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
Well I guess the main problem is the huge variety in guitars/pickups/plec/playing style. Mostly the pickups I guess. If an amp sim sounds great with a muddy humbucker it will sound bad with a bright single coil. So the only solution in my opinion is an amp sim with very simple user manipulation rather than preset/ir focus. That’s why I prefer not to work with IRs. They very seldom work with my guitar as it’s quite unique (baritone with mini humbuckers).
I guess the ultimate goal for an amp sim would be to achieve the fender amp effect. Whatever you plug in sounds good with little to no adjustment. A little black magic..
I am testing every amp on several different guitars. They dont all sound great on every guitar but at least there are options for humbuckers and single coils in different positions
I get my ideas about good tones from listening to classic recordings. But the most important criteria is that I have to feel inspired when I plug my guitar in and play. Many times, after hours of tweaking and experimenting I get something that sounds like what's on the album I'm listening to. But somehow even though it sounds like the reference, it doesn't feel good to play on it. The most typical example of that is when I can get the tone to sound like the reference when I pick really hard, but the real amp used in the original recording sounded like that even when playing lightly, so I'm getting the right sound but I'm working too hard for it. An amp like that might pass a listening test but it's not enjoyable for the guitarist. When we finally do get an amp right, the feeling is unmistakeable: it's just super fun to play. A few times as I'm tinkering I stumble on a sound that isn't anything like the reference but I catch myself jamming out instead of working. If that happens, I stop and save the settings I've got. So there are several amp models in there now that don't sound like any reference at all.
Other times the reference is more technical. I did a fender amp sound today. The EQ curves for the preamp of Fender, Marshall, and Vox amps are easy to find online and they're simple and easy to copy. So that's often the starting point when I know I want one of those sounds. Another way we get more technical references is to download speaker cabinet impulse responses and look at them in a spectrum analyzer. We aren't using cabinet IRs in the app but we do check to make sure our cabinet emulation unit has a spectrum that actually matches real speaker IRs, at least at the starting point before we tweak it by ear.
Now, I can see the anticipation building... If you have several amps finished then I would release it at an Intro price and add more amps as IAPs or as updates that encourage more
buyers based on new video demos of the amp types. With every update yo could also consider raising the price and the update pattern wold train buyers to get in on the rewards
early.
NS2 committed to iPhone and audio tracks as updates. Many are still waiting until audio is added but those that started at intro reaped the most rewards for supporting the developer's work.
Getting @flo26 to beta the product and provide feedback would insure positive feedback from excellent musicians. He took a run at a YouTube channel but seems to have slowed down. He's provided many excellent tutorials here for IOS Guitar uses and his word "makes or breaks" apps here.
What you described sounds a lot like what Kemper did to build their widely respected product.
Two thumbs up for using your ears to rate and science to achieve 😎
Did you see the Kemper interview on Anderton’s TV?
I like his idea of studying amp hardware but not actually modelling the circuit down to the last resistor and capacitor. That’s a compelling approach because there are parts of the amp for which accurate methods of modelling have yet to be discovered. If you make an exact circuit model of some parts but do an inaccurate approximation of some other parts, the result will usually end up too bright, too dark, too fizzy, etc. That’s caused by the part of the amp you didn’t model accurately. If you work by ear you could compensate for those errors by listening and making adjustments. But Kemper makes the point that if you are able to make adjustments by ear then you could build the entire amp by ear; after all, the hardware amp builders do it by listening and experimenting so why shouldn’t we also build software amps that way? I totally agree with him there.
I think two different issues are being conflated here. Amp/distortion/preamp settings and cabinet IRs.
When most of us are talking about cabinet IRs, we are talking about well-recorded IRs whose intention is just to capture the characteristics of a particular speaker cabinet in a room -- these IRs aren't meant to provide the sort of distortion and tone that one manipulates with an amp or distortion pedals controls.
Amp and distortion settings are certainly super sensitive to what the input is and the same settings won't sound good with different pickup types or even the same pickup type in different positions or on different guitars. When I switch between guitars with my real amp, I have to change pretty much every knob to get a sound I like.
However, I don't change speaker cabinets when I switch guitars.
The same is true of good cabinet IRs. If the cabinet IR is an IR for a real cabinet that would sound good with different guitars and pickups, then the cabinet IR should work for both. But the amp settings will have to change. But those settings are independent of the IR.
There may be cabinets that only sound good for some instruments and not others but that is a whole other thing.
I've added a page to the wiki for us to add tips and trick and links to threads related to getting good electric guitar sounds on iOS:
https://wiki.audiob.us/amp_simulation_tips_and_tricks
100%
Attempts at full circuit modeling have been done a few times in history, often ending in unsatisfactory results or unbearable CPU load.
I still own a Creamware NOAH, one of the more successful attempts (it sounds fantastic!), which uses roughly one DSP chip per voice, at least for the Minimoog and Pro One models.
DSPs were expensive back in the days so Creamware sold two versions, one with six and one with ten DSP chips.
They always said that they modeled the synths directly from the schematics. I don't know how far they went with modeling components but the result was/is great.
When you make a circuit model of a synth, the points of failure are the oscillators (they will have aliasing noise unless you use an insanely high sample rate) and the modulation of parameters (because a digital model operates on discrete samples in a step-by-step process, you get problems in the model wherever there is a feedback loop, for example in resonant filters, because when you very quickly change the values of the other components of the model, the values stored in the feedback buffers don't correspond to what they would have be in an analog system where changes happens instantaneously rather than sample-by-sample.) If they really did do an exact circuit model of the entire synth, they would have to run at an insanely high sample rate (hence the dedicated DSP chips).
In my own guitar amp models, the interaction between the power supply transformers and the vacuum tubes is the point where the model falls apart when it's not configured properly. I don't know for sure but I certainly wouldn't be surprised if that's also where other amp sim apps also get stuck.
An interesting experiment is to replace your cab IR with a .wav file that is not a cabinet IR at all. It can be literally anything: white noise, a 1 millisecond long clip from a Beatles song, anything. One thing you'll notice right away is that the cab IR will not cause a clean signal to become distorted and noisy, even if the IR was recorded with a lot of noise and distortion. What it will do if it's not done right is mess up the EQ.
A widely used technique for modeling acoustic instruments is to couple a digital model of a string with an impulse response from the actual instrument. You can get impulse responses of acoustic guitars, violins, and other stringed instruments by threading a sock through the strings so that they don't ring out and then recording yourself tapping once on the bridge with a hard object. I tried this with a violin a few years back. I tapped the bridge with a rock and then loaded the recording of that tap sound into Space Designer in Logic Pro. Put a synth playing a saw wave on the track and it was amazing how close it got to the sound of the violin. It wouldn't fool anybody of course; it was still obviously a synth, but the tone was unmistakably violin-like.
Btw, the convolution app I was using in iOS till recently for hosting cabinet IRs (Fiddlicator) was I think created in order to host IRs of different violins and violas in order for owners of inexpensive instruments to record their instrument and have it sound like a better instrument. It works pretty well. I have run Finger Fiddle (which sounds really good without help) through a viola IR and was impressed by the increased realism.
I’ve tried to track down a sarangi IR since that is an instrument I’d like to emulate but haven’t found one.
I looked up fiddlicator. It says it is designed to make electric violins sound like acoustic ones. That's really cool. No AU3 support though?
Nope. It was really well done (and free) but hasn’t been updated in years if I recall.
I am following this thread with great interest, but I also notice there is absolutely no mention of IMPULSation app that was recently released and had two threads dedicated to amp cab IR's. Just curious on the thoughts of involving that in the mentioned set-ups. I have started using tips/trix from this thread in addition to IMPULSation and I find it really quite good/nice. No one else?
As far as I know, for cabinet IRs, all the convolution options on iOS are pretty similar in performance and quality. What is important is the IR file itself.
I think not so much about which IR loader is best, but the ability to maybe disable the cab in the amp sim to use your own IRs with an app such as Impulsation
We currently don’t have that option in our app, but I can see how it would be useful. I’ll consider adding it.
Yes. If it’s done correctly then all convolution apps should sound the same when they have the same IR loaded. Unless they have additional EQ or time stretching features, of course.
Thanks - really looking forward to this app and appreciate all the videos/ insights/ details
Agreed. But what other options are there for loading IR's? I must have missed them all prior to IMPULSation, I was thinking we didn't have a great selection to choose from.
Rooms (besides impulsation, the only AU option)
Fiddlicator (free)
iConvolver
AltiSpace
Blimey. Thanks. Turns out I had 2 of those already.
Happy New Year!
I believe Fiddlicator has an IAP of $5 to unlock the longer IR's. I was surprised how cool the
short ones were for free from OwnHammer (200 ms) and then I was delighted by the improvement the $30 collection was with 500ms waves.
So, the lowest cost option for large IR's might be Rooms! Not sure. Fiddlicator has a delay and reverb of excellent quality included and probably never made it's developer rich so
I felt OK buying the IAP to encourage maintenance. It made me want to put a pick up on my violin or (better yet) get a quieter e-violin and use headphones. You don't want to be around me when I try to play in tune. Still... practice makes the time pass.
FWIW, no IAP has been needed for any of the cabinet IRs that I've tried. That being said the Rooms developer is very responsive and actively maintaining Rooms -- and it is AU. The AU IAP in Rooms is quite inexpensive and worth it in my opinion.
I wanted to load the 500 ms guitar cabs. How long are your IR's? (My memory can be
flawed but I recall buying an IAP).
I am pretty sure that I loaded larger cabs than that. The IAP seems to be for MIDI control of the parameters.
Thanks. Looks like I paid to show respect for the App. But MIDI control with Mozaic might be
a fun project to learn LFO's. Make the walls move in and out until I get sick.