Budget studio with high-end sound
Synthesizers - a great invention, but there are so many that can do something particularly well and why you just have to have them. The purchases add up in no time and the bank account suffers. However, there are app alternatives that are both inexpensive and offer many advantages. Synth freak and Beat reader Carsten Herbst reports ...
If you want to expand your studio and have a tablet, you should buy your synths as an app. It doesn‘t get any cheaper than that.
I have three iPads and a Surface Pro 4 permanently installed in my studio. The mounts are screwed to my desk in places that are ergonomically convenient for me, so that the tablets have a fixed place and the cables are out of the way. All of the iPads are equipped with UR22 or UR44 audio interfaces from Steinberg, through which they can charge the battery on the one hand and have a decent audio out on the other. In addition, each iPad has its own MIDI port. By the way, all USB interfaces that are class compliant, i.e. do not require separate drivers, are suitable. Almost all current interfaces meet this requirement.
The audio outputs of the iPads end up in Behringer XR18 mixers, of which I have a total of four cascaded in my studio. The Surface Pro is connected to the studio via a USB/MIDI interface and the audio out also goes into an XR18. So I can address each tablet with 16 MIDI channels each. The power that results from this is gigantic!
Using apps like StudioMux or Audiobus 3, I can directly address 16 apps per tablet, each with its own MIDI channel. channel directly like an external hardware synth. I can also assign AudioUnits as effects to each app. The limits here are only defined by the processing power of the tablets. Apart from the sound generation, there is the advantage that I can put the control software for the XR18 mixer on the tablets. This gives me direct control over 16 channels per tablet. The control app even offers multitouch, so it almost feels like a real mixer. And since the console itself requires almost no processing power, I can run the routing to the synth apps in the background.
My app recommendations
Since the apps are ridiculously low in price, I actually have pretty much every synth out there. With an average price of 5 - 20 euros per app, this should be affordable for everyone. The really great thing is that once you buy an app, it can be used in parallel on any iOS device. That‘s like buying not just one Minimoog, but several! Not only do they sound authentic, they are also polyphonic with four voices. Many really good synthesizers even cost nothing on the iPad, such as Synth One from Audiokit. This synth is very fat on its own. One of the most expensive apps, on the other hand, is LayR at 25 euros, but on the one hand it is 16-voice multitimbral and on the other it offers 256-voice polyphony or, in the most extreme case, 256 monophonic layers. This app is one of the best VA synths I know, app or plug-in.
Hardware and controller for the haptics
Apart from the price and the really good handling of the tablets, the biggest advantage is the offloading of processing power away from the DAW. The Surface in particular is important here, because it can offload the load of the VSTs as well.
But the Surface also makes real sense in other places, like when you use VCV Rack 2 or Voltage Modular. I don‘t even need the VST version of VCV Rack, I just launch it on the Surface Pro and it‘s controllable in my setup. Speaking of controlling it: Together with a Midi Fighter Twister from DJ Techtools as a hardware controller, this is really fun and costs only a fraction of a real modular system.
Which tablet should it be?
To the question of which tablet I would now recommend: Clearly the iPad Pro with 12“screen. But for studio use, the Surface Pro is also extremely useful, as it can outsource VST plug-ins as mentioned. VArranger, for example, offers a really good automatic accompaniment and is compatible with various style formats. The VArranger just screams for a tablet, because the touch operation makes much more sense than a mouse. If I run Adam Szabo‘s Viper plug-in on the Surface Pro, I effectively have a complete Virus TI2 in the studio, for a price that can‘t be beaten. And the tablets are also much cheaper than most synths on eBay.
Flexibility and mobility
The best feature that convinced me from the beginning is the extreme flexibility, because an iPad is not „just“another synthesizer in the setup, but a universal hardware tool. The iPad can also be a completely independent DAW if you use Cubasis or Nanostudio 2. And with that, the iPad can also be seen as a standalone workstation on the go, which is clearly more than any standalone groovebox could offer me. The only thing I miss is the haptic feedback of a hardware groovebox, but that can be solved with controllers and a tablet is almost unrivaled for on the go.