Could You Score A Movie With An iPhone?

This video, via Brice Beasley, offers an audio demo of his Basement Cinematics presets for LayR Multi Timbral Synthesizer iOS synthesizer.

The patch collection is designed for creating cinematic atmospheres. 

LayR is a massively polyphonic, multi-timbral synthesizer for iPad and iPhone. On modern 64-bit devices, it can deliver up to 256 voices of multi-layered sounds.

Could you score a movie with it? You’d probably want have some other gear to use with it! But Basement Cinematics does a great job of showing off what’s possible with LayR, running on a recent iPad or iPhone.

Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Pricing and Availability

LayR is available now for US $19.99 in the App Store. The Basement Cinematic patches will be available in a free update.

20 thoughts on “Could You Score A Movie With An iPhone?

  1. Obviously a provocative title – but an iPhone or iPad offers WAY more processing power than most of the classic digital synths that people do use.

    So there’s no reason why you couldn’t use one.

    For my money, an iPad plus an old MIDI keyboard is a great combo and offers a lot more power than any budget synth. Add Animoog and the Wolfgang Palm iOS synths and it’s killer box, with a great interface.

  2. Hyperbole.

    You could USE an iPhone whilst scoring a file, to talk to the director, for example.

    If a person had only an iPhone, and got a gig scoring a film and then they said to the director, “How about I only use my phone to score this film? We could put a disclaimer at the beginning of the film about how the score is all iOS synths.”

    The director would probably say, “Yea, we’re going to go in a different direction. Thanks for meeting with me.”

  3. Yes, imo almost everything is possible for all
    iphonic zombies
    who pray the whole day to their idol
    whilst drinking the best coffee from starbucks
    and eating best rolls from subways 😉

    *scnr*

  4. being a director myself, i do not care at all what gear a musician uses. it is just about getting the job done. period.

  5. the question should always be, would you wan to …, the answer should always be no as you’ll have to get it into a proper DAW at some point anyway so you might as well just start off in one.

    1. Exactly!

      Depending on the film, you could do some sequencing and some synth stuff on the iPad. If you needed good samples, what would you do? Use IK SampleTank?! Don’t make me laugh. Those samples suck!

      If a person offered me a scoring gig and needed symphonic sounds and said do it on a phone, I’d say: “Hard pass.”

      It’s not a matter of “talent” or even what kind of processing a phone has. It’s a matter of workflow. You need a DAW, you need to sync to picture, you need lots of tracks, plugins, VI’s, you need LOTS of disk space.

      Ok, I’m taking this click-bait WAY too seriously.

      But any kids following this thread, don’t try this at home!!!

  6. Some of the sounds in this video are fantastic and show just how good some synths are on iOS these days. This is masterful synth programming and video is shot and edited very well too. Well done.

  7. In the same way as some movies were made on a budget with non-pro video equipment… u could do the same with the soundtrack. Some people like the challenge of creating the most with the least. Creative and open-minded. Some also like the challenge of proving other people wrong because other people often try to impose rules for all aspects of life. Some of those rules are down to conformity and lack of imagination.

  8. Tangerine (1995) winner of film awards filmed on 3 iPhone 5s.

    Sooo yesss easy peasy : gimmee iPhone 5s 128GB + iOS software + audio interfaces + midi controllers.

  9. Sometimes when I’m bored I’ll use the Moodscaper app on an iOS device to customize tv shows in real-time — so it wouldn’t take too much effort to add some decent atmospherics to movies with a mobile device and good apps, and who knows, maybe it’s already been done and not publicized, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell, lol…

  10. This is amazing! I love the textures and the detuned feel of the tracks (normally digital synths tend to sound too perfectly tuned to me)

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