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.
Is a song/track ever finished ?
Is a song or track ever finished ? Or do you spend countless session tweaking it, adding tracks, dropping tracks, boosting eq, swapping out reverb bla bla bla ..
Do you tweak along the way or get the to an advanced state fairly quickly with the main structure and then tweak away ?
Comments
Art is never finished, only abandoned. (Leonardo da Vinci)
Let the track sit in the shelf for 3 months - don't listen to it during that time - and behold!
It might sound very finished even though you were uncertain before
DaVinci was a hack! (Kidding). Art is finished when you’re finished with it. There comes a point for me when I’m simply tired of working on a piece, and at that point I’m like “this is it, this is the song, warts and all, but it is what it is, it can’t be another thing” and then it’s done. When you start tweaking more stuff, but the voice in you’re head is screaming “that’s not the song anymore!” That’s when you know you’re done. Maybe it’s not the most polished, but you do another one and they sound better and better
Q. How do you know when a track is finished?
Aphex twin. When i'm fucking sick of it.
unless you're trying to flog it, that's probably the best way to tell
Omg. I have been binging on Aphex Twin lately. So awesome.
it's easy done. so much good stuff
Sure. When it's close enough for rockandroll. The same goes for tuning.
Absolutely.
I've quoted this on the forum before, but it's such a good message from producer/engineer/mixer Andy Wallace.
https://www.soundonsound.com/people/inside-track-linkin-parks-hunting-party
@telecharge very good. First engineer/producer I ever worked with in the studio was always saying 'no, it's not perfect, but it's the perfect performance and that's what'll be lost by the time I make it perfect.'
It’s easy as put a deadline. Sometimes some extra limitations like “record realtime performances instead automation edit” can help depending on your self-imposed quality threshold.
The funny thing is when you find lots of users exploring self-generative apps and then use a DAW for automation... but hey! If that make someone happy who am I to laugh at them?
Focus is the key. You want to dabble with music or share it? One could expent an entire life dabbling without any external output but high quantity (and quality) personal satisfaction; another maybe just want to tour a work (as creative object: cd, movie, paint...) so deadline and some kind of business plan (o management) becomes a must.
Ask yourself,
Who am I?
What I want?
What I need?
What I love?
Then set a focus, deadline and a plan. Life will make you figure how to reconcile all.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of inspired.
Some great comments so far
A song is really finished... when no one listens to it anymore
Perfection - is the enemy, chasing it is futile.
If you feel like you could do more with a track, then it probably needs something.
If you have had enough of tweaking bits and pieces, then you have either gone too far, or it’s perfect!
This is where madness can reside in artists.
I come from the world of decades working on 2inch analog tape.
Because you cannot start moving notes around / adjusting performances, you learn a mindset that stops one from stuffing around with finer pointless details, and instead you listen for feel, performance, magic.
Without these 3 ingredients, everything else is pointless.
A track is finished as soon as next one comes along. They're all fully finished when I'm dead.
I have, mistakenly it seems, attributed this quote to PJ Harvey.
Can’t blame yah.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/229856-a-work-of-art-is-never-finished-it-is-merely
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/192509-a-book-is-never-finished-it-s-abandoned
https://www.writing.ie/guest-blogs/a-book-is-never-finished-only-abandoned/
‘A life is never finished, merely abandoned.’
-Audiogus
I have this general rule that when faced with conflicting quote sources (as is common these days) to pick the oldest human involved. Not always right by any means, but often.
My default attributions are Voltaire or Dorothy Parker. Sometimes Harpo Marx.
"In the future everyone will quote Andy Warhol"
-Voltaire
"The Velvet Underground never sold many records, but half the world will repeat a statement allegedly made by Brian Eno"
-Dorothy Parker
"It depends"
Some tracks just gel together and when you're done you KNOW it's done. Others you finish and think it's done and then months later you're kinda "well.... maybe if I....". And others yet are done because you're sick of it all and have to do something else before you smash your head against a wall.
I have never finished a track.
Ain't nothin' wrong with that, lessin' that's your aim and you feel bad about it.
Once I’m happy with a track I delete any DAW files I’ve created, but usually these days I mix stuff together in Soundforge anyway, which means at the end I just have one finished file.
Get it done, move on to the next one.
Art is not eternal folks.
My biggest inspiration is a local musician. He’d record a tape of original songs each evening, and sell the single copy for a pound when he was busking. No copies, no worries mate.
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Why not?
I've actually finished two recently.
... or maybe they aren't
I'm trying to get into this.
At present, More often than not , with cubase cpr project files I'll "save as" rather than "save" at the end of a project I'll delete 95 percent of the back ups.
At the end it's fun to go back to one of the early saves to see how the track has developed or transformed into something totally different.
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While seeing the immediacy, and moment caught in time quality to this method, I’d feel like I’d tossed the baby out with the bath water. As do the other RTM.
Mainly because of the experience gained in the past couple or three years, where a song will be finished to the best of our abilities using the best apps we had...only to become aware of how big a difference, for example, Fab Filters could make to that same song.
Or as recently as yesterday, where I saw Doug’s video for Lo-Fly, an app we hadn’t considered, and realised like a bolt from the blue that it was the final ingredient needed to truly finish of something we thought done.
When music making centred around expensive studio time, using instruments that cost a small fortune, capturing the moment was vital. But now, in the digital age, the big benefit is surely that we can make and remake. Not always and forever, but when appropriate.