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.
What do you do with a failed tune?
I’ve been making a small bunch of songs on Gadget on my new iPhone 8+ since I got it late last year. I reviewed what I’d done the other day and found that they were all fairly astoundingly good except for one, which I hadn’t noticed before – upon retrospect, I realised was total crap. I’m not sure how that got through, or at least, I’m not sure how I stopped and moved on with that one in that condition. How on earth did I think it was any good?
I’ve got quite a professional attitude to finishing a thing, knowing when a thing is or isn’t finished according to the brief, and not dragging it out unduly forever or conversely handing in half-done work. This comes from being a professional designer, artist, photographer and all those things in the past, and I know a lot of people here are in a similar group so if you’ve ever done work for clients, agencies or alternatively, teaching work, you’ll know what getting stuff done properly involves.
My question to the assembled is: what do you do with a thing that isn’t up to standard and you realise shouldn’t be submitted as it stands?
On one hand, it might have got that way gradually and you realise it is heading downhill but you carry on anyway hoping it’ll turn around. On the other hand, you might have blissfully continued all the way to the end thinking it was good, and only later with the benefit of a gap in time and some perspective, you realise it was shit and wonder how this got past you.
What do you try and do in either case? Give up and move on to another piece? Try and fix the existing one? How much fixing is fixing and how much do you throw out? Etcetera, that sort of thing, you get the picture.
Comments
I consider all my stuff unfinished, yet in some ways it has already reached the initial objective (to have fun on the journey). That said, I do occasionally realise that to continue something takes away from the journey and I just delete it. Once deleted I never consider it again. There is always something new to do and play - new sounds to discover, new sequences of notes to experience.
My problem is creating a second part - verse, chorus, key change whatever. My hard drive is filled with great beginnings that have been abandoned for want of finishings.
Move onto the next thing, or chop it up and mangle it for the masses.
Deciding a song is bad is one of the worst mistakes anybody can make, that is unless you make music solely for you and nobody else,some of my most popular songs are the ones i despise, i was lucky to find out early on that a song is a song.
I always delete stuff like that, it's not worth the time for me to work on something that isn't doing it for me anymore. I used to save everything "just in case", but I'd have piles and piles of unfinished music that wasn't exciting me at all after a few years. I'd see that folder and almost resent it, like I knew I should keep trying even though I wasn't enjoying it anymore.
I'd say I probably delete 80% of the music sketches I make these days. But in a way I see that as a good thing as it frees me up to just have fun and explore, and I learn a lot that way. Not everything I do musically has to be an end product, sometimes it's nice to play just for fun knowing there's no pressure to finish it. I record it just in case, but if I listen back later and I think it's crap, oh well it was good practice and at least I had a good time while doing it.
I sell those to Kanye
The most important thing is having the good sense to know what is crap and not use it! If only 90% of Soundcloud had that sense. (Did I say that out loud? 😜😝) Not everything works out. Holding back on something that isn’t ready or doesn’t work is a key skill for an artist, and it pays to know when to move on to another idea.
More often what I run into are kernels of an idea, which are good, but making them into a completed song is difficult for some reason. Sometimes they come easy. Sometimes they have to sit on the shelf until the right moment.
FWIW, I was just reading that my favorite Beatles song, “I Am The Walrus”, was made by combining three separate ideas that Lennon had that weren’t working. So I guess it goes to show that even our misfit toys may have a place eventually, with the right circumstances.
Also, as timing would have it, I have spent the last month and a half completing a tune that I first began in 1996. I revisited it briefly in 2001, and still couldn’t make it work. But the seedling of it was strong enough that I decided to give it one more try this year. It was one of the hardest and longest-coming things I’ve ever done, but now it’s almost complete (just needs mixing and a few touches). We’ll see if I can make it this time! 😛
I have many tracks I thought were awesome when I made them 12+ years ago. I listened back to all those “classics”, and they fell into three categories....
A. Lack of production skills, but really damn great solid ideas.
B. Lackluster melody and chord progression.
C. Spastic shit.
Category A is pretty self-explanatory, and these tracks can be fixed with an update. Category B is almost the same as A. The only difference is changing a couple of notes, applying inversion or retrograde to a musical phrase, or even changing one or two chords can fix the remake.
Category C is far trickier. I used to come up with very embarrassing lyrics, or I’d shout the track title over the melody and beats (ala Brooklyn Bounce, Sash, etc), or would use a “hamster voice” like Scooter. Ah, my embarrassing teenage years.
My point for Category C is that even amongst the rubble, you can always mine a few good gems. I currently lifted the lead trance melody from one of these tracks, and I’m repurposing it into a new song.
Okay, so another trick would be to have an honest friend (whether musician or not)/honest forum member listen to your “less than perfect” track and give their unbiased constructive critique. Better this than to become so self-critical that you get a 4-year writer’s block....like I did.
Bottom line though....do NOT toss it out. NEVER toss out what you consider to be rubble. Who knows? Maybe 15 years later, you’ll come to find out that there’s SOMETHING salvagable.
I suggest you release on Alihoopa and let others have fun with it. See what others come up with in remixing it or whatever.
You sound like you are very productive and creative, so just keep on with new stuff. Unless you get a good idea of what to do with your dead track, you could probably just move on. It doesn’t sound like you are desperate for projects to work on.
Delete.
If it aint a hit it aint a hit.
Next.
How I do my whole life actually.
IF IT DOESNT WORK THEN WHY WASTE ANOTHER SECOND?
On my forearms I have tattooed
"Change I must or die I will"
I think change and movement discarding the old is critical for greatest growth.
Well the ones that are truly bad I delete of course. Waste of space, but the ones that are merely “unfinished” I usually just render them to audio, give them title and tell people “this ones short”
Lol I’m working on a track like that right now. Ive tried a lot of different things and im debating deleting it or just stripping it down to core essentials and making it really minimal. I am already bored of it and can’t really put anymore of myself into it so its time to move on.
Post it here and let us be the jury...
Yes, or play it on the piano or guitar and let one of your mates be the judge. If the chords/melody/rhythm don't make it, maybe choosing different sounds will.
I wouldn't stick too long with such ideas, just let them go and be open for better ideas to pass by close.
Great advice! I use to hoard music. Then someone wiser than me finally enlightened me.
Music doesn't do anyone any good rotting away on your hard drive.
Release it to the wild. And, let it live!
Well so far I’ve deleted most of it and remade it. I was going to delete the whole thing but I quite like the opening melody, which is only 4 bars, and never appears again until the end. I deleted all of the bass lines, deleted another set of stuff, and kept deleting things. Then remade bass lines and re-did a few other things, and so on, and I’m still in progress for a short while. It’s still in soup stage at the moment but already it is far better, a lot more powerful and seems to have a point to it.
‘’’
On a slightly related note, I’ve always suspected that the Madness song Baggy Trousers started out as three separate musical ideas not with a view to one overall song. At some stage those particular three disparate musical expressions got brought together and used as the verse; chorus and middle-eight of one single song.
One man’s failure is another man’s delight. RTM have made tunes which we thought did not quite work, put them aside, then dug them out again for another listen, or to grab the bits that did work as intended. One of those tunes, when it finally became a finished song, ended up being something that people liked more than stuff we sweated over for weeks.
If I make something bad or just average, people won’t hear it. It will simply never get finished. I’ve got a pretty great (re: anal) filter for knowing if what I’m doing pleases me or not.
A dud gets stored as a rough mixdown on my Drive for archive’s sake and the project is deleted so I won’t feel the need to go back and ‘rescue’ it.
Maybe a song sounds bad or wrong somehow because it represents a path into the unknown. Some songs don't reveal their beauty immediately. Having someone else listen can often be the catalyst.
I used to find that when I’d post a bunch of photos I’d shot and developed and scanned, to Flickr. The ones which received more views would inevitably be not the one I was proud of the most, from that batch.
This is different though, it’s not just that I didn’t like the song in retrospect, it’s that I was embarrassed at how lazy I’d been about it in many places.
I think the very best art manages to wander off into the unknown, and then find something beautiful out there. But not every trip succeeds.
My own opinion and taste changes way too often for myself to be the basis of any real opinions on worth beyond selfish ones
A few thoughts I’ve had:
OP.—- Navel Gazing?(all fairly outstandingly good) Outstandingly good or Fairly good? Tunes or Songs I’m never sure what you consider your music to be and if whatever it Is ,IS Crap then flush it. Lady-App-titude hit the mark re.SoundCloud
Nope, I’ve turned it around quite satisfactorily, and on my homeward journey from work within the past hour, I’ve got everything where I want it and it passes quality control now.
It now has a new bassline and another thing that was supposed to be a bassline but is now a kind of powerful uplifting drone, so I shouldn’t call it a bassline.
Also, I’d done something back then that I must’ve thought was a good idea at the time. I had split the melody across two synths by copying then deleting complementary parts of it on each (odd bars on one, even on the other, for example). How do you put that back together easily? Not easy at all on iOS. Well, it is on Gadget macOS – I could just copy from one and paste in the other instrument and it superimposes in position over what’s there.
Drums nearly went in the bin, but I reconsidered and split across three drum machines. And, new vocal placeholder melody since today. I’m happy with it now.
Also, I’ve long thought that the Madness song Baggy Trousers I referred to earlier is so archetypical that there was probably an ancient Roman version at the time, indubitably called Baggus Trouserus. The lyrics were probably the same, except the chorus would have been Baggus Trouserus, Baggus Trouserus, etc.
u042193, Phew so glad you managed to polished that previous turd ,well done.
All of this is why in some ways I am happy that my passion for music is my hobby and not my job. I often wonder if it were my job then would the pressure of 'having' to make money from it destroy the creative freedom and free-form quality control I currently have
Careful, you may about to be starting a trend to categorise drones.
Don't you mean Baggus Toga's
And also the effects of constant listening that can make something that initially sounds wrong to sound perfectly fine