| Cult of Mac

How to make Logic Pro X record something after you played it

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Logic Pro X
Logic Pro X. Is there anything it cannot do?
Photo: Apple

If you’re a musician, or if you ever tried to record yourself singing, playing or just trying to bang out “Happy Birthday” to add to that cool video you made, you’ll be familiar with the First Law of Recording Music: Your best ever performance will be the practice run right before you press record.

No matter how many takes you do, the best one will always be the one that you didn’t record. Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a way to go back in time, and record the one that got away? If you’re using Apple’s Logic Pro X software, you can do just that — with both audio and built-in software instruments (MIDI).

Why the iConnectAudio4+ is the best audio interface for iPad and Mac

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iConnectAudio4+ is the best gift you can buy for your iPad. And your Mac.
This is the best gift you can buy for your iPad. And your Mac.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The iConnectAudio4+ isn’t a new product. It’s been around for a few years. And this isn’t really a review. This article will be more of a PSA, telling you about a unique input device can change how you use your iPad for audio.

The feature that sets the iConnectAudio4+ apart from other USB audio interfaces is that it can connect to two computers at once, and send audio to both. It can even route audio — digitally — between your Mac and your iPad.

This cute, rubberized keyboard packs proper piano-style keys

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Arturia MicroLab
Looks small, feels big.
Photo: Arturia

This is the new MicroLab from Arturia. It’s a USB MIDI keyboard you can hook up to your Mac, your iPad or your iPhone. It’s tiny — but how does it differ from the zillion other portable MIDI keyboards littering the pages of Amazon? Two ways.

One is that it has a bunch of clever design features that make it great for travel or small desktop setups. The other is that it has big, proper, velocity-sensitive keys, instead of the stupid junky keys on almost every similar MIDI keyboard.

Learners will love Roli’s colorful, light-up piano keyboard

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musician playing roli lumi
Look at how much fun it is to play. Just look.
Photo: Roli

Roli is best known for its squishy, multitouch, pressure-sensitive music keyboards and controllers. Those are great. But the new Roli Lumi goes in a different direction. It’s a small portable keyboard with light-up keys. And not the kind of light-up keys you might see in a movie set during the 1970s disco scene: These light up keys help you learn to play the piano.

Piano lessons will never be the same.

Wildly customizable keyboard unleashes iPad creativity

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The new Buchla Thunder layout for the Sensel Morph.
The new Buchla Thunder layout for the Sensel Morph.
Photo: Sensel

The Sensel Morph is a different kind of “keyboard” for the iPad or Mac. It’s a pressure-sensitive panel onto which you can slap various silicone overlays, turning it from a QWERTY keyboard into a piano, a movie-editing controller or many other specialized interfaces.

It’s a customizable, wildly imaginative input device designed for musicians, video editors, illustrators, writers and other creative types.

iOS’ most essential music-making app gets a massive update

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AUM should be on every musician’s iPad.
AUM should be on every musician’s iPad.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

If you’re an iOS-using musician, then AUM is an utterly essential app. It’s an audio mixer, but that description hides its power. AUM does let you mix the audio from various apps, but it also hosts audio units (like plugins), routes audio between them, records those channels, and more.

This week, AUM got a huge update, adding a whole bunch of great new features.

How to make music with an iPad and a ‘classic’ Swedish synth

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These two will make beautiful music together.
A perfect music-making combo.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

At first glance, the decade-old OP-1 synthesizer from Swedish musical instrument makers Teenage Engineering looks about as standalone as it gets.

The tiny device couples a short, piano-style keyboard with a screen. And it contains a drum machine, several synthesizers, a sampler, a handful of sequencers, a virtual four-track tape recorder and even an FM radio. You can create entire tracks on it with no other gear, or you can hook it up to electric guitars and microphones and bring the outside world in.

But it also pairs surprisingly well with an iPad. You can record audio back and forth, but things go much deeper than that. You also can use the OP-1’s hardware keyboard to play instruments on the iPad, and use iPad MIDI apps to control the synthesizers on the OP-1.

Making music with an iPad and a synth

If you own both pieces of gear already, hopefully this how-to will give you some new ideas about making music with an iPad. But if you only own an iPad, this in-depth article will provide tips for using your tablet with other music gear.

And if you know nothing about the OP-1, or about Teenage Engineering’s work in general, you’ll learn why the company is kind of the Apple of the synth world. Teenage Engineering is known for its incredible interface design — and for having a quirky personality similar to 1984-era Apple, when the brand-new Mac was making waves.

Atom Piano Roll is an iOS MIDI-lover’s dream

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Atom piano roll
Atom is a like a player-piano for your iPad
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

 

Atom is a “piano roll” sequencer for making music on iOS. A piano roll is named for the software used to run olde worlde player pianos. It’s a roll of paper with holes punched in it. As the roll moves through the piano, the holes are read by a “tracker bar,” and the corresponding notes are played.

Imagine such a sheet of paper in the digital realm. That’s a modern piano-roll sequencer, and it’s a commonplace way to control software instruments. Atom brings some amazing tricks to the piano roll. It’s also an Audio Unit (AU) app, which means it can work as a plug-in inside your favorite iOS Music apps, like Cubasis and GarageBand.

How to record digital audio from your iPhone to your Mac with iDAM

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Audio and USB, together again.
Audio and USB, together again.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Did you know that you can send the audio from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac via the Lightning cable? That audio stays in pristine digital ones and zeros, and can be recorded (or otherwise used) anywhere you can edit audio on your Mac.

For musicians, this turns your iPad and all its music apps into a plugin for your Mac. And for anyone else, it could just be a neat way to route audio into your Mac’s speakers. The feature is called iDAM, and it’s built into your Apple devices. Oh, and it works with MIDI too.

MidiWrist lets you control musical instruments from your Apple Watch

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Chill out with the Apple Watch Breathe app.
What’s the time? It’s time to get ill.
Photo: Graham Bower/Cult of Mac

For Apple Watch-owning musicians, the MidiWrist app is pretty wild. It lets you control almost any music hardware or software just by tapping the Apple Watch. The possibilities are almost literally endless — and you can even map the smartwatch’s Digital Crown as a custom controller.