Krosswindz’s latest album Jhora Palok has given the four guys and a gal in the band plenty of reason to smile. “We have already received our first royalty cheque from CD Baby USA (online music store) for Jhora Palok and there is another cheque on the way... we are thrilled,” smiles guitarist Vikramjit ‘Tuki’ Banerjee. A 
t2 chat.

Your album has tons of iPad tones...

Yes, the opening track Lonamati has a synth arpeggio pattern running throughout that is the app Figure made by the famous software developer Propellerhead. The second song Jhora palok has a synth sequence at the very end interlude which is from the very popular iPad app GarageBand. The song Jokhon moner kone has a synth pad right through, from the app Alchemy. 

Is this a first for you?

Yes, this is the first time I have used the iPad for a proper recording project. In the past I’ve used the auto upload feature on the Figure app to upload compositions to SoundCloud.

Why use these iPad tones?

I felt the need to use these iPad tones as they were not freely available on the PC format and also it was way much more fun setting up these sounds via the touchscreen on the iPad! It decreased the load enormously on the CPU of my main PC machine as I was hosting so many sounds outside the PC. The iPad has allowed musicians like me to host a lot of our virtual sound sources on a machine outside our PC.

What are the high points of the new album?

The emergence of a new progressive psychedelic sound which we have never recorded before. A fresh new compositional style has emerged with some very unique songwriting and quirky arrangements. I love the generous use of acoustic guitars and nylon-string guitars, especially in the opening track Lonamati. I am also very pleased with the mixing and mastering of the album as it translates beautifully across all music systems including laptop speakers.

 

From making songs on the fly to recording a band, apps can do it all, says Tuki

•For practising guitar I love Amplitube; it’s a very powerful guitar amplifier and effects emulation software

• I dig the Alchemy synth app for its ambient sounds

• The TF7 synth app is great for getting some odd textures

• The Yamaha setlist designer is a handy app to make a bunch of different songlists for different gigs

• GarageBand is an all-rounder and can pretty much cover all the bases of music composition sequencing and synthesis too

• Launchpad is probably the most fun of all the music apps for its loop feature and making songs up on the fly by triggering samples from the onboard pads like a drum machine sampler

• The most professional and most impressive of all is the Auria app which is a 48-track audio recording digital studio. It can basically replace what the computer now does for us musicians... that is record a full band to a multitude of tracks and then mix, add effects and then do the final mix

Cactus guitarist Ritaprabha Ratul Ray’s new EP Project Dreamcatcher (drops later this  month) was recorded in three rooms. “I recorded certain vocal tracks, all the guitar parts and programmed the drum and bass grooves in my home studio Area 51.0. The keyboard parts were done in keyboardist Sudipto Banerjee’s home studio. Some vocal parts were recorded in Bolpur, for which I had to carry my mobile recording set-up and drive down to Bolpur,” smiled the 27-year-old guitarist. A t2 chat... 

Tell us about your new EP... 

The songs on the EP Project Dreamcatcher are very rustic and earthy in nature and it was quite a challenge to place them in an urban context, keeping the soul of the songs intact. The soundscape has influences of hip hop,  ambient electronic music, funk, lounge music.... Madhubanti Bagchi and Raju Das Baul have sung on the EP.

What kind of apps do you use to play music? 

I use Logic Pro 9 (Logic Pro 9, Ableton Live 8 are professional recording and music production apps; one can buy them from the App Store) as the central point of my music production endeavours. Apart from that, Cubase 7 is also my choice of a DAW (digital audio workstation), especially for the post-production procedure. Ableton Live 8 is my choice of a DAW while playing live with backing tracks.

Which ones have you used on your new album? 

During the initial phase of producing the songs, I programmed and recorded all the sounds on Logic Pro. Eventually as the project progressed and the directions became more specific I used Cubase for some of its signature functionality. 

Which other music apps do you use?

I use DM1 as a drum machine app on my phone (iPhone 6). You can compute grooves on the go with a variety of tones to select from. Since the app is on my phone I usually pair it with the Amplitube app to practise along drum grooves. 

Arindam Chatterjee