On vacation without your DAW computer you can’t really work on your mixes or recorded songs. You can, however, work on songwriting. I have an acoustic guitar where I am, so I can noodle around creating new riffs. I don’t have a drumkit though. And honestly, not being a drummer I’m not sure it would make a loot of good. I usually program my drums in the midi editor in Reaper (and add some fills and cool patterns from Superior Drummer).
So what I need is a sequencer with a drumkit. Enter Drumtrack HD for iPad. It does exactly what I want. You add patterns and then arrange them into a song. When you are done you can export either a midi file to use with your regular VST drumkit on your computer, or export as a sound file via mail or to SoundCloud.
Drumtrack is really easy to use and has a lot of settings and options, like quantized recording and replacing samples, if you want to be more advanced. It’s a bit pricey for an iOS app and will cost you 75 SEK ($10), around a regular working lunch :-). For a travelling musician this might be an invaluable tool.
Here’s a very quick sample made in about 10 minutes (including learning the app from scratch):
[soundcloud url=”http://soundcloud.com/osirisguitar/drumtest”]
