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.

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Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

q about your beat creation workflow

Simply put: how do you come up with beats fitting your ideas? Do you rely on your playing skills or do you paint in notes? Or do you use more specific apps like Patterning, Octachron and stuff. And if the later do you program busy beats and kind of cut them down with probability settings? I‘m still looking for something like EZ Drummer2 where you can play in some music and let the app suggest some approrpiate beats...

Comments

  • No programming.

    Looping

    Hardware playing live for most part.

    No piano roll stuff for me

  • I use everything you mentioned- sometimes for the same instance. I don’t rely on one method.

  • I tend to have a fair amount of swing in what I write so it is usually easier to have something metronomic going and just record.

    I usually make something overly busy that way with a template drum preset with 5 to 8 parts and then copy it. Usually working with around 16 - 20 sounds total.

    Generally back and forth, I'll use those copies for some layering (sound designing stage) and subtracting (after I like or not the layers or just for variation).

    Don't really add fills until the song is closer to done.

  • I play in everything via touch screen keys and drum pads, use the piano roll only to correct minor stuff that’s not worth doing another take. Usually it starts with a 4 or 8 bar loop that gets copied out to jam over on top of. I kind of just fill up the timeline as quick as possible, putting stuff down. Then it gets sculpted down into a basic structure, whereby further stuff is added or taken away.

  • @dermichl said:
    Simply put: how do you come up with beats fitting your ideas? Do you rely on your playing skills or do you paint in notes? Or do you use more specific apps like Patterning, Octachron and stuff. And if the later do you program busy beats and kind of cut them down with probability settings? I‘m still looking for something like EZ Drummer2 where you can play in some music and let the app suggest some approrpiate beats...

    Future Drummer or other Lumbeat Drum apps.. and iBassist seems to be the smoothest experience there is..

    Wish there was the midi export that iBassist has..

  • edited June 2019

    @dermichl said:
    Simply put: how do you come up with beats fitting your ideas? Do you rely on your playing skills or do you paint in notes? Or do you use more specific apps like Patterning, Octachron and stuff. And if the later do you program busy beats and kind of cut them down with probability settings? I‘m still looking for something like EZ Drummer2 where you can play in some music and let the app suggest some approrpiate beats...

    I think you answered a lot of your own questions there! But just to throw in my .02 bitcoin, here are some thoughts:

    I love Patterning, and I put in TONS of 'accent' hits in addition to the main beat with probability set very very low, so they only hit every now and then. Works great with snares and other stuff... Just for fun, on a typical 2/4 snare pattern, put hits on the beat before (16th note), set ratchet to 2 divisions, and probability to 2 to 5 percent. Every few bars you get a nice little roll in to the back beat. Makes it feel more like a live drummer. CHH I always fill every beat, then set probability very high on all of them to do the opposite, have occasional dropouts to create a live feel...

    Rosetta has some really nice tools, because you have the 'mutate' function on rythm and most of the others.

    Sorta glorious and effective cheating is soft drummer and the others in that series, what an amazing resource they are - even if just as a placeholder in a track. I have been studying all the 'traditional' rythms there, and it is pretty mindblowing... You can even record the midi into sequencers...

    Last suggestion, when programming beats its fun to take an element, one that would normally go to a perc sound or a tom, and send it to a synth instead.

    Cheers

  • @db909 said:
    I play in everything via touch screen keys and drum pads, use the piano roll only to correct minor stuff that’s not worth doing another take.

    Pretty much my workflow when I'm in a linear DAW like NanoStudio2.

    Otherwise, it's mostly just messing around with apps until something interesting/fitting happens. I do very very much like using probability and variable length sub-patterns (to create polymeteric type stuff) in apps that support them.

  • @dermichl said:
    I‘m still looking for something like EZ Drummer2 where you can play in some music and let the app suggest some approrpiate beats...

    I've never used EZ Drummer. Reading this though makes me want something like an unquantized single line 'Accent' pattern in the (fantastic) Lumbeat apps that would adjust the underlying drum beats to emphasize those points (without trying to recreate some of those wonderful beats in his apps).

    Kind of like a super simple groove quantize—or more like a 'groove adjust', I guess. The built-in beats already have all manner of groove. If you could push and pull the accented parts of those grooves to more closely match the thing you're working on though...

  • edited June 2019

    TBH, this is the area I have been trying to nail down for a very long time. After experimenting in several directions, this is what I have come up with:

    Idea —> MIDI —> audio instrumentation —> mix —> mixdown

    Everything is ultimately midi driven. I create MIDI in one of three ways:

    1. Using a piano roll editor, most often Xequence.
    2. Using SymphonyPro5 to enter music notation then exporting to MIDI.
    3. Connecting a midi hdwe kybd to Atom Piano Roll (and a synth to monitor) and recording, then exporting.

    (Note: There are many other ways to get MIDI, like recording it from the fabulous sequencers out there like Patterning, or Fugue Machine. Depending on what i’m after, I use those too.)

    I use MIDI almost ALWAYS In Xequence connected as a midi source in AB3 to AUM ports. In AUM, those ports are connected to the instruments I want to generate audio. The AUM audio out lanes are Record-enabled. When I start recording in AUM, Xequence is triggered (by Link?). I use AudioShare to Normalize and Trim after recording. (BTW, It’s just my preference to use AUM as the audio creator and AB3 as the midi router. I’ve read other posts here citing one over the other. Both are GREAT. So is apeMatrix! I’m just more used to AUM.)

    I open Auria Pro and import the AudioShare edited audio as needed to fit the song. If I wish, Effects are added to Auria Pro as appropriate, listen to it, make adjustments until I’m happy, then do a mixdown (usually back to AudioShare). Sometimes there are intermediate mixdowns that get saved for a final mix, also in Auria.

    That’s the general flow. Sometimes as I create MIDI in Atom, i’ll Export it somewhere in case I want to use it again.

    Before today, I didn’t have all the pieces in place. But it works for me now that I do.

    This will be enhanced even more if/when Nanostudio2 gets audio tracks. It’s just too big of a pain right now to import the audio to Slate and assign clips to the pads. With NS2 MIDI in/out, I can still use it as a fabulous instrument (and I can import/export the midi clips too if I wish).

    That’s the general idea. Before I start, I sometimes noodle on a keyboard and record the midi and the audio, so I can listen and refine the big picture before I start the song build. That’s the musical creation step. That’s where “trying things out” happens. If there’s something I like, I can note the timeline and cut/paste the midi for use. I usually do this with a metronome at the BPM setting that I’d like for the section of the song.

    I’m wondering though whether anyone else has the same problem using naming conventions to keep everything sorted out along the way...

  • Patterning for how I'd usually use a drum machine. Otherwise I just drag samples onto the timeline. I play most of my drums on a real kit but intentionally chop them up a lot.

  • @BroCoast said:
    Patterning for how I'd usually use a drum machine. Otherwise I just drag samples onto the timeline. I play most of my drums on a real kit but intentionally chop them up a lot.

    Patterning is fantastic, either for painstakingly plotting out a beat, or for improvising until you get a good groove. I also like live drumming on the OP-1.

    Another nice trick is to set two Drummers against each other in GarageBand. Or Drummers and GB drum loops. Then maybe sample and chop up the results in Egoist.

    FWIW I don't like straight "rock rhythms" in my own music. If I'm arranging something with acoustic instruments, I use trap/dance/hip-hop-inspired grooves, only with acoustic drum kits.

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