25 years ago, I used to mess around with rudimentary music composition software on my family’s Atari 800 XL computer. I don’t remember what the software was called, but basically it allowed me to plug notes onto a musical staff. I remember using it to work on a song — for weeks and weeks I slaved away, and after all that work, I had come up with nothing but an unimpressive, one-dimensional midi file.

Things are different today. You can download a few apps and tinker about on an iPad for a few hours, and — voila, you can compose a fairly interesting chunk of music. This is what I’ve been up to over the past few days. I’ve been using Addictive Synth to produce basic sound structures — the app enables endless manipulation of sonic components (note all the knobs).

 I’ve spent most of my time in Music Studio, which is a “lite” DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). In this app, you put everything together — you can paste sounds (from apps like Addictive Synth) and add in beats and everything else, and shape the whole song.

So I composed a few tracks and uploaded them to soundcloud — see below. I produced “Trifles” first — it’s dark, and experimental (arguably too much) and there are a few glitches. But still, I’m pretty happy with it, considering it came from an iPad.  Next, I created “1” — mellower, more of a traditional / classical music piece (best listened to with headphones):

I’ll post more songs if I continue with this creative phase…