i don't know what it is, but i've avoided taking any music made on an iPad/iPhone seriously. maybe it's internalized gatekeeping but to me so much iOS-made music has a specific sound to it that doesn't feel as detailed. almost like how you can tell a short film looks like a short film versus looking like a feature film, but can't pinpoint exactly why (however there's a great video i just saw about this, which i highly recommend watching here)

but logic pro on ipad has hadso much hype behind it since its release and i wanted to put it through the test to see if I could make a full track using it. i've tried this before but never ended up with something i was okay enough with to post. tl;dr - i was proven wrong

since i've been seeing "playstation and 2000s jungle" trending a lot i decided to try making something in that style. I was born in 1987 so when this sound was at it's peak i was in early highschool and buying all of the games that are considered key references for the genre. basically, there's no way i could avoid being inspired by this style if I wanted to or not.

after a clunky start i really started to get my footing with editing audio on an iPad. there are certainly some features missing (it NEEDS an in-app audio browser, for one - this Files management with "Slide Over" just doesn't cut it) but i was very impressed with how easy it was to timestretch, slice, and mangle audio. virtually all of the ingredients needed for a perfect breakbeat recipe.

using my hands on the iPad in various different ways felt musical. i'm specifically not talking about the onscreen piano keyboard, the drum pads, or the gimmicky guitar string thing (which I will never use) but just the act of moving clips around the screen to put them in the right place. trimming and slicing with the pencil especially felt much better than a mouse or trackpad. automation of parameters didn't quite compare to having some MIDI controllers with knobs, but clever usage of Read & Latch automation modes allowed me to punch-in some real time performances of FX.

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to cap off the track's vibe, I inserted a particular FX stab that was used in Dark Souls 1 - in fact, just this past week i made the discovery of this exact sound as being sourced from a popular retro 2000s sample pack (see here for proof). see if you can hear it playing during the track.

the most important thing for me however was the round-trip functionality. apple claims that projects made on iPad Logic Pro would be able to transfer over to the desktop logic pro and vice versa. i was happy to find that yes, it actually did work as they claimed. however, you have to only use stock FX. not much of a problem for me because i've been trying to use third-party plugins way less than i used to, so i lucked out there.

this track specifically used only stock logic pro fx and a simple compressor on the master bus.

all in all, i'm pretty excited to keep experimenting with this. i'm not exactly sure how far I'll take it but here's to hoping that i'll bite my tongue after all and start viewing this as a usable music device for my workflow.