4-Way iPad Jam

 As our theme for the performance will be 'The Planets', this week we had a mind mapping session looking at the three planets we will be composing for: Jupiter, Neptune and Saturn; and tried to conclude what tempo, key and genre each would be:

Saturn - Bringer of Old age; Jazz; maybe 6/8; 90BPM; A Major or minor

Neptune - The Mystic; Atmospheric/Trance/Psychedelic; 140BPM; A minor/ C Major

Jupiter - Bringer of Jollity; Uplifting; 120BPM; Bb Major

Now that the students are a bit more confident with the apps they've been using, they started to break out in to groups to try out some compositional ideas together. This resulted in some really good ideas and innovative uses of the apps as you can see in this video. 

The iKaossilator was used as the rhythm generator and set the tempo with various loops; the Animoog was used to add a dubstep style synth bass played using the keyboard on the app on which you can add modulation by sliding your finger vertically on the key; lead synth using the Garageband keyboard in glide mode and the iMS20 provided some repeating melodies played with one kaoss pad set to the scale of the piece and another set to the filter to create sweep effects!

The aim is still to get all 10 iPads playing at the same time but a Quartet is an excellent start!