I've been proselytizing about the wonders of working with an iPad in my sound design career for years. More than just an excuse to get a new Apple product every few years (which admittedly it is), my creativite output and productivity have increased 10 fold with this device. As a tool in the studio, an iPad isn't necessarily cheap, but thes apps all clock in under $30. Compared to stand alone soft synths and plugins, all of these are a steal. Here are my favorite apps and some ways I like to utilize them.
A recent challenge had me wanting to create some new writhing/wriggling/squishing sounds. I dug up some very old recordings I had done of my mouth when it was really dry. They were decent recordings, but by themselves they really only work for exactly what they are, a character opening and closing a very dry mouth. I knew there was a lot of good texture and variance in there, but the performance was all spread out. I could spend my time chopping it up and trying to make something of it in editorial, but I decided to break out a new tool in my arsenal.
Samplr is an app for the iPad that I recently discovered. It's a multi-mode sampler that you can record directly into (useful for on the fly recordings) or import directly into from a variety of sources (I'm using dropbox). As an iPad app, Samplr is inherently touch based, which is what makes it so powerful.
