14 DAY TRIAL // Cultofmac scored an interview with the atypical musician Tom Freeman, who recently launched his newly finished music album created 100% on the iPhone. The album, iMatik, addresses the experimental electronic soundscape listeners and features 25 music tracks. The album is available for sale on Freeman’s personal site.
Freeman works as a sound engineer. Everything started when he began to play with the apps he had previously installed on his iPhone, “just to have them” because, Cultofmac notes, Freeman usually likes to browse on app software features.
Freeman claims that the quality of the sound from the iPhone is comparable to the quality one might get from specialized hardware synthesizers. “It turned out really cool, the sound from the iPhone really impresses,” Freeman tells Cultofmac.
Starting with Izotope’s iDrum app, as the baseline sound-editing software for his album, and continuing with Sound Warp, an application that allows the creation of freestyle sound, the source notes that Freeman added and mixed self-created sounds to the workflow, aided by almost five music software apps. With Flare Scratch, he elaborated the turntable features and also used iSkream to create new, modified sounds, the interview reveals. Beat issues were managed with the BeatMaker app.
There is one thing, however, that Freeman wasn’t able to achieve just by using his iPhone and this is the overdub and the final mixing of the tracks. These final processes were exported and performed on a digital audio workstation, the source concludes.
“iMatik is a fresh DJ mixtape full of phat beats, DJ scratching, and live synths, made completely on an iPhone. Everything was made using apps available from the iTunes app store, such as Beatmaker, iDrum, Flare, Jasuto, etc. The parts were programmed over the course of a few months, in places including hotels, motels, the beach, bars, and anywhere else you would bring a phone. While this initially started just as a way to have fun and do some music ‘on the road,’ it transformed into an awesome psychedelic hip hop and electronic music experience,” Tom Freeman says, defining the newly released album.