If you've ever played Gears of War 2 (who hasn't), or watched Desperate Housewives (we know you secretly love Mrs Van De Kamp), then chances are you've heard music composed by Pieter A. Schlosser from PaaxMusic in Los Angeles.

Pieter's been in the music business for the last five years working on a whole lot of tunes for film, TV and gaming. From CSI New York to composing in "French" for The Sims 3, he's got a wealth of experience in this field and, must be mentioned, he's an avid reader of TUAW too.

When Pieter got in touch with us regarding our 'Count The Beats' series, and sent us the above picture of his studio, suffice to say that the TUAW offices descended into a flurry of excitement (papers flying in the air and everything). What can we say, we love a picture of an inspiring setup.

The logical next step was to sit down with Pieter and talk shop. Read on to find out how the complexities of this mighty setup come together, how the iPhone works as a part of the composing journey, a little bit on DAWs, the "dream upgrade" and how to get the job done when all else is failing.

A word of warning, there is some serious music tech geekery ahead. If in doubt, just pretend that it all makes sense and slowly nod your head, then move onto the next paragraph. That's what most of us do anyway!

Earlier this month, I wrote about connecting my old Mac mini to my television . My mini offers a great Apple TV-style lifestyle with none of the Apple TV limitations. It's a real Mac running real Snow Leopard, albeit on an older, admittedly limited mini. I have Front Row, EyeTV, QuickTime, and more, all ready to entertain me on demand, as well as standard system access to mail, web browsing, etc.

The sound in my living room is powered by a couple of speakers that shipped with an ancient computer monitor. Their audio works fine for close-up TV watching and Wii playing. Move across the room and those speakers prove how limited they are. Add in a treadmill with its motor noises, and the sound decreases to virtually nothing.

So how can one listen to those great shows that are playing back on that lovely large screen across the room, especially when walking or jogging on the treadmill? I messed around with several solutions until I stumbled across one that really worked well for me. Using my home's 802.11g Wi-Fi network, I could call my iPhone from my Mac using Skype. With only the most minimal of lags, I was able to transmit live audio and watch my favorite shows on the Mac while listening on the iPhone from my treadmill.

Read on to learn how I accomplished this...

The App Store is somewhat deluged with music-related applications. While I find many of the instruments to be novelties, the iPhone-based remote controls available for various Digital Audio Workstations have really caught my attention.

I've been playing around with the various musical remote controllers available for a while now. When the various iTouchMidi controllers were released, I got pretty excited. Problematically, I'm a fan of Logic Pro, and these intriguing but mostly Logic-incompatible controllers weren't up to snuff for my personal needs. It was a few weeks before I discovered the available OpenSound Control (OSC) apps in the App Store.

I've played with the lineup of controllers such as OSCemote and Mrmr (iTunes link), and both of those are a lot of fun with a good amount of potential. One stood out for me, though, and TouchOSC has officially become part of my home studio setup.

TouchOSC provides an array of control screens consisting of faders, rotary controls, buttons, toggles, XY pads, multi-faders/toggles and LEDs in various configurations. It communicates wirelessly with software and hardware which can receive and send the OSC protocol. I thought I'd offer a quick rundown of the steps I used to get from TouchOSC to Logic. I'm sure the same methods can be applied to other software, with a little variation.

An overview of the controller configurations in TouchOSC can be found in the gallery below. Read on for the lowdown.

The lovely and talented Peter Kirn over at Create Digital Music has posted a round up of music apps for the iPod / iTouch platform. The list includes tools for using your iPhone as a MIDI/OSC controller, making random weird digital art, visualizing your music and, er, listening to Snow Patrol's next album, amongst other apps. Peter's a thoughtful critic and his evaluations are pretty detailed and thorough.

If you're an aspiring iPhone musician / DJ/ sound designer, this is definitely a good place to start finding useful apps.