Rounik Sethi at MacProVideo.com recently spoke with DREAM THEATER keyboardist Jordan Rudess about his work with the band, iPads, and Geo Synthesizer. An excerpt from the interview is available below:

RS: I really enjoyed sampling and bringing it into Geo Synthesizer. It is so easy to launch SampleWiz, record an external sound, and then load it in Geo. I was stunned that it felt quicker than sampling in Logic even with the dozens of key commands programmed into my finger tips!

JR: "I love the idea of things being incredibly user-friendly. Most of us have gone from having many hardware synths (in my case a room full of hardware) to a computer that pretty much does it all. My beautiful keyboards are sitting there mainly as museum pieces! I love them still, but really when I go into my studio I call up Ivory, Omnisphere, Alchemy and some Native Instruments stuff and I’m working! MIDI... What’s a MIDI cable? I’m starting to forget what it looks like.

When we were producing Geo Synthesizer Rob made a wonderful MIDI Controller (as it doesn’t only have onboard sounds) that you can plug into almost anything whether it’s your computer or hardware. I said to Rob that the MIDI thing is wonderful but people are going to want to just play this app. I don’t want to depend on people connecting to a wireless network or figuring out what interface to use to connect to their synth. It’s all great, but when we start talking about that we’re talking about another level of user. More and more I really like it when things just work."

RS: So what are your five favorite iPad apps in any genre?

JR: I’m an app-oholic, for sure. Well, I’ve really been enjoying the new Animoog app. I’m also a big fan of this company called Sound Trends. They have an app called Meta DJ which shakes up the DJ world with some cool stuff. Integrating a lot of their technology you can do things like bring in an iTunes song and quickly change the tempo of it to match an onboard synthesizer. You can coordinate many different worlds inside this one app. I just love what they’re doing.

On the video/photography side I’ve been using an app called PhotoToaster lately. That’s super and another one I really like is Big Lens that allows you to do depth of field really easily using multitouch. OK, There are lots of great apps, but another that springs to mind is Vocal Shapes which is simple and beautiful representation of audio with a visual display. It uses some cool mathematics to generate the visual patterns based on what’s happening in the audio domain.

Go to this location for the complete interview.

As previously reported, Rudess recently launched the new Wizdom Music website here. As the band's webmaster put it, "a really cool resource for info on all of his apps." One such app is the Geo Synthesizer, a musical instrument and MIDI controller. A collaboration of Wizdom Music's Rudess and Kevin Chartier (MorphWiz, SampleWiz) and Rob Fielding (Mugician), Geo Synthesizer is an incredibly expressive musical instrument specifically created for a multitouch surface. Rudess has issued Part 3 of his Geo Synthesizer tutorial, which can be found below. Parts 1 and 2 are available at the bottom of the page.

Rudess says: "Since touching a preliminary piano keyboard on an iPhone screen and realizing the amazing potential for musical expression on a multitouch device, I have been inspired to create next-generation musical instruments for iOS. Geo Synthesizer is a dream come true in many ways. It is the fastest truly playable iOS instrument that I have put my hands on to date. I can fly through the range of an instrument while expanding on the kind of advanced pitch control we introduced in MorphWiz. As someone who grew up with synthesizers, I can tell you that pitch bending has never been this good!

"Geo features many of my custom sounds and in addition, Geo is also a MIDI controller, so you can use it with any external midi instrument or virtual MIDI. Virtual MIDI allows you to control an app running in the background on the same device! A great feature of Geo is that internally and externally we send independent voices on each note played, so as an example, you can pitch bend one note and not the other, or add unique expression on every note! I can't wait to see the YouTube videos of all of you guys rocking out with Geo Synthesizer!!!"

Read more here.