Recording - January 2015 - 44

If you've been wanting an easy way to jam with your
iPhone without compromising on quality, the
GuitarConnect Pro offers great sound at an approachable price.

Focusrite iTrack Pocket and Impact
$99.99 and free; www.focusrite.com

stereo from the onboard mic, in mono from the guitar input, or in mono with
a mix of the mic and the guitar.
Impact has some basic but usable effects built in: amp modeling with
three presets and simple controls for overdrive and reverb or delay while
tracking guitar, and a chain of three effects for "mastering" after a
recording's done. There's an Enhancer, your choice of Doubler/Huge
Chorus/Big Room, and a Compressor. There are simple "more" knobs
for the Enhancer and Compressor, and the middle effect can simply be
turned on or off. Five presets are provided that you can tweak: Acoustic
and Electric Guitar, Guitar + Vocal, and Male and Female Vocal. A simple video edit system lets you cut out the start and end of the clip (where
you're turning the iTrack Pocket on and off), and then you can share to
email or direct to YouTube or Vimeo right from the app. It's easy to learn
to use and you can get surprisingly good-looking and sounding results if
you're careful.
Being careful, by the way, occupies much of the online user manual.
Focusrite explains that you don't get to overdub, edit, clean up your visuals, or isolate your audio, so you need to be set up in a room that sounds
good and experiment with placement for maximum audio and visual
quality. The iTrack Pocket will capture your sound, warts and all, but if
you give it a good performance in a good room, your followers on
YouTube will get to see and hear your work at its best.

Cakewalk ScratchPad
$3.99, expansion packs $2.99; scratchpad.cakewalk.com

Focusrite offers a lot of great iOS recording solutions,
but the iTrack Pocket is something quite specialized...
and quite special. It's a stereo microphone and guitar
input device that's optimized for recording "selfie" performance videos for YouTube.
The iTrack Pocket is literally pocket-sized, weighing just
a few ounces. It's an angled cradle for an iPhone 5 or 6
with a forward-facing stereo mic array, an input gain
thumbwheel on the left, a 1/4" Hi-Z input jack (input
impedance unknown) on the right, and a detachable
Lightning cable on the back for hooking up to your
iPhone. That's all there is to it: you plug it in and it works.
But with what? That's where Focusrite's new app Impact
comes in. While the iTrack Pocket can record into almost
any audio app (and comes with basic directions for Apple
GarageBand), the free Impact app is set up with a very
simple workflow for capturing videos with great sound. It
shows you your video as you're recording, with a dual
peak level meter on the left of the screen and a running
waveform display at the bottom that's white for playback
and turns red while recording. You can select to record in
44

RECORDING January 2015

The iPad is a great way to create rhythm tracks and beats. A cleverly
designed app will provide the user with a way to layer loops, manipulate them, stop and start them easily and in a musical way, add effects
to them, and assemble them into finished tracks, all while taking maximum advantage of the iPad's multitouch screen. Cakewalk's ScratchPad
app does just that, in a way that's easy to learn and fun to play.
As you can see in the screenshot, ScratchPad lets you place up to nine
audio loops in a 3 x 3 grid. Each loop can have its own settings for level,
pan, loop/one-shot play, retrigger, and when and how it stops (on the
beat, on the bar line, etc.). Each loop also has a lowpass or highpass filter whose cutoff and resonance can be played in real time with an XY pad.
Each of the nine sounds has a circular expression pad that can be used
to manipulate the sound in real time. Touch the arrows and you're shown
the waveform, which can be scratched back and forth in real time; the
upper segments activate four kinds of stutter, and the lower segment slows
and stops audio.
Each column of three pads has its own global start/stop and slowdown controls so you can launch entire sections of your array at once;
a Record function lets you record the audio resulting from all of your
movements and save the result as an audio file to export. A columnbased browser lets you select and audition loops, use AudioCopy and
AudioPaste to import and export your own loops, save sets of loops as

http://www.focusrite.com http://scratchpad.cakewalk.com

Recording - January 2015

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