A number of you might be wondering What On God’s Earth is happening to Alert! Safety Boom! at the moment. It’s been a while since we updated you with any news and I thought I could take the time to clear it up.
It’s all my fault.
The beta build has been up and running for a while now and, barring a few minor tweaks and amendments, is pretty much ready to go. Ready to go without the music, that is. This has been due to a number of minor to major annoyances at my end but, sparing you most of the details, massive flooding has caused me to have to move most of my studio equipment into storage.
This fact has had a rather detrimental effect on my musical output somewhat and, although I have been able to produce the odd tune here and there we just haven’t been able to make things that are properly A!SB!ish enough just yet.
There has, however, been a rather awesome development due to this sorry turn of events. This being that my lack of instruments – coupled with the boredom that obviously ensues from said lack of instruments – led to a number of interesting discussions with Canis about the possibility of producing musical devices on the mighty iPad.
Currently, there are a load of synths and sample set apps available for the iPhone (and, of course, increasingly the iPad). As a producer and musician I can safely say that the bulk of these fall into two camps: the first being cute toys and the second being emulations of classic synths with poorer sound, a poorer interface and no really useful IO. Both of these are not really useful for anyone with a real interest in music production and this to us is really sad. The iPad is a truly unique device, one that could be used to create genuinely intuitive audio controllers and unique sound creation tools.
The thing is, though, there really aren’t any out there. I’m not going to litter this post with spoilers, that’s for Canis to do when he’s good and ready, but suffice to say that that might be all about to change very soon.
On top of that great teaser is that in the next few weeks (hopefully) my studio is about to be rebuilt and work will begin on A!SB! anew! Just goes to show that good things can indeed come from having my home destroyed… and it costing a fortune to repair… I think I’m going to go cry now.