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 Store

Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

Piano or guitar?

If you were starting over now, or just plain starting, which would you choose and why? Or if you play both, do you prefer one over the other?

«134

Comments

  • @Telstar5 said:
    If you were starting over now, or just plain starting, which would you choose and why? Or if you play both, do you prefer one over the other?

    I am a drummer, but I've always had a thing for bass guitar. Does that count?

  • Alpenhorn

  • Or guitar.

  • I've always considered the difference between the two concerns the way of playing involves pushing the piano away versus hugging the guitar to you.

  • I play both. Picked the guitar up first and if I had to pick one it would be that. It wins on physical feedback and expressiveness.

    And volume. There is a simple pleasure to bashing out some power chords and letting them ring. :D

  • Banjolele;)

  • My daughter started piano at 4, saxophone at 13 and now is learning guitar at 16. Piano at a young age is the best start you can get for western instrumentation and music.
    I didn't have such a good grounding when I was a child but wish I did now. I don't have a repertoire of tunes I can play anymore but I know my way around a guitar and have some keyboard skills.
    If I was starting something new I might start learning shamisen.

  • I don't think it matters as long the person learning is enjoying it. They're interesting to me in that they both have different learning/feedback curves, neither of which are fixed curves. The piano is quickest to sit in front of and get something resembling music out of. Guitar requires some finger strength. It's easy to visually learn where the C is on a keyboard. It's easy to work out 'left==lower' and 'right==higher' on a keyboard (similar one fretboard...until you change strings). But then, after a few months, I think they flip. It's easier to learn 5 or 6 folk chords and one or two strums on a guitar and get a whole lot of music out of them. Hell, entire genres have come and gone on less. Very much less so on the piano. Then they flip again... tone and the like are much easier on the piano (in that it basically comes down to velocity), there is no vibrato, there's no real squawk notes (mis-fretting), hammer ons require very little dexterity... then they flip again: on guitar, once you learn the shape of a 9th or a 13th chord or the shape of most any scale, it's trivial to change the key. On piano, you pretty much have to learn each chord in each key in all of their different shapes. Suddenly, on guitar, you can read tab and mash out most any tune in any key. On piano, you're hoping the tune you want to play is in one of the keys for which you've learned the shapes!

  • My first instrument was guitar because I was a kid, and I wanted to be Eric Clapton, but my parents had a Steinway in the living room that I banged on for years and drove everyone crazy. I ended up playing keyboards. An arranger/composer really needed a piano. Today I’d choose a guitar. Computer GUI’s offer so much for making music, but nothing that provides the expressive power of a guitar.

  • @brambos: I'm a drummer too and I've also dabbled on bass. I think you might wanna scratch that itch at some point, bu if for no other reason than to introduce yourself to chords/harmony and standing up and playing.

  • Leave it to this forum for providing such smart responses and perspective here.

  • I wish I'd taken the time to learn the theremin (left handed of course). I don't like it when you try a new instrument and it makes you sound like a fool. My first chosen instrument (not counting piano, which wasn't) was a jews harp. A few of them, in fact. As a teenager I really liked them.

  • edited May 2017

    The piano is a great map for music theory, it's all laid right in front of you. To continue on @syrupcore's theme, the piano is easier to learn, as long as everything is in the key of C, and with the piano you're always aware of the actual notes you are playing, whereas on the guitar it's more of a mystery to most guitarists - ask them what the actual note is at any given fret and in all likelihood they have no idea.

    The guitar is more more rhythmically interesting IMO, strumming allows for rhythmic patterns you can't really achieve on the piano. I also think that when it comes to melodic playing the layout of the guitar tends to encourage playing shorter intervals, whereas the piano doesn't, and that really affects the kind of melodies and solos you tend to hear from both instruments.

    Anyway, they're both awesome in their own ways and a truly rounded musician should learn both.

    (edit) And of course the piano allows for playing bass notes with the left hand, and with two-handed playing can achieve some very full and intricate playing that can't be done with a guitar.

  • As opposed to 50+ years a lot of other keyboards springs to mind other than a piano. What's so special about the piano?

  • @u0421793 said:
    I wish I'd taken the time to learn the theremin (left handed of course). I don't like it when you try a new instrument and it makes you sound like a fool. My first chosen instrument (not counting piano, which wasn't) was a jews harp. A few of them, in fact. As a teenager I really liked them.

    I'm a lefty too! I learned guitar first and it was one of my brothers right handers. But my very first instrument was my voice and scribbling poetry

  • @u0421793 said:
    I've always considered the difference between the two concerns the way of playing involves pushing the piano away versus hugging the guitar to you.

    I loved the comparison! I feel the guitar as a part of my body, although some pianists need to feel the piano as an extension of their bodies.

  • @richardyot said:
    The piano is a great map for music theory, it's all laid right in front of you. To continue on @syrupcore's theme, the piano is easier to learn, as long as everything is in the key of C, and with the piano you're always aware of the actual notes you are playing, whereas on the guitar it's more of a mystery to most guitarists - ask them what the actual note is at any given fret and in all likelihood they have no idea.

    The guitar is more more rhythmically interesting IMO, strumming allows for rhythmic patterns you can't really achieve on the piano. I also think that when it comes to melodic playing the layout of the guitar tends to encourage playing shorter intervals, whereas the piano doesn't, and that really affects the kind of melodies and solos you tend to hear from both instruments.

    Anyway, they're both awesome in their own ways and a truly rounded musician should learn both.

    (edit) And of course the piano allows for playing bass notes with the left hand, and with two-handed playing can achieve some very full and intricate playing that can't be done with a guitar.

    Rhythmically interesting indeed ... I take much pleasure from loosening the strumming hand and just playing around with the palm mutes and semi-random rakes on the strings around a chord progression.

    I like both but I feel more mechanical playing the keyboard, the guitar feels way more an extension of me. I play it, can hear the sound and feel the vibrations immediately through my fingers/body.

    Doubtless if I focused more on the keyboard my musical knowledge would be way better.

  • I started out on piano. My mother, brother & sister all played. So maybe I'm biased, but you learn both treble & bass clef, as well as harmony, melody & rhythm more completely.
    That said, if I were to start over, it would be cello. Infinitely more portable. Amazing tone & expressiveness. Equally ideal in both solo & ensemble environments.

  • @Santosgera said:

    @u0421793 said:
    I've always considered the difference between the two concerns the way of playing involves pushing the piano away versus hugging the guitar to you.

    I loved the comparison! I feel the guitar as a part of my body, although some pianists need to feel the piano as an extension of their bodies.

    Ah yes, a pianist extension.

  • @DeVlaeminck said:
    As opposed to 50+ years a lot of other keyboards springs to mind other than a piano. What's so special about the piano?

    Centuries of the greatest music ever written and performed has been played on a piano. The greatest pianists who have mastered the instrument are historically musical giants. If that music is a vital part of you, even of you’ve never actually played the instrument, it’s hard to imagine what music would be like without it. The expertise and craftsmanship that goes into the making of a fine piano is amazing, the sound like nothing else. It must be why a lot goes into sampled pianos, the sampler hoping to capture the power and breadth of the real thing.

  • I think guitarists get more girls. Maybe.

  • @JohnnyGoodyear said:
    I think guitarists get more girls. Maybe.

    And I just can't picture the Devil playing a piano.

  • I love playing the guitar. If I did it over again, I'd love to learn piano. My son is taking lessons now, he says he will teach me, I think that will be fun. :)

  • @richardyot said:

    @JohnnyGoodyear said:
    I think guitarists get more girls. Maybe.

    And I just can't picture the Devil playing a piano.

    Three words: Jerry. Lee. Lewis.

  • Harpsichord.

  • edited May 2017

    @bigcatrik said:
    Harpsichord.

    Now you're talking! But I personally prefer the stylings and refinements of an Arpseechord

  • Im a bassist but I love both : the Pianar and the guito :)
    In this video , for non french talkers Gainsbourg who was drunk and an asshole as usual said that piano is superior to the guitar but Béart answered that Bob Dylan and Brassens have composed with guitars .

  • @Telstar5 said:
    Leave it to this forum for providing such smart responses and perspective here.

    To be honest you should do both. Piano and guitar are spearheads for two major instrument families in contemporary music. I'm a self taught guitarist and learned bass and UKE on the back of that. I wish I had piano lessons when I was a kid to get some more theory up my skull but that's never happened, might have to concentrate during my daughters piano lessons (2 for the price of 1?).

Sign In or Register to comment.