An Unequal Music

A 9.5” x 7.31” recording studio!

As a child, I have seen musicians carry heavy equipment to reach my father’s studio in Mumbai. And this was 2 flights up. No elevators. They used to come in by 9am for a recording scheduled to begin at 10am. 10 minutes to unload the gear from the taxi. 10 minutes to climb up slowly with it. Sometimes two trips were needed. A 10 minute rest, and then some time taken to set the instruments up.
And as true musicians, they soon started rehearsals with a smile and with great team spirit as a group. And the equipment was not a simple bamboo flute. These were vibraphones (can’t imagine anyone else but late Rajesh Deo with it), drum kits, sitars, sarods, etc.
In about a 1500 sq ft area of a studio, 10-12 musicians played their parts together, where one mistake meant that all of them start from scratch. And ours was supposed to be the most advanced studio at one point with guess what…. an 8-track, ½” recorder!!!
Technology advanced by leaps and bounds in the music making area since 1978, and what do we have now in 2012? A studio measuring 9.5” x 7.31”. Yes, the iPad2. And no, Apple Inc. has not gifted me one for talking about them in this column.
The Garageband software on the iPad2 is something that requires the user no experience to make music! It’s a tool that allows you to lay down tracks, mix them a bit and finally make a whole song (with vocal recordings too!). At $5 (appx Rs. 250), you get drums, drum machines, keyboards, synthesizers etc. These are categorized into touch instruments and smart instruments.
With a multi-touch feature, these instruments sound and play just like their real counterparts. The sound output depends on how hard you touch them and where you touch them! The tones vary accordingly. So in case you’re playing the drums, just make sure you use only fingers and not the real drumsticks!
He goes on to say that in the UID project of the central government, people living in cities and jungles will have their personal data in a cloud up there somewhere. Now, what would happen if it rains?! (Good question). The data could then get mixed during times of a cloudburst, and the police will end up arresting the wrong people.
The smart instruments make one sound like an expert musician! Even if someone has not even touched a guitar before, he/she can start strumming various chords and even use fingers to pluck the guitar strings, which provides a life-like visual effect (not that touch feel of a real string of-course). Nevertheless, it’s pretty well done.
The recording studio feature in Garageband on iOS helps you carry your studio anywhere you go. The last few years saw this take place through a laptop, a USB/firewire sound card and a MIDI keyboard. And now, it has shrunk further onto the iPad.
The music created here can then be shared via email and then on other iOS devices. Alternatively, the same session can be opened in the regular Mac computer’s Garageband software and further refined in a regular studio environment.
One can arrange and mix songs whenever inspiration strikes on this 8 track studio (ah, reminds me of that analog tape I mentioned at the beginning of this column).
For me, it feels like a full circle, but one can only imagine how small things have become. Whether the music bears the same kind soul as it did in the analog days, however, remains debatable.