Tag: music

I Made a Synth Keyboard

Just for fun, I made my own synthesizer keyboard app for the iPad and iPhone. It’s all homebrew stuff. I created my own oscillator and ADSR envelope routines and just rely on the OS for audio sample callbacks. It can play back any of the following waves: sine, square, triangle, sawtooth, pulse, and noise. If you’re familiar with old-school game and computer systems, like the NES and C64, you’ll recognize some of these sounds.

I’ve previously demoed the synth music player, which uses tracked files for note playback. This is the first time I’ve hooked up the synth code to a UI system so that you can play music directly.

This keyboard runs on iPhone and iPad. Here are a couple of screenshots.

iPhone:

Photo Apr 23, 11 07 17 PM

iPad:
Photo Apr 23, 23 06 09

And here’s a demo of me playing with the app on the iPad:

The Like cover Will You Love Me Tomorrow

In this fantastic clip, L.A.-based band The Like cover a classic by The Shirelles.

The Like manage to pull off a faux-mod, 60s feel on their latest album, which I suspect was helped along by producer Mark Ronson who has a love for that era’s sounds. It definitely helps that they’re cute and likely helped by a stylist. Judging by the comments in this Refinery29 article about the band, they did not always look and sound this way, much to the chagrin of some long-time fans. If you ask me, it works.

Image from Refinery29 article.