Apple builds with Erykah on her new creative process that includes Garage Band, a MacBook and her Home studio.

“Making this album at home felt good,” Badu says. “I felt relaxed. I didn’t feel any pressure at all. I took my time. And in taking my time, things happened so quickly. I know that’s strange, but that’s how it happened. I didn’t have to go through the hustle and bustle and fuss of finding another engineer. I have a home studio, but I didn’t use it that much, because I was able to maneuver things by myself on the Mac. In four months, I had three albums—seventy-something songs and 20 to 50 more ideas.”

For New Amerykah, Badu laid freestyle vocals over tracks from producer 9th Wonder, who collaborated with producer James Poyser. “9th Wonder would send me a track and I would put some vocals on it, put a tambourine on it or something. Then 9th Wonder would IM it to James Poyser, who would put some keys on it. Poyser would IM it back to me, and I’d write a hook. I’d send it all to Mike Chavarria, and he would dump everything to two-inch tape to get a nice warm analog sound.”

Read the rest here.

After the last post about making music on the iPhone, I decided to to a search and I came across two nifty little iPhone Apps that actually let you make beats within the iPhone itself. The first is called mpc500 and looks amazing! (See image above on the left). It has 9 pads and I think you can even sequence with it. You can use all your own sounds and even load them in from iTunes. Sounds DOPE. The second one is called BeatPhone (which is on the right) and it looks pretty promising with much of the same features as the mpc500 except it even has a single octave keyboard controller built in. They both look like solid Apps (for what they are) and far easier to install than the manual concept I discussed earlier but it does require a slight hack to get it popping. Again, there’s now way I would use this to make something serious though I could probably get away with some D4L type joints — easy. This would definitely come in handy when you just need to lay down a quick idea on the spot. Surely it beats leaving wack beat box voice messages for yourself.

BeatPhone Example Video (Using the old interface)

I’m not exactly sure why anybody would actually want to do this with their phone but I guess its pretty cool to know that you COULD if you wanted to. For me it’s yet another incentive to go ahead and cop an iPhone. Read the instructions here. Essentially what Cesare Marilungo has done here is figured out a way to use the touch screen censors on the iPhone as midi controllers. From there you can set it up to trigger sounds on your Mac or PC. By no means is this easy to setup. Looks like you really gotta know what your doing to get it working.