GeoShred Play – the entry-level version of Wizdom Music‘s innovative iOS multi-touch instrument – is available through April 17th as a free download.
The note:
“As we unite around the globe to fight this pandemic together it’s more important than ever to social distance and stay home. The team with GeoShred wants to play our part in keeping your spirits lifted and your creativity flowing, through this time of uncertainty.”
GeoShred is an expressive musical instrument with a multi-touch performance surface, coupled with an advanced physical model of a guitar. The app is a fusion of Wizdom Music’s Geo Synthesizer user interface (Jordan Rudess), and moForte’s powerful, modeled guitar and effects chain, based on the Physical Modeling research of Dr. Julius O. Smith III of Stanford/CCRMA.
Pricing and Availability
GeoShred Play is available now as a free download through April 17, 2020.
Note: A Pro Upgrade In-App purchase enables support for Preset Editing, AUv3 and MIDI/MPE In/Out.
Whew. GeoShred is one of those apps that almost makes me consider an iPad, but I’m already committed to a desktop. His iPad looks pretty recent, so it probably has a generous load capacity. You have to go the same basic route with any computer: build it to a usable peak and then think of it as basically frozen so you don’t trip over it with the Update Of Death or somethin’.
I appreciate all of the freebies and generous try-outs during the viral wave. I’m still within my own OS curve, so yeah, I’m going to buy a few things as a result. Way to inspire shut-in customers!
It works flawlessly on my iPad Air 2, which came out in late 2014. Same goes for many other AU/VSTs: there isn’t really a workload issue when working with Garageband, provided your iPad has at least 2 GB of RAM (the Air 2 does).
As Andy says, RAM is the main limitation. And there isn’t much “fragmentation”, here: it’s pretty much the same limitation for most iPads since 2014. Which also goes with the fact that most devs work well within these limitations. In other words, there are fewer perceivable differences in performance between iPad models than you’d notice on the desktop.
As for updates, the situation isn’t that dire overall. For instance, all these models since 2014 support the latest OS (iPadOS 13).
Granted, iPadOS 13 has had issues, which have been rather well-documented. The flipside is that iOS 12 is still supported quite well. A few apps do require iPadOS 13, including GarageBand and Cubasis 3. But it’s quite easy to have a very stable setup on iOS 12 with some kind of AUv3 host (AUM, apeMatrix, Audiobus 3) or DAW (including Cubasis 2) and hundreds of AUv3 plugins (including GeoShred Pro).
Another thing about iPad musicking is that the network is pretty strong and we benefit from the lack of fragmentation: we all have fairly similar setups, regardless of which iPad we have. What I mean is, if you hang out in Audiobus forums or Facebook groups about AUv3, you get tons of examples and suggestions which work on a 2014 iPad as well as on a 2020 one. That part’s very different from desktop.
If you get access to an iPad Air 2 or later, here are some of my suggestions as of free apps to try: https://montrealgia.net/2019/02/24/getting-started-with-ios-musicking-some-free-apps/
Awesome Application….gave it a whirl….fun