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.
Here’s my first iPad-only guitar EP
This is the first time I have posted any of my music here. It’s an EP of three (so far) tracks, all iPad-only. Well, mostly — some of the field recordings were done with an iPhone 
Everything was recorded and mixed in GarageBand. Let me know what you think! And no need to be gentle. All criticism welcome.
Comments
I listened all the way through. Congratulations on having your own voice and not sounding like everyone else. It's refreshing.
Thanks for listening. That’s just about the nicest comment I could wish for!
Cool, especially the guitar
Cheers. The songs are so different from each other that they might not really go together as an “EP,” but I doubt anyone cares much about that any more these days.
@mistercharlie Originality is high in your sound.
Some lovely guitar playing on display and it all works really well together.
Some dark doodling, some jazzy bits, some blues, but all very original
Keep it up and poke your head into the song of the month club. Too late for December but January has plenty of days to go.
Very friendly bunch and I’m sure you’ll be welcomed.
Excellent, really enjoyed those!
Very cool. Indeed very different stuff, in a great way. Guitar is very cool. Two minor nits, from blood orange. I think your mix is a bit too hard left and right. And the rhythm guitar is perhaps a tad high in the mix.
Great. Remind me a little bit Jameszoo!!
Thanks folks! Very encouraging.
Mixing is a definite weakness right now. I’ll take another pass at that one today.
I hadn’t thought of that. I’m in!
Enjoying your work, Mistercharlie. Guitars sound realistic. What apps did you use?
panning reminds a lot on classic multitrack tapes, as does the basic tone - which (keeping it raw) is cool for such a modern device. Respect if that's just picking the right sounds from Garageband.
Guitar dominates a tad, understandable if that's your main instrument.
I agree with the comments about originality and versatility
If you consider remix, focus on level and balance - doesn't need more fx, except maybe a tiny bit of ambience reverb to slightly glue... in a way you don't notice the room afterwards.
Cheers! It’s a mixture of ToneStack, and GarageBand’s amps. Some of the clean tones are recorded into the GB instrument recorder, not the amp sim section.
The FX are a mix too, but mostly AU plugins in GarageBand. The next track I’m working on uses a Red Box to take a DI from a tube amp into the iPad, which actually sounds great. Mostly I fiddle a bit until I get the sound I’m after, and then leave it there. Once the guitar is in a mix, I’m discovering that it needs to be thinned out quite a bit. I remove the bass, for example, to separate from the bass line. The individual parts actually sound pretty bad when soloed!
I will. I’m mixing on headphones at the moment, which isn’t ideal. Should I add the reverb to the master track, or to tracks individually?
I realized I’d only mentioned the guitar apps. I also used AudioShare for field recordings, Moog’s Model 15 for the white noise in Blood Ghost (run through Replicant 2 to glitch it up).
Keyboard sounds are Alchemy inside GB. Keys on Dirt Fairy are the amazing FM Player. Drums on Blood Ghost are Patterning, and GB Drummer on the other two.
Drummer really is amazing. It’s both instant, and very customizable.
Nice recommendation! I hadn’t heard of him, but I really like his music so far.
Very nice. Unique sound. My fav is Blunt Knife. So, you used the guitar FX in Garage band? I've never been able to get em to sound that good. On my second listen now, really good stuff.
Cheers!
The guitars on Blunt Knife are going through the new guitar amp presets in the latest GarageBand. They’re Clean Combo and New Old Stock. I seem to remember tweaking the amp settings on those a bit too.
Also, I used the built-in Visual EQ to emphasize the mids on guitar, and the solo uses the GB Auto-Funk pedal. Guitar signals going in are pretty low. I find that helps a lot to keep things natural-sounding.
difficult to answer - sometimes a small amount on the master track simply works.
Individual tracks (of course) provide more control - but I had only small amounts in mind, preferably small ambiences that are hardly perceived as 'reverb' - and I wouldn't include all instruments, probably just the guitars.
(the whole thing might as well be considered overkill)