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.
Comments
Different 'sounds' react very different to reverb, what's great on a guitar may be a complete fail on vocals - or vice versa.
Synths can generate a vast range of sounds on their own, so the same applies.
You can add some 'ambience impression' with any reverb (and the basic IOS one supplied by Apple is quite a good implementation), but it's rarely the most convincing either.
It would in fact be no problem at all if the 'switch fx off' part is placed at a reasonable location in an app and the whole fx code section is taken off the CPU.
Which is not granted by just flipping the switch, as it might still eat cycles in background.
Reverb is CPU heavy by nature, it permanently moves memory blocks and requires fast control with precise timing.
Another matter of fact with reverb is it's software complexity - only few developers yield top results. That's the reason why classic hardware boxes are still in use.
(just as a sidenote for IOS-only experienced readers)
I create synth patches for me. If I use reverb in a patch it’s because I like the end result. If I then make that patch available to others, I want it out there dressed in its Sunday best making me proud. Even so, I don’t expect that patch to be used by anyone (including myself) without being tweaked to suit the end purpose. While you’re tweaking the patch, if you want to remove the reverb, feel free, but I’m not going to do it for you. Get over it.
There are no rules, guys. Make what you want to hear.
Hey, whatever works for you.
In my own case, first thing I do is delete all presets (hate when synths don't let you delete factory presets and my user folder is buried under mountains of presets I'll never use) I then cut the reverbs on all synths unless they happen to sound more interesting than my chosen bus FX (usually two or three nice reverbs among other shaping tools. I'm admittedly neurotic, but I just like maximum control over the space. For the music I'm making, the ability to run more instruments simultaneously is more useful than running fx on every channel, which nearly always causes cpu issues for me.
My point was simply about cpu spikes from using too many separate reverbs.