A Drop in an Ocean: How Apple made me put together 'The Road Rising'

Making The Road Rising (December 2017)

I'm a PC sort of guy, all the music I make is pretty well all done on PC's.

This tune 'The Road Rising' was made totally on Apple hardware. I used an iPad (borrowed) and my very old iPod 3 to make the tune. I did however use my trusty DAW on the PC to compress and EQ the files for more punch. I chose deliberately to stick to the iPad and the iPod because sometimes you find 'restrictions' force more creativity.

I downloaded free synth and looping software just to try and learn how to use the iPad but found some of it sounded so good, I decided to make a tune.

I need to be clear at this point, as with a lot of electronic music, I used preprogramed loops to make the biggest chunk of the song. So I'll list the programs and you'll recognise how I did it....quite frankly....because you'll find the same loops. So if you want to do it yourself it is not that hard.

As a rule I tend to start from scratch when I write music (and I will mostly do this) but this is one time I thought it sounded so good, it wasn't worth reinventing the wheel.

What I -did - add manually were the

'bass'
background 'drone' and 'ambient' notes.

I also manually played an iPad Synth lead parts on a couple of synths
and manually played the iPod 'piano' parts.

I also manually twiddled knobs and crosshairs and dot charts on the iPad and iPod to get freaking electro FX sounds underneath.

I didn't know how much fun was to be had in an afternoon.
Here are the software programs I used -they are all downloadable for free from the Apple Apps store (at the time of writng this):

Blocs Wave - this is the main one full of loops that made the majority of the tune