one thing in common – it’s a bloody hassle to create a full song from scratch.

I’m excited about the imminent release of a portable imageline app cuz I’ve been using their products for more than a decade now and they encourage a good work flow. I first used fruityloops in 2001, (I think it was version 2). It had been recommended to me on a forum for Whitehouse (the band, not the jazz mag) as it came with an emulation of an edp Wasp. Prior to using fruityloops I had never created my own loops and had had to rely on ejay products which consisted of rearranging prerecorded(and very conservative) loops until you created something vaguely musical. To be able to program my own beats or automate vsts was amazing, it wasn’t long before I purchased a full copy. If I can remember rightly you had to use a seperate program to arrange your loops with audio, but I think with version 3 you were able to arrange patterns and audio on a playlist.

As fruityloops became more feature packed it morphed into FLStudio, and to be honest it is still my favourite DAW by far (Acid Pro comes a close second, Logic waaaaaaaayy  down on my list). It’s built in effects and synths are very tasty, the ability to automate anything and everything and the various beat mangling and riff generating options make it really fun to use (compared to Cubase where I would spend long periods of time staring at a blank arrange page waiting for an idea). I’ve seen some sniffy attitudes in some music forums towards FLStudio, it’s not a real DAW (it is), the sound is inferior compared to logic/reason/cubase (it’s not) or it’s only suitable for dance music (not true by any stretch).

The idea of having a cutdown version of FL on my iPad/iPod gives me nerdwood, I shall let you know whether it lives up to the hype when it is released.

FLStudio is up to version 10 now, if you haven’t tried FLStudio before , download the demo, you wont regret it. If you have a cracked version, then shame on you, the guys at Imageline have worked hard to create this, don’t be a douche and put your hand in your pocket. You get free updates for life for Chrissake!

I shall review FLStudi10 once I update my copy (probably in the next two weeks). In the mean time here’s a little vid to whet your appetite.