This short music clip was an exercise in learning several creative tools. I began in Avid Pro Tools Sketch, the clip-based, non-linear iPadOS app similar to Ableton or Logic Pro’s Live Loops. Its deep integration with Pro Tools lets you start on the iPad and seamlessly finish in a full desktop session.

After sketching some ideas and building a simple arrangement on the iPad, I created a Pro Tools session on my computer and opened the same Sketch file from iCloud. From there, I simply dragged the arrangement scenes into the Edit Window, automatically creating new audio tracks and clips.

I then performed an additional top-line keyboard part on a new track in Pro Tools, using ANA 2 (Sonic Academy / Slate Digital) virtual synthesizer instrument, and mixed the project down to a 44.1 kHz, 16-bit WAV file, with separate passes for sample-rate and bit-depth conversion.

The initial grayscale waveform file animation is from the native iOS audio file player on my phone; I imported the mixed-down audio file to my phone, played it, and took a screen recording while it played, creating a video file. The visual effects were added in TikTok; briefly posting it allows you to save a copy of the processed video locally without any watermark or logo; you can then delete the public TikTok post if desired.

Finally, I assembled the video in DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic Design, including replacing the audio from the screen recording-TikTok workflow, with the original, full-resolution audio from Pro Tools, and rendering to an H.264 codec, .MP4 video file, for content distribution. Sketch 23 is published on Zora as an ERC-20 token on Base Chain, tradable now on Zora, Uniswap, and other DEXs — with Coinbase support coming soon.

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