A Little Context...

As you’ve no doubt seen if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook or down the street in real life or whatever, we’ve been busy shipping our new module, Odio, which is a little 2-in, 2-out audio interface for using iOS devices in your Eurorack kit. Entirely coincidental to this, but alarmingly convenient, Chris Carlson finally updated his excellent Borderlands granular synth for iPad to v2.0.

Never was a match more made in Heaven than Odio and Borderlands, as Marcus Fischer’s post yesterday on his excellent Dust Breeding blog proved. I thought a little video demo of using Borderlands with Odio might be appropo, so after my shipping chores were done for the day, I busted the above out.

In the video, the analog synth melody is coming from my full boat of WMD/SSF modules I just got this week, the hi-hat is coming from our Mad Hatter module, and the speech synthesis is courtesy of a prototype module I’m currently researching that runs a full emulation of the TI speech synthesis chip. (In other words, those aren’t samples, at least in the traditional sense of the word.) The whole mess is sequenced via Sequencer 1.

You can hear in the beginning that the synth line is passing through the iPad via the AudioBus app. After a moment, I instance Borderlands. Since Borderlands is a synth, and not a real-time effect, the audio is interrupted. I then flip to the Borderlands instance, and record a couple measures of the synth line.

After fooling with that for a bit, I then move the speech synthesizer’s output from the mixer to Odio, and record a bit of it, while I’m twiddling knobs on the prototype. What happens after that should be pretty self-evident from watching the video.

Anyhow, I think the video shows how powerful the Odio/Borderlands combination is. If you’d like to see videos of other iPad-based software in use, let me know your specific requests.