Months pass without my having enough energy to do anything with hardware. I’ve noticed that the one thing I can still do is handle a mobile device. The Orba MIDI controller has been a roaring success, it works well with my mobile phone and I’m beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel.
I’ve got a DAW that I’m pretty happy with (Presonus Studio One) but it’s simply not portable so while I’m still learning the basics of DAW composition and mixing is less than ideal. So I went in search of a DAW that would work on my mobile phone.
I’m still open to suggestions, but meanwhile my favourite is Roland Zenbeats. I bought a device unlock for that, which opens up lots of resources, but honestly I could have been fairly happy with the free version. It’s not a toy. It’s available for both Android and iOS (and you can apparently run it on Windows and OSX but I think that’s a comparatively expensive licence.)
Edit: the Zenbeats YouTube channel is good as an introduction.
There is much to learn. The main advantage here is that I can always have a functioning DAW with my current work in my pocket. Any time I do have the energy, it’s there with me. Here are a few screenshots showing the user interface as it appears on my phone screen (Moto G5S).
I’ll try to keep a log of my progress in this thread. Anybody else learning composition or mixing using any DAW, or with any advice, please post here.