They’re a daily part of our smartphone-swiping lives, but touchscreens are oddly often viewed as a last-resort approach to music production. But, spurning the keyboard and mouse can make for a far more fluid control experience...

At the time of its launch, Apple’s iPad made many of us weak-at-the-knees with its promise of keyboard-free music-making. Apple’s tablet was all set to fulfil the fantasies of many of us who dreamed of a type of interfacing with our DAW akin to Tom Cruise in Minority Report – swiping, zooming and pinching our way around the music production environment of tomorrow.

For a range of reasons, that elementary change just didn’t happen. But that’s not to say that the iPad didn’t deliver in spades when it came to music-making fare over the next few years. There were inviting, touchable DAWs such as FL Studio Mobile and the tablet’s take on Garageband, surprisingly deep synths such as Korg’s Gadget 2 and Audiokit Synth One. While fluid beat machines such as AKAI’s iMPC and Fingerlab’s DM1 allowed us to build up our ideas and finger-craft our tracks wherever we were.

Many of us dreamt we’d be interfacing with our DAWs through iPads like Minority Report

However, whether it was due to the hardware limitations of tablets, or our penchant for the safety-blanket of a keyboard and mouse when it comes to long serious mixing sessions, tabletbased production failed to really supersede conventional approaches, instead flourishing as more of a flexible idea-generation or experimentation avenue.