We’ve all heard about how many things there’s an app for, but here’s a new one: pro musicians making music on stage, in concert, using iPad as a brand-new source of multi-touch musical magic. Renowned keyboard player Jordan Rudess is leading the way.

While rock is full of high-profile guitar slingers, it’s a little harder to find standout keyboard players, much less one who can step up and play the dickens out of any musical genre—only venerable names like Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman come to mind. But in the last decade, one of the most prolific masters of the ivories to emerge on the scene is Jordan Rudess, a smoking keyboard player who’s also been deeply involved with all things Mac for years. He puts it more plainly: “I’ve been using a Mac since the beginning of time.” A man after our own heart!

Rudess came into the limelight largely based on his involvement with the neo prog-rock band Dream Theater, but he’s been banging on the keys since the second grade and was enrolled in a Juilliard classical piano program at the tender age of 9. These days, his interest in Apple’s tech has expanded into an intense passion for designing cool new musical tools for the iPhone and iPad. “As soon as someone came out with a piano program for the iPod touch and I put my hand down on it, there were fireworks in my brain,” he says. “I realized how totally awesome it was, and the vast possibilities for creating new musical instruments just blew me away. With a Mac, you’re not able to put your fingers down on it and play it—the multi-touch screen takes the iPad and iPhone to a whole new level.”

Anyone who rocks a keytar this awesome is obviously as cool as he is talented.

Rudess initially signed up with developer Amidio to produce JR Hexatone Pro, a unique music-creation tool with one of the most densely packed interfaces we’ve ever seen on an iPhone. But he’s since founded his own company, Wizdom Music, and delivered his first universal iPad/iPhone app, MorphWiz. It’s a new type of software instrument that could only exist on the iPad, even though these devices are typically not considered serious “tools” by professional musicians.

“I feel like most people look at these devices as ‘fun things,’ but there’s another side of it [that’s] important to those involved in the creative arts—they open the door for the next level of electronic-instrument design,” he explains. “The whole multi-touch aspect is really unique, and the iPad is really an expressive, very cool, different, forward-thinking musical instrument. There’s nothing ‘toyish’ about it—and it’s only going to get better over time.”

Rudess’s app MorphWiz ($9.99), created with iOS developer Kevin Chartier, might be the coolest musical instrument of any kind for the money. “I was inspired by the Haken Continuum (cerlsoundgroup.org/Continuum/), an advanced hardware controller that allows you to attack a note, hear that definite pitch, and slide from there to another note and intelligently ‘snap’ to the target note. MorphWiz is really smart about how it slides from note to note, and it can even happen with chords, and individual notes within chords. Another cool thing about MorphWiz is that it’s got real vibrato capabilities, a critical thing for people wanting to really make music with it.”

Rudess’s $9.99 iPad app MorphWiz uses multi-touch to let you slide from note to note.

As far as the audio quality goes, Rudess emphatically states, “We live in an age when distortion is king. And while there are some purists who will always look for the highest-end solutions for making music, I’ve started breaking out my iPad in concert with Dream Theater, and no one has complained yet!”

The visual aspect of the iPad isn’t lost on Rudess, either. “My desire was to combine the audio and visual worlds as much as possible, to work together, because in many ways they really are one thing,” he says. “How can something about the visual tie into the audio? As you play MorphWiz, you’ll see an interactive visual element change as you move your fingers and change the sound.” Given that Rudess has made a prolific career of finger-dancing, we can’t wait to see what sort of multi-touch magic he’ll conjure up in the future.

via How Pro Musicians Use the iPad to Make Sweet, Sweet Music | Mac|Life.