The Landwhale - Sigh

Yesterday an interesting tweet scrolled past our feed: "New E.P. dorkiness: "Sigh" from #Denature made with #Tabletop for #ipad Listen at http://soundcloud.com/thelandwhale." Following this, we discovered that Denature was a great little EP by The Landwhale. "Sigh" is the first track:
01 Sigh by TheLandwhale

We were intrigued by this EP, as it appeared that the rest of the tracks were made on an iPad as well (in Garageband). We contacted The Landwhale and he told us about his experience making "Sigh" with Tabletop:

"Sigh" is actually the first song I've made with the app, I bought it when it first came out but hadn't really played around with it until I started working on this track.

I made "Sigh" on a plane ride home from New York a few weeks ago. Had a lot on my mind I guess. I started playing around with Tabletop as soon as the "ok to use portable electronics" announcement was made, and the entire thing was written and mostly mixed by the time I landed, about two and half hours.

I was just screwing around, exploring the devices and learning the app, started playing a beat and messing about. I saw the turntable device and the recorder device and started sampling from my iTunes library. I then assigned and pitched/played around with those few samples, so I could play the piano stabs, the drone/pad sound, and other samples.

I played them live into the Gridlok as a pattern. Once I recorded the beat and melodies as patterns on the 3 different samplers, I routed the samples into different delays and reverbs. Once I felt pretty satisfied with the track, I went to export it so I could finish the mix in Ableton or Logic.

This is where I must admit, I was hoping to be able to export the separate tracks from the mixer channel. I understand that's not possible right now, and it's not the end of the world, but would be pretty nice to have. I'm also clamoring for an iPad 2 for the increased ram and cpu power.

I ended up doing a "performance mix" the next day using the little 8 channel mixer to fade things in and out, routed into the recorder device, and that's the mix that's on the record, although I did the final mastering in Logic.

We want to thank The Landwhale for this fascinating look at how he created a track during a plane ride. Make sure to go to the Denature page and check out the whole EP!