Modstep Is Here To Turn Your Dusty First-Gen iPad Into a Sick Audio Workstation

The corporations behind our devices are only getting better and better at erasing their own product histories. The term is planned obsolescence and it's by-now built into how we even think about consumer technology. The smart-phone isn't merely old in the sense of having relatively limited capabilities and features, it has been intentionally targeted by its maker for irrelevance. It is in this way that a brand-new device with perfectly capable specifications for many if not all useful tasks can be rendered as junk.

Modstep (via Create Digital Music) offers something different. The audio app marries its features not to (or exclusively to) the latest and greatest sixth generation iPad, but to the iPad 1. From what I can tell it manages to do this while offering a deeper set of capabilities than many or most comparable iPad instruments. Which makes sense because, well, even the first iPad was and still is an incredibly capable machine.

And the big secret is that the demands of making electronic music have not increased in proportion to the increasing capabilities of gear. Crafty people are making music with Arduinos now, and in terms of audio processing, that's about the equivalent of making music with a TI-85 calculator. The iPad circa 2010 was a rocketship.

Modstep goes for $20, which is on the middle-high end for iOS music-making apps, but is still on the might-as-well-be-free end of things for audio production equipment in general.