I realized I never had posted this. This was the trailer I rolled for last year’s CODAME Art and Tech Festival. It used elements from Starpause’s sample pack and some art from Vicente Montelongo. The background music was by yours truly.

Rocking the Showdown SF with The Use (Michael Durek), Jack Hertz, Bitwise, and ANI. We’ll be massaging your ear drums Sunday, March 31 starting at 8:00 PM. (More details also on reverbnation.com.)

Another Mobile Music Meetup is here and we have 4 artists:

• Timeheater
• StarPause
• Mushen
• ANI

We’ll start the music at 7:00 PM at Il Pirata in the Mission.

Yes, it arrived! The new DUO-CAPTURE mk2 from Roland. Now my setup is even smaller and more portable—I’ve finally gotten to not requiring a power supply. The big iPad 4 now runs my synthesizer/sequencer and the iPad Mini runs the realtime effects.

I’ve been searching for months now for an audio interface ever since I got the LiveFX app from elephantcandy. I had been trying out the IK Multimedia iRig to capture inbound audio into the iPad Mini running LiveFX, but that’s really set up for guitars. I needed something with a clean line input, and I was really happy to hear about the mk2 after reading all the NAMM coverage.

At the beginning of March the mk2 started arriving at dealers and I immediately placed my order. Of course, no reviews existed at the time so I bought it pretty much on faith. It turns out to be quite the awesome little box.

The mk2 conencts just fine to the iPads when using a USB-to-Lightning camera connector. On the bottom of the unit there are two switches: a computer/tablet selector and a sample rate selector (44.1KHz, 48KHz). Setting the unit in tablet mode, it was ready to go after plugging it in. The unit itself feels cheap and it weighs almost nothing, but it seems like it could take a bit of abuse. The two volume sliders on the top control input and output volume, and that turns out to be a necessity when using a headset. The front panel has line in/out and it seems to have really low latency and a fairly clean DAC.

I’ve now used it for probably about 3 hours total and so far it has been very stable. I think for musicians on the go this is a pretty good lightweight piece of hardware, and especially for iPad users it feels like it is light on the battery. I’ll be trying it out in a live set tomorrow, so we’ll see how it holds up for real!

New toy coming soon … but will it blend work? I’ve been retooling my setup a little to see if I can get away with a 100% iPad-only solution. There are a lot of interesting new apps coming out that solve the problems of capturing and transforming incoming audio. I’m excited to see what can be done with a new audio interface that’s built for iOS.

An article on DJ Tech Tools about Beardyman’s quest to build his own looping + effects performance platform, “The Beardytron 5000 mkII: Building Beardyman’s Ultimate Live-Production System“.

Apparently there are some who are amazed this was possible. I know this because of a small SnapGuide I put up:

Check out How to Connect a MIDI USB Keyboard to an iPad by Amy Lee on Snapguide.

It really is just that easy. The hard part is making sure that the iPad can supply enough power to run the device. Someone mentioned the iRig KEYS from IK Multimedia. I think this looks like a pretty decent proposition: 37 keys, sustain pedal input, 2 wheels. I have not had a chance to use it myself so I can’t attest to how the build quality is. (I will say that I’ve tried and owned several devices that have not stood up to my abuse—I would pay top dollar for a small but hardy piece of equipment.)

A short clip taken by Eesa at The End Is Here Party in San Francisco, CA on December 21, 2012.

The end is almost here! Get your ticket to hear some great artists a talk about the end of the world with Carter Phipps. Get $2 off with the code ELECTRO.