Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
32 step sequencers/drum machines vs 16 step
After actually trying to make music with sequencers on iOS, I've started to appreciate sequencers that are built to do up to 32 steps, rather than 16. It ends up being a musical length of time to loop with, to be able to make 2 measure patterns of 1/16th notes rather than 1 measure. The one measure loops tend to gravitate easily toward a techno vibe. With the 16 you usually have to jump into song mode, to string your patterns together, or it tends to gets repetitive dangerously quick. It's weird how the way sequencers are layed out influences the music made on them, and how what is convenient to program ends up happening often. Probably techno was heavily influenced by hardware sequencers and drum machines with 16 steps on the front panel, and musicians trying to figure out music that sounded good without having to commit to jumping into song mode.
One idiosyncrasy of iPad sequencers is that 32 steps barely fit on the screen in a row, (think Xynthesizr, buttons are fine, but stretch from edge to edge of the screen) while keeping the buttons big enough to be useful, making UIs challenging. I suspect that is why 16 steps is popular, the buttons end up being a nice size while affording some room for other stuff round the sides. Shrinking buttons based on pattern length would be ideal but are probably hard to program. Patterning is nice example of an adaptive size grid thing.
The interest in 32 step sequencers got started when discovering the classic drum machine beats in Funkbox were 32 step loops, they're still repetitive but not obnoxious. I like using Xynthesizr, Patterning, Funkbox, Effectrix, Thesys (despite the terrible tiny UI, it's easy to get nice sequences). Any more 32 step iOS apps?
Anyone else see the 32 steps/pattern thing as a selling point?
Comments
I'm not worried about 16 or 32 steps what I'm fed-up with is the assumption that everyone makes beats in 4/4. Many grid-sequencers lack the option to divide beats/steps into sub-divisions(triplets and tuplets) and set the timing division 3/4, 5/4 or 6/8 just as a few examples.
@samu In DrumPerfect you can put any number from 1 to 32 in the top and 2-4-8-16-32 in the bottom of the fraction. So if you want for example, to make music in 17/32 time you can do it.
@Processaurus You can divide each beat in DrumPerfect by 16. So with a 4/4 pattern, it could be up to 64. Of course you could have up to 512 subdivisions if you set up your measures that way.
But what's cool about DrumPerfect is not that it can be complicated, but that you can usee it to make things easier. So I can start with a traditional 16 step pattern, and if I want to I can just change the last beat to 8 so I can do a faster drum roll.
So I agree that 32 is better. One of the ways that DrumPerfect can sound like a real drummer is that it can play as fast as any drummer can. And it can play as loose as every drummer does in real life.
Def. more better.
dm1 also has the option to use 32 steps
... and I share your observation of 16 vs 32 steps, 16 gets repetitive very quickly while 32 can already express something musical
iSpark and auxy offer 16, 32 and 64 steps but they split them into screens of 16
The old 'classic' Moten Drum Machine has one of the best ways to 'split a beat' in to sub-divisions and it can be done on per instrument.
Most of the time I end up using Gadget anyways...
16 bars and up to 1/128t resolution is enough for me
Nice!
Very clever! The adaptive beat splitting is a great way to use a touch screen for drum programming. Super cool, because one issue of having lots of fine resolution steps on the screen (like if you wanted to do a 32nd note roll on a snare or hihat) is that it is visually easy to get lost on the other drums, where you aren't using the 32nd notes, like you'll have to be counting a bunch of boxes between each kick drum and it's easier to get a screwed up sounding beat, like if a kick is accidentally off by one 1/32 note.
+1 for 32 steps for the reasons already mentioned.
Little MIDI Machine can be set to 4x16 or 1x64 steps, I believe.
midiSteps can be anywhere between 1 and 64 steps per track.
(Both by the creator of Funkbox). On that note, FunkBox has a spare MIDI Out track, labeled 'Bass' I believe.