Monday, October 2, 2017

Old but very serviceable

Not me, the iPad. It's an iPad 4, which apparently makes it about 7 years old. As much as I dislike how Apple manages their infrastructure, I have to say that this 7 year old device is still enormously capable - great battery life, runs smooth, and as it turns out, a very easy and convenient writing tool!

The guitar sounds in Cubasis are very basic, will see if there's anything optional that can be added there to make those a bit more pleasant, but all the same it's very workable for writing. For practicing guitar solos, I might Bluetooth it over to the GT 40 amp (though I won't be able to record if I do that, but it could be good just for practice).

Thanks to that convenience, I was able to do some writing today, and it will only get easier the more I use this combo of iPad and Cubasis!

Sunday, October 1, 2017

Making Writing Easier

The set up for songwriting that I came up with today.

One thing I am always looking to do is make the writing process easier. I do main recordings on my desktop, but I don't like being tied to the desktop while just experimenting and writing - inconvenient!

So far I've been using Evernote to sing or play into on my phone, but it's become inconvenient. It used to be easy to add several recordings to one "note" which kept multiple attempts at pieces of a song in one place, but now I can't see how to do that and I have to create a separate "note" each time which gets cluttered fast.

Besides, I wanted the ability to play and sing separately, so I could have my guitar playing away in my ear while I come up with words, or I could use it to work out soloes and or bass lines without heading to the PC.

I have Cubasis 2 on the iPad, which I like a lot as it is just like Cubase on my desktop. The problem with it was Apple - because they don't let you just browse the files on your iPad, you have to go through some app or another to see them. That meant moving anything OFF the iPad to start building the proper recordings on the desktop seemed to be a pain in the arse.

I was considering buying a mini-digital multitrack recorder, but joy of joys, I just discovered that Steinberg actually do things better than Apple - Cubasis has a wifi server mode, where I can see all the Cubase files on my PC and copy to and from the iPad with ease and abandon!

The raggedy collection of not much yet on the iPad, easily accessed from my desktop.
Enable it in Cubasis, enter the URL it displays into a web browser on the PC, and that's it - and like it says on the tin, it's wifi, so I don't even need to bother with all that cable-y nonsense. Well done Steinberg!