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.
Comments
The procurement budget dept.
The backstory to the 303 is actually really cool. It was intended to be a bass-guitar companion for gigging solo-guitarists. Except it didn't sound anything like a bass-guitar (and was impossible to use). Hence the product flopped and only a few thousand were made. Lots of them ended in the garbage bin before some starving experimental electronic musicians picked them up and started tweaking those knobs.
That's why the "it can sound like a bass guitar" is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek gag towards Roland: mine can actually sound [a bit] like one
Yes, absolutely! The MIDI file should sound identical to what you hear in the standalone sequencer (which is actually a miniature AU-host in itself, sending regular MIDI to its hosted plugin).
Probably no one, it was meant to emulate an electric bass guitar, which if programmed well it can do, no one wanted to program it though, it was deemed too tedious....it was once the ravers got hold of them from charity shops and messed with the filter in ways they weren't meant to that the sought after sound was discovered.
Well that's how the legend goes anyway.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think all 3 bass sounds in the FBS track i posted earlier were from the 303.
I love that story.
Ahh just spotted @brambos post above lol
Cool. Resistance is futile!
The 303 is mostly overused as in the video but i love it in a more understated way, as in rhe way recondite uses it. Check out these tracks.
Great, always needed a bass guitar. Insta buy!
Can't wait for the 1-star app store reviews saying "doesn't sound like a bass guitar at all"
The story is great, but isn't it always some devices originally built to emulate certain sounds, just being incredibly bad at it, but giving birth to a new style of music?
Neither did the 303, and that's what it was more or less designed for and marketed as! It just happened to have this whole other array of sounds that became the foundation of new genres of electronic music.
Looks cool, @brambos !
Like! Like!
Is there any instrument that is more extreme than the 303 in the difference between original concept and most popular use?
@brambos can't wait man / looks fantastic
Tie In is one of my favorite Recondite tracks
And yeah, I also love the subtle way he uses the 303 sound in all of his tracks. I think he's not using a real 303 though but an Ableton plugin, he mentioned this in the RA Exchange podcast if I remember correctly...
@vpich thanks for those. Really nice examples of mnml. Im a big 303 fan and hardfloors acperience is the one that shows me what you can do with a bunch of 303s. Thanks also @brambos this sounds amazing. Bundle?
you remember some correctly
after hearing some of his tracks i was so impressed that i researched his gear and he uses a 303 hardware copy, forget the name. but everything else is done with only ableton. he says he only uses operator for every other sound but the 303.
Hi @brambos this is looking really good. Is there a way to do some Troublemakers in AUM? It could be amazing.
one of my early introductions into electronic music was Plastikman (Richie Hawtin). His early techno work with just 808's, 303's and a few other synths blew my mind (and his videos too! great stuff!) Then the first ever piece of electronic music making gear was Rebirth - which i totally loved! I haven't been into that type of music for a while, but i did come up with some great bass grooves with Rebirth. I'll probably pick this up if it;s 4 or 5 bucks on sale intro priced
Gonna buy this... Obviously.
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While we are on the subject of 303 and synth sounds with some knowledgable people on this thread - could someone hazzard a guess at the origin of the lead (almost plucky) synth sound heard throughout this fantastic track. (Starts right at the beginning and then develops throughout).
Sounds very analogy to me. Shamefully I can't even hear if it's thin chords or just single notes being played. I know it's mixed with a different pad sound and sometimes a bass sound.
I tried getting close to it with saw wave in iOdessei, but actually the closest I've got so far is by using Chicago in Gadget with some ring mod. Which is why I'm wondering if it might even be a 303 (although it sounds too rich and organy).
Any insight appreciated
Yup. Great album. Can't pick out the synth. Maybe a prophet. But the coolness is the warbly fx. I think klevgrands pad and some fx could get you pretty close
Thanks. Seems like there's a nice whiny detuned pad synth that's got a really fuzzy filter opening and closing.
But then also a slightly over driven/distorted plucked lead synth as well that sometimes plays the same notes/timing as the pad, but then also breaks into its own pattern at other times.
And some bass.
I'll have to go back and listen for the warbly FX
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303 doesn't have to be bass!
That's the Church of Something. Real good.
Imagination notably used the TB-303 bass line as the replacement for an actual bass guitar, as intended. For anyone thinking of going camping, here's some fashion tips from Leee John:
In fact the whole album uses the TB-303 as the bass line:
Actually I just remembered, I once intereviewed Leee John at some computer show or other, and although it never got published in the mag that I was on at the time (ST World) it turned into a general friendly chat about MIDI, including his mentioning how fiddly it was programming their 303 back in their early days.
For Brambos:
I apologize in advance for making requests for future features, but I have a good one. Read this first:
Mike Matthews of EHX
on building effects pedals
“My philosophy has always been to leave in as much sound and variety as possible, and always go right to the edge of an effect.” “I would always leave in the noise if I would lose feeling by taking it out. Of course I didn’t like noise, but an effect was an effect, and your music is a thing of feeling. That was always my philosophy. Sometimes you’d turn a control up and you’d see it would begin to oscillate – but sometimes right at the edge of oscillation there are some interesting effects. Sometimes that interacts with other things. A lot of companies would take that out, so the user wouldn’t get a shitty sound, but I would leave that in and leave it up to the user to get a fringe effect.”
As a 303 enthusiast, I think your app sounds brilliant.
For a while now I have been opening up devices and tweaking them a bit. Sometimes adding or subtracting a pot here or there. I wouldn't dare open up a 303 and decide to find out what would happen if I cranked that resonance or accent or filter a bit beyond the knob's limit. I have wanted to know just how far you could push that screaming beast until it is almost inaudible. This is why I love my Jomox T-Resonator or EHX Flanger Hoax... they are truly beyond the scope of the audio range of a normal effect... sooooo....
I want an Unlock Knobs button. I know you must have to set how far the screaming and burbling range is in order for your beast to sound like the original. But I am just imagining a world where I could press an Unlock Knobs button and the range of those six sweet knobs goes from 1 to absurd.
I may have lost my mind.
A lot of this discussion makes me feel really old. People have to watch documentaries to find out about something that I just lived through? Yes, yes, I was one of the idiots who bought a 303 and a 606 to accompany me on guitar. I thought they were really cool. I didn't think they sounded "real," they were just accompaniment and really portable for somebody like me, who traveled a lot.
I didn't get rid of them because it didn't sound like a bass guitar and the 606 didn't sound like "drums." They were both just too slow to program. After awhile I realized that I just wasn't using them.
So I sold them cheap and never thought about the 303 again until Iara Lee hired me to handle the publicity for her movie "Modulations" at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998. Then I found out what you could do with that 303 thing.
Turns out the whole movie is on YouTube. I may watch it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139468/?ref_=nm_knf_i1
That's a cool story. Makes you realize how conditioned we are today in the way we use synths and instruments. I know that whenever I see a knob/slider labeled "cutoff" I have an irresistible pavlovian urge to tweak it and hear what happens to the filter