Introduction to iOS Music Production Brown Bag

I work at Odecee. It is a technology consultancy company with a difference. They understand that people are their main and only asset, so they tend to hire smart IT professionals, pay them well, and give them cool toys.

Every week they run brown bags in their office. A “brown bag” means a lunchtime presentation where attendants are supposed to bring their lunches (in brown paper bags, hence “brown bag”). Yet, Odecee also provides catering for those events.

We have monthly sessions on web development, DevOps, mobile development, and “kitchen sink” (tech topics which don’t fit into any other category). However, employees are invited to speak on any other topics they are passionate about, whatever drives them, makes them tick.

I myself recently took an opportunity to present a brown bag on the basics of iOS music production. The reason I wanted to talk about music to a technical audience is because engineers often see the world through a lens of their technical skills. They like no one can benefit from a creative freedom music gives them. For engineers music, especially electronic music, is a perfect creative media. It is technical but, at the same time, it is unstructured. It obeys laws of physics but musicians don’t need to rely on formulas to create.

I hold a view that everyone can be a musician. Making music should be fun, the tools should be easily available and easy to use. Unfortunately, it is often perceived as something highly complex and expensive, only accessible to a few chosen ones. That point of view is reinforced by a current state of desktop music production tools. But fortunately for us, Apple delivered yet another mobile revolution and this one passed mostly unnoticed by the general public - the revolution in mobile music production. As with many other areas, iPhones and iPads made music making what it should be - easy, fun and accessible.

Here are the slides of the presentation.

My goal with this presentation is, quite simply, change the world, one man at a time: if after that even one person picked up a music instrument, whether a real one or one in an iOS app, and made a tune then my job here is done.

You can listen to some of my music on my Soundcloud account. Track Cold Space / Sparkling Nebula listed there was almost entirely made on iPad in Nanostudio, only the final mixing was done on a desktop.