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.
Examples of iPads being used in professional productions
I find it interesting to read about these sorts of things and see what "professional musicians" think of the iPad as a tool. Here's one example I just found. I actually didn't go looking specifically for the iPad in this case, it just happened to turn up while I was researching an album.
If you don't feel like reading through the whole thing (it's fairly long) the apps mentioned in the article are:
NLogSynth
Korg iMS20 (high praise for this one)
Various mellotron apps
SpaceLab
There's also that Gorrillaz album that was recorded entirely on an iPad. The Fall I think it's called. Wasn't a huge fan of that one myself but hey, it's still pretty cool to see such a huge band making the iPad a central part of their recording process, even if it was just for one album.
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I've seen iPads in pictures on stage with the bands Living Color (guitarist used fx apps in his setup). And King Crimson had a shot with Thimbjam loaded on an iPad. I think Orbital uses iPads live to. I'm sure others do too
Any more examples?
Saw a pic yesterday of Facebook iPad group - Herbie Hancock had 5 iPads hooked up to a MacBook in his current live show!
5 years ago, so who knows what rig now but pretty cool...
https://cycling74.com/articles/taking-max-on-stage-with-herbie-hancock
Currently Herbie uses 5 iPads onstage: one for the Omnisphere app, one for TouchAble clip launching, and 3 for our preset/song list/song system.
This dude has real creds https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjOdcJbnQcVjH_o4j2AbLog
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tha_Bizness
By "professional", are we talking about all professional situations (including experimental music and installations), or just "well known" ones? If we're talking about ALL professional situations, then the only thing I haven't used an iPad for is DJing (why would I bother DJing though) nor an installation (although I plan one of those in the future though not looking forward to paying the w--kers at Intermorphic their crappy blood money subscription for unlimited timing which should've already been included in the price of their "annual version" of Wotja X
).
What I use my iPad Pro for...
-Sheet music reader for piano performing.
-Full Productions (whether dance music (which sometimes includes easy cheesy pleasy EDM), or ambient, or experimental, remixing, mixing, mastering, you name it I do it).
-Video Editing
-Cover Art
-Animation (well, 2D lyric video-styled "puppet" animation, lol)
-I guess promotion as well via Facebook (although I usually live stream my piano performances on Facebook using my iPhone).
I define professional as dollah bills, mo bills, mo professional.
And, of course, Herbie using AudioKit FM Player in the studio 😉
Score!
Robert Fripp (King Crimson) uses one to trigger Mellotronics M3000. "We no longer take mellotrons on the road. Instead we take this iPad app". (from: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/50th-anniversary-edition-mellotronics-m3000/id375100093?mt=8 )
As a pro musician I've been using one or more iPads for music creation on a weekly gig since 2013.
I also use one for reading sheet music when the need arises. One contractor I often work for finally made his 140+ charts into pdfs and Dropboxed them to me. I'm SO happy to no longer spend 20 mins. after each gig putting sheet music back in numerical order!
THE END
Beardyman has a live stage setup centered around 5 or 6 iPads all controlling Ableton. Basically just used as MIDI controllers, but still impressive.
I think iOS devices really shine as control surfaces especially. I think i will do this myself more now too
I saw Jean-Michel Jarre playing Animoog during his last tour...
Glitch mod uses many ipads running Lemur for their live shows
I don't think it gets more professional than Henny tha bizness.
Pete Johns from Australia releases singles and LPs using solely iPad and GB:
https://www.google.com/search?q=pete+johns+youtube+garageband
Years back I saw Belew using an iPad onstage, couple of days later Flux was realeased. Unfortunately the couple of times I’ve seen him since he’s been strictly MacBook
Read somewhere that the sound designer for the soundtrack of the movie "Eye in the Sky", heavily used the iPad Borderlands granular app for a lot of the soundscaping.
Orbital...
Steve Spacek use iOS in his productions, his Instagram is worth following...