The iPhone Musician
Music and technology. How the two keep introducing themselves to each other in new ways. As a musician though, finding another way to stream music and get song recommendations is cool, but actually not improving my ability to make music. I just discovered a few new tech innovations that are though: GigBaby and Cleartune for the iPhone.
Gigbaby is a digital 4 track recording application and Cleartune is a very simply designed, entirely functional tuner. Yesterday, I tuned my guitar and then recorded a spur of the moment chord progression, all with my iPhone. I actually then composed a beat directly in Gigbaby and synced it to the guitar recording – I tapped out the rhythm on the phone, which allowed GigBaby to register the beats per minute (BPM).
This is really cool. I have been recording guitar licks onto the voice memo function of all of my previous cell phones for years – they all sound terrible, and I could barely hear what I was playing. The exponential leap that the iPhone has allowed me to take with recording music on the fly is very welcome and genuinely stands to improve my songwriting process – I’m now able to develop songs more quickly and keep a better record of my ideas. Will this lead to better music being made in our increasingly tech-driven culture? Probably not. But Cousin Chris is geekin out and enjoyin it.