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
First off, nice work. I like the way all the instruments sit and are easy to pick out. One thing that makes picking out all your great sounds challenging is the wall of sound-deftones-distorted guitar going all the time. If I were mixing this, I would consider using the electric fuzz guitar more sparingly, more in and out, here and there electric guitar to make changes more dynamic. With the electric guitar out, you can hear the space in the tune, which finally pops out at the 4:13 mark. When this happens, the song opens up a bit. I wonder if the song would keep that open sound with quieter or arranged electric guitar. Keep the parts and instruments, but consider taking things out to ADD space. Nice sounds all around, engaging and pleasant underscore. Well done wanyi.
I get what you mean about the guitar. I was hoping that a proper EQ and better mix all around might work well but I would like to do something more interesting with the guitars regardless. Thanks for that feedback.
Sonically rich although the guitar fuzz doesn't work for me. To my ear it sounds like it needs to go lower, grungier. Also there are a few moments where the rhythm and lead lines clash and generally the whole piece seems to lack direction, but I guess you already knew that! That's the brutality over with. Otherwise, it is nicely mixed and although the beats don't deviate much (or at all) you've kept to time - and that is important to my aural satisfaction. This music is crying out for vocals. You've got some lovely sonic waves coming in and out, a good grasp of groove and flow, and if I had made this I would cut it by a third and gradually introduce the sounds, layering up, increasing the distortion incrementally throughout and bringing some vocals in early and then letting the music do the rest. But it's not my song :-)
First off, I like the wall of guitar and the progression is nice. The melody is good too. The issues I can hear are as follows: fundamentally, you need to decide if you want to make a shoe gaze track or a synth pop track: the pleasantly bouncing bass synth is all wrong for a shoe gaze style track. It needs a more gritty bass guitar voicing preferably doing something a little less 8 to the bar and lower in the mix. The synth melody is very nice but again, the synth voicing itself is wrong for a shoe gaze song because it is too clean, clipped and precise (in shoe gaze all the up front instruments have tails in order to create the characteristic wash of sounds). In practice this means the melodic instruments other than vox need to keep it very simple. The solution here would be for the melody to be sung. The timing is all very locked in and straight down the line. You could try adding some small variations in the rhythm sections at the ends of bars etc. If it were me Id put a tiny touch of delay on the drums, reverb and compression to sit better with the guitar mood. I have written this while listening and relistening to your track. I hope i havent been too brutal! Theres a good song here but in my heart Im not convinced its a good fit for the inherently visceral, grainy stylings of shoe gaze. But thats just my opinion. Hope some of this waffle helps.
I accidently clicked on this link thinking it was a new app but it was because of clocktoy's comment that i gave it a listen. I dont know what your reference points are but i agree with most of what clocktoy said. Perhaps if you added vocals with delay/reverb or if you really wanna copy shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine, try multitracking your vocals 3 or more times. The keyboard part didnt do it for me and while this is no fault of your own but a limitation of digital, the bass guitar sounded to bright to me at times. there are a few apps that claim to add "tape saturation" but ive never tried them.
lastly as for the drums, i actually prefer variation. again im assuming youre an mbv fan but colm'a drums were sampled but even they progressed and had variation whereas yours sounded like you just pushed the "start button" on some old keyboard and played over it.
Good part! Your song moved me emotionally. Especially the tiny two note melody in the background when it started. Its interesting how the tiniest parts can create the magic (think david bowie's heroes ebow part) and at other times, too many parts can sound busy and complicated. Keep it up.
oh, probably the harshest part of my criticism. Dont call it gaze dude
It's like if i wrote a heavy metal song and called it "metal". There are a million other shoegazey names you can come up with such as
dream shadows
ocean dream
dreamless (haha was thinking of the dev here)
but you get my drift
or if you really wanna be original, give it a gangsta edge
dream biotches
west side dreamz
That's great! Thanks for listening and providing feedback guys. That's just what I was looking for.
The synth melody is supposed to be what I would want a vocal melody to sound like if I could sing at all. I can't. While in my head I would want that girl from Purity Ring to do the honors I think maybe I should revisit that idea and try to figure out how I could do it myself. Multitracking the vocals and saturating them with effects sounds like a good idea to check out.
Plenty of good constructive advice that I can definitely work with. Thanks for listening!
I don't get why you'd need to pick "synthpop" or "shoegaze". Seems a useless distinction unless you're trying to sell the track to a stock-soundtrack sort of place that needs categorization. Just make your song.
I think it sounds good. The drums are fine to my ears though perhaps a couple of well placed fills would serve the song well. They are about as active as anything on Loveless so whatevs.
Agree with the general concensus that replacing the synth with a vocal would be the best possible thing. Maybe @girlvsworld could sing on it.
She made a song out the last shoegazery thing I put on soundcloud. Her's with vocals and my needing-vocals original.
Otherwise, I think the synth bass and wash of distorted guitars sounds good. I'd actually skip the parts where you turn it down but I'm just that way.
Though the end drop off also sounds really nice too.
@syrupcore said:
Ordinarily I'd agree with that, but not in this case.
haha, you know syrupcore i actually felt your exact same feeling when i read clocktoys comment and was ready to say almost the same thing you said ala "just make your song" but when i heard it, i actually understood where clocktoys was coming from. philosophically i agree with you and he shouldnt give a shit about what anyone thinks but he did ask for our opinions so i gave it, however i STRONGLY disagree that wayni's drums are on par with colm o closing. if youve ever seen then live, you'll know what i mean. yes, on loveless they sidnt shine as much but it wasnt just some stock drum beat that you push start on.
oh and to deny that there is a strong shoegaze influence is denial. I really like wayni's song but cmon we all (myself included) owe some credit to mbv if we use distortion in this manner
Use of distortion goes back a lot further than that.
@gjcyrus I hope I didn't imply that it wasn't shoegazery. It is, I like it. Fundamental part of the syrup in syrupcore.
No dis to colm, wonderful drummer. But he broke his arm two tracks into Loveless and Kev and co. didn't (generally) get terribly creative with the beats they made with the samples for the other tracks. And my point was only: simple beats worked well enough on the shoegaze record by which all other shoegaze records are measured. Sometimes a simple beat is more than enough and that, to me anyway, is a key part of MBV - crazy sounds welcome, complex music is not. They mostly made deceptively simple songs.
@paulb distortion has been around since the first recording experiments at least. Still, some people (say Chuck Berry or Hendrix or Sabbath) come along and change or expand the way people use distortion. My Bloody Valentine is certainly on that list.
"Use of distortion goes back a lot further than that."
@PaulB - Pls read last four words of my post
"distortion in this manner"
I know very well the Kinks, Hendrix, Metallica to name a few have all utilized distortion. I meant in the vein that wayni's song was. I love Hendrix but his manner of distortion is a lot different from MBV where the tremolo arm was used when strumming chords.
@syrupcore - no worries man. diff strokes for diff folks. I do agree the beats on MBV were nothing extraordinarily difficult and simplistic. But to me there was a "live feel" as they were live drums that were sampled. Whereas on wayni's song (no disrespect towards him as I like his overall song) the drums do not sound like live drums. If you had an SR-16 from back in the day, you could bust out this beat. If you had majority of any keyboard that you could buy from a local department store, almost guaranteed one of the presets next to bossa nova or samba would be a rockbeat and this would be that beat. Again not saying it doesnt work, but why settle for mediocre when it could be magical. Theres a reason loveless is a timeless classic to many. It's the finer details.
Another example would be slowdive. I think they had a demo ep out where it was just a drum machine but it was soulvaki space station that got me as it had live drums even though the beats were very simple. Take even the cocteau twins, known for their drum machine beats but their albums with live drums have a diff feel although to be fair to them, robin guthrie has said he would often try to make drum beats that a live drummer could not possibly do. So if ur gonna use a drum machine or app, try to make it unique as opposed to sounding a like a generic drum beat .
Being honest the beat is the AM Pop 1 MIDI loop from Cubasis with the AM Pop set. I've been working on a proper beat in DrumStudio because I really like its sounds. But for whatever reason I have terrible timing issues when I playback and record DrumStudio so think DM 1 might be my solution. I like the flams and rolls in DrumStudio so much though...
When you guys say "Synthpop" which part are you referring to? The bouncy melody part or other sounds?