Recording - February 2015 - 56

Korg Gadget

By Devon Brent

Korg calls Gadget a "Music Synthesizer Studio." With up to 17 synthesizers and drum machines plus a nice built-in sequencer, Gadget is
quite the powerful studio app.
World tour
Korg decided to name its drum machines and synthesizers after cities
around the world. Gadget has three drum machines: London, Amsterdam,
and Tokyo. The twelve synthesizers are Marseille, Chicago, Wolfsburg,
Berlin, Phoenix, Dublin, Miami, Chiang Mai, Helsinki, Kiev, Brussels, and
Kingston. New to version 1.0.3 were two in-app purchases, a loop slicer
called Abu Dhabi and a sampling rhythm box called Bilbao. Just as we went
to press, Korg released a new virtual instrument app called Module, which
includes five "Gadgetized" versions of its keyboards for use within Gadget.
Each drum machine and synthesizer has its own particular strengths.
For example, Kingston is a polyphonic chip synthesizer that makes 8bit like sound effects. Marseille is a PCM sample playback synth that
runs the gamut of typical General MIDI synth sounds: pianos, organs,
keyboards, strings, choirs, guitars, and more. While most of the drum
machines and synthesizers offer their own one-trick synthesis pony features, they do pull off some fabulous tricks.
Sequence, mix, export and share
The sequencer is arguably Gadget's best feature. MIDI data is broken up into Scenes, each of which can have a length of 1 to 16 bars.
You can also adjust the time signature for the Scene from 1/1 all the
way up to 32/16 and can use any beat count value in between. Each
instrument has its own separate track within the Scene. If you have two
tracks, with Track One being one bar in length and Track Two is four
bars in length, you can set the one bar track to play in loop mode or
just do a 1-Shot playback for the whole Scene.
Editing within the Scene is done piano-roll style within a typical quantized
grid. Thankfully, the grid is merely a placement tool, and not a hard and fast
placement of every note. The grid is adjustable from 1/2 to 1/64 note divisions
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RECORDING February 2015

and can be set to do triplets. You can adjust the grid after entering your piano note roll details, and the notes already placed
will stay in position. This lets you, for example, make a triplet in
a bar at the beginning of the measure, but easily put in straight
16th notes after the triplets. If the thought of quantizing every
note turns your stomach, fear not; you can switch quantize off
and move, lengthen or shorten any note however you like with
a tap and drag of the finger.
Once you complete your Scene, you can mute, clear,
or copy your Scene to a new Scene, or copy a Track into
another Track in your project. From there, you chain all
of your Scenes in order to make a song.
Along the bottom of the interface is the mixer, which
allows you to individually control pan, reverb send levels, volume, and set solo or mute for the whole track, and
adjust the master reverb and limiter. Once you're happy
with your track within a project, you can Freeze the track
to free up CPU power on your iPad if you so choose.
If this still isn't enough control, version 1.0.3 of
Gadget allows you to export your tracks to audio into
Ableton Live! If you're happy with your song the way it
is, you can export the whole mix or individual tracks
directly to Dropbox, or via iTunes sharing on the Mac or
PC. Gadget also sports the AudioCopy and Audiobus 2
feature sets, so you can use your tracks in your other
favorite iPad apps as well.
In use
When I initially got Gadget, I wanted to see how easy it
was to use on the iPad itself. Without reading the manual, I
managed to create a respectable 8-Scene song, complete
with bass line, chords, and a drum track, in about 30 minutes.
I found editing and moving MIDI data to be easy and intuitive.
I was also very happy to discover just how darn good
Gadget's instruments sounded. From the variety of drums
within London, to the synth leads in Berlin, to the breadth
of PCM samples within Marseille, it all sounded amazing for an app on the iPad. Each instrument has a good
number of very usable presets that show off each synth's
strengths quite well.
I also found out track count was heavily dependent on
which iPad you have. While the minimum requirements
are an iPad 2, expect to be able to pull off a limited 5
tracks without freeze and 8 with freeze. Those of you
lucky enough to have the iPad Air can expect 20-25
tracks real time, with 30-35 tracks when frozen. My iPad
3 couldn't even pull off the 9-track demo song, Gadget
World Tour, unless I froze a few of the heavier-duty tracks
up front. That falls in line with what the iPad 3 is listed to
be able to handle: 8 live or 12 frozen tracks.
I tried pulling Gadget into my MIDI studio. Gadget
was able to recognize my M-Audio Uno MIDI interface
(note for first-time users-you must have the interface up
and running before starting Gadget) and I was able to
play Gadget's instruments on my MIDI keyboard.
However, once connected to MIDI, the Play and Record

Recording - February 2015

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