iPad Blows the Lid Off Music - Steve Rosenbaum - MediaBizBloggers

Cover image for  article: iPad Blows the Lid Off Music - Steve Rosenbaum - MediaBizBloggers

I bought my son a drum kit this weekend. And a synthesizer. And a string section. And an Accordion. And a Mixer. And a sound effects library. And a DJ console. And a huge set of loops.

Frankly - I bought him a marching band, orchestra, jazz band and rock band.

I'm a great dad.

And he's a lucky kid. Why? Because he lives in a world where access to all of these musical instruments, tools, and technology now cost $9.95 - or less.

And he's going to be able to make music in a whole new way.

But let's start at the beginning.

I was reading blogs on my iPad and I stumbled into a video about the very first iPad DJ. Her name is Rana Sobhany and she turned two iPads into mixing pads and was able to invent a new way to rock the house, mixing, scratching, looping and creating a pretty cool new way to create music.

Here's the video of her that my friend Robert Scoble recorded - it speaks for itself:


Click here to view the video

This got me thinking. If this young woman is using existing software on the iPad, and it's just been out for a few weeks, what other musical tools and software have been iPad-ized and how does the experience of making music change when you've got a touch-sensitive control surface and a powerful computer built into a device as slim as a yellow legal pad?

Well, as it turns out, there's a HUGE collection of applications for musicians that are already in the App Store. There are plenty of free ones, some at .99, and a few at $9.99 - but they're almost all low cost or free. And they're amazing.

So, after downloading ten or so of the best selling ones, I handed them to my 12 year old maestro to see if he can translate his physical music making into the digital touch-pad realm. The simple answer is yes.

The piano keyboard is amazing.

The new graphical composing tools are intuitive and elegant.

The looping and mixing tools take music creation to a whole new level.

And that's before we connect the iPad to Garage Band and are able to start doing compositions.

Anyone who says the iPad isn't a creation device hasn't started to play music on it.

That will blow your mind.

Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO and Co-Founder of Magnify.net - a fast-growing video publishing platform that powers more than 50,000 web sites, media companies, and content entrepreneurs to aggregate and curate web video from a wide variety of web sources. Currently Magnify.net publishes over 50,000 channels of Curated-Consumer Video, and is working closely with a wide variety of media makers, communities, and publishers in evolving their content offerings to include content created by, sorted and reviewed by community members. Rosenbaum is a serial entrepreneur, Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, and well known innovator in the field of user-generated media production. Rosenbaum Directed and Executive Produced the critically acclaimed 7 Days In September, and his MTV Series Unfiltered is widely regarded as the first commercial use of Consumer Generated Video in US mass media. Steve can be contacted at steve@magnify.net Follow Steve Rosenbaum on Twitter: www.twitter.com/magnify

Read all Steve’s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Steve Rosenbaum - MediaBizBloggers.

Follow our Twitter updates @MediaBizBlogger

Copyright ©2024 MediaVillage, Inc. All rights reserved. By using this site you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.