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.

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

Compression

I decided to make a thread so as not to derail the holiday sale thread, but I wanted to share a cool way to learn and understand compression, paraphrased from “Mixing with your Mind.” This really helped me to understand the effect compression has on sounds and turned the light on to using it in other ways.

Set your attack to the fastest, release to the fastest, threshold really low, so it’s really slamming it, and ratio up as high as it will go, turn up makeup gain so you hear something because with this setting you’re basically reducing the signal to nothing. It will sound bad, don’t worry.

Now just play with the attack control until the attack of the sound is what you want, whether it’s a lot of attack or none at all. You’re isolating just this element and it will help understand what it does.

Now move to the release and play with that, getting a sound you like. Maybe you want it to pump in time with them he music, or hold on for really long, or let go really fast, but you’ll hear what t all sounds like.

Now move the ratio to something sensible (3:1, 4:1, something like that).

Now lower your makeup gain to prepare for the last step, because if you don’t you’ll blast yourself with sound!

Now raise the threshold until its reducing the gain to an amount you want. With this method you may find yourself not reducing gain as much as you thought you might, but do it to taste. If I remember right, in the book he said to aim for 2-3db of gain reduction but it’s been a while since I read it and I no longer have it.

Anyway, maybe that is helpful, I know it set me on a good path to understand. The good news is it works on any compressor that has those controls, and you’ll find yourself getting a lot more mileage out of stock compressors in DAW’s rather than buying tons of different plugin compressors thinking they all work different. Then, when you do buy another, you’ll know what it offers that another one doesn’t. And if you get the pro-c from fabfilter it probably covers just about any compression need you’d have, and in conjunction with the built in auria comps you’d be well set.

Comments

  • Thank you!

  • Cheers for that. I also found that PSP OldTimer is not bad either. ;)

  • @studs1966 said:
    Cheers for that. I also found that PSP OldTimer is not bad either. ;)

    I love old timer as well, that definitely is one you use for “vibe” rather than precision. I love it on bass. Actually, I love it pretty much on anything.

  • @mrufino1 said:

    @studs1966 said:
    Cheers for that. I also found that PSP OldTimer is not bad either. ;)

    I love old timer as well, that definitely is one you use for “vibe” rather than precision. I love it on bass. Actually, I love it pretty much on anything.

    Thanks for the above effort. Much appreciated. As for Old Timer and Microwarmer, I always feel I'm sat in the corner when folks are talking about all the Fabs at the Boffin end of the spectrum, because these two are my bread and butter (and there aint much meat etc).

  • Great tip, thanks, took me an age to get my head around compression, still have a ways to go.

  • @mrufino1 said:

    @studs1966 said:
    Cheers for that. I also found that PSP OldTimer is not bad either. ;)

    I love old timer as well, that definitely is one you use for “vibe” rather than precision. I love it on bass. Actually, I love it pretty much on anything.

    It pretty much your "Tomato Ketchup" for compressors. A bit on here, a blob on there. :)

  • nice tip, thanks!

  • edited December 2017

    Great tip. Read that years ago, still use it to figure out how to set the attack and release musically. When I've set them, that way, it always sounds sweeter than the default settings, once you return the threshold and ratio to a sensible setting. I'm often surprised how often I end up with long attack times, with things like bass, and acoustic guitar, and vocals. It's great for getting the right thwack on the drums too. And helps reveal the relationship of the release time to the tempo of the song- one reason why presets won't prevail over real ears listening and tweaking.

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