DRUMline spoke to Jordan Rudess of progressive metal giants DREAM THEATER at this year’s NAMM (National Association Of Music Merchants) show in Anaheim, California about his Geo Synthesizermusical instrument and MIDI controller. You can now watch the chat below.
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.
Upon Geo Synthesizer‘s initial release in late 2011, Jordan stated about the app: “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!”