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.
iOS music: Music you MAKE vs. what you INTEND TO MAKE?
I have noticed an interesting trend with music making on iOS for me over the last year or so.
The style of music I seem to be swerving back into time and time again is one that was long out of my arsenal.
Being a pretty traditional house head and 1990's NYC nightclub purveyor, I mainly am inspired and intend to make house style music and remixes. Mostly for DJ uses.
However, lately I have not ended up there in my sessions.
It seems that I am able to tap into much deeper strains of inspiration and styles of music creation. Due to the very specific abilities, methods, apps, and advancements, I seem to be stepping into an old haunt of my creative history.
Sort of a dark, industrial, type electronica with some goth overtones and punch rough edges.
I am going to really try and understand this a little more for myself as it is probably a clue to some personal developments and growth. I am actually being inspired to go a little deeper emotionally and in my thoughtfulness of music making. I think that is pretty awesome that iOS music making has been able to unwittingly inspire me to branch into music areas that I really didn't even think about ever going back into. I guess to best summarize, I am making music that was usually the type that involved a band and instruments along with synths. But, now I can do it myself in a fun and effective matter.
How about you?
What has iOS music making done for your music making styles of surprises? What has blossomed since doing music more on iOS?
Or has it been the opposite for you?
Do tell......
Comments
It's always best if you can let it just emerge out of you, sometimes what comes out even surprises you. You sit down to write something, and you have no idea what it is exactly that you are going to write, and up swells. It's a bit like magic.
I think about this kind of thing from time to time and then my naval becomes a wormhole and I get sucked into a ton of questions and lose the script of what I was thinking about or trying to get to.
All my stuff is a result of some happy accident or another
That sounds great RUST(I)K. Back in the 60s Marshall McLuhan said "The medium is the message". What you seem to be saying is the medium influences the message. I couldn't agree more! It makes you wonder what Beethoven or Mozart would have done if he could have gotten their hands on all this wizardry. I think they would have created something new because that is what they did in their own time, push the boundaries.
On the other hand people like you and me see it as a way to facilitate the creation of music we have loved, but realized in a new way. Equally worthwhile to get in touch with one's own originality, without the difficulty of being a genius!
It’s strange - I sometimes make free-form jazz without really necessarily trying. Especially with Quantum. Repeating riffs in different keys or voicings, stringing them together with polyrhythms. It’s funny because I think of synth music as being very obviously structured, but the tools can actually support much looser compositions. Or maybe I just have more John Coltrane in me than I thought...
We have lots of serendipity in what we do.
Inspiration and perspiration in equal measure. All guided on a per song basis by an idea, a story or a theme.
@RUST( i )K I think that the best music is the music that writes itself. The moments when I've been so consumed by the process that I forget EVERYTHING else (food, sleep, kids, bathroom, etc.) have always resulted in the best music. Have you ever had a moment where you lose yourself completely that at the end you can't exactly remember how the music itself came about? That is what I shoot for, although truthfully my aim is wildly inaccurate most days.
I've proven to myself that while it's quite reasonable for me to sit down and write something specific in a deliberate style, it's also less fun than just letting loose.
I won’t tolerate random inspirational creativity in my art – art has no place for variability and lack of control, in my opinion. I come in with a specific specification, I get stuff done, and when the specification is fulfilled, I’m finished and the product is fit for purpose. The only room for variability and accidents is due to ignorance or lack of skill, and in my case, there’s a quite lot of that. If I was better at it, I’d be less creative and more designed.
Complete random bollocks. Sometimes it’s good random bollocks, other times, just bollocks.
I thought I was only going to make hip hop instrumentals. Have totally surprised myself.
There is a BM3 challenge on the Intua forum using a vocal track and it has been a while since I have done one of these. It has been great for keeping me focused on an intention but i do look forward to going back to free, happy accidents in a couple weeks. The execise has been good at pushing my learning of BM3 as a tool.
I feel you on all that @RUST( i )K . I started out thinking my thing would be “pop instrumentals”/BEATS. Now I just make music. It is all instrumental in the no vocals sense with synths and stuff and I just try to make them stand on their own. Idea being no one is listening and thinking “when does the singing start?” It’s good on its own.
I’ve learned that if I ever try to make a specific thing, it always turns out terrible. So I just mess around with stuff until I hear something I like and then I’ll know what to do with it. But I don’t wait for inspiration, the doing is what inspires.
What’s interesting though is I have come to treat some of the apps like ingredients in a meal. So the idea would start like “what if I just make an entire song using only this or that limited app?” What would that sound like?
I’m confused...wouldn’t a “ specific specification “ kind of cancel itself out?
Please explain I don’t understand
Participating in WeeklyBeats 2018 has been trans-formative for me. With only one week to complete a song and that on the short time left after work and family, there's no looking in the rear-view mirror. This has ended the constant second-guessing and ridiculously ambitious planning, and has forced me to commit to directions that are simply "good enough". Surprisingly, this rush has improved, not weakened, the end results. Whereas I had only finished a handful of tracks my whole life, and never thought those all that good, I've put out 18 this year, and to my total shock, even enjoy listening to them.
More than anything I think it's the freedom that comes from not having the luxury to expect every track, every riff, every beat, to be great. The priority is on finishing. The question becomes simply "can I turn this into something or not?" Do I have enough ideas here to glue together into a song?
The surprising thing is my output has been all over the place style-wise. It's like "now where the heck did that come from??" I mean ... I've even put out 80's style stuff that I actually like. I hate 80's music!! (sorry! ... I know I just offended half the forum.
) I guess it's the near stream-of-consciousness thing of not having the luxury to second-guess what I'm doing.
Anyway, it's been a blast.
I just enjoy that dry sense of humor so much...
Some reason dope answers!
So dry it cracks. So dry I almost always require a double take. But yes
I love this thread. So many interesting approaches and perspectives. Like many here I've found myself making music with iOS apps that I wouldn't have otherwise. But mostly I've had fun and felt fulfilled being creative. Life is good.
Wow you take a hard line on that! I understand what you are saying though - its similar to how I approach graphic design as opposed to what fine artists do. Don't hear that attitude towards music very often. I get that a level of technical expertise is required but I still like a lot of happy accidents in my music then use the technical skills to harness them.
Funny Ive gone through a similar process lately and headed to more dark industrial stuff of my early influences.
Like you I spent many years in the scene so I was always making dance music that I could play live then just continued with it out of habit. This wasn't helped by the gear and software that basically hadn't changed in paradigm until iOS came along.
Ive found a new freedom and inspiration in music making lately based on three things: innovative iOS tools, no expectations from my negligible followers and not being drunk.
It doesn’t cancel out because they’re phase-coherent. It becomes additive, like the additive effect of two similarly tuned resonant filter poles.
>
From the forthcoming album....
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Monzo.
I’ll use that!
Actually I’m having to pull my socks up now. There are two guys in the band writing all our stuff, and playing other people’s music can pall a bit after a while, so I’m trying to come up with a few bits myself.
I just enjoy playing around with apps and making some noises
The tech geek in me makes me dig into apps more than needed and that in turn feeds the other side of my personality which sometimes gets to be a bit of a burden, you know the 'ask a human data-bank' side LOL...
the machine is my co-creator
)
https://soundcloud.com/simon-nowis-1
We're lucky to have you @Samu
Your right-brained creative self has the best tech-support available
The 21st century runs on technology. Our art forms must use the latest technology to push the envelope just as the development of the pianoforte did in 1700.
I was taught that true creativity comes from a place that is apart from judgements of right or wrong and, as a jazz musician, intellectual planning was simply not the way to go. I once asked my teacher "If I play a phrase I like should I repeat it? Her answer: "Play anything but that". But that's jazz, after all. It comes from a soul place. Thought, in that landscape, is an impediment. I am not always able to clear away the judge-mental, evaluating part of my brain, but my best music has come when I have let go of being ruled by my intellect and enter the famous "zone". Of course the fundamentals must be internalized first.... As Donovan sang: First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.
I see that a lot of electronic music can consist of parts being artificially generated and then molded into an intriguing shape. Whether by intellect or intuition it is truly a new art form with its own "specific specifications".
Agree. On all fronts. ALL.
I got clean(7 years now). Yes, with an iPad in my hand the whole time. LOL
It is striking the changes that have accompanied me personally in addition to musical content with this iOS music making journey.
The instant ability pick up phone get beat, baseline, ad melody and throw some lyrics sitting in a parking lot is startling at it ability to produce inspired musical ideas and personal satisfaction.
RIght.
Super inspiring.
Nice to hear about others.
And for me so much easier than a traditional DAW.
The simplicity of producing so many sounds is amazing.