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 Store

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

Video: Modeling Vernon Reid's guitar tone on the song Cult of Personality by Living Colour

This video shows an attempt at modeling Vernon Reid's guitar tone using nothing but AUM, EQ, Saturation, and Reverb:

Comments

  • More insights on how to model guitar rigs using AUv3 FX apps. We've been in a golden
    era of FX Apps lately.

    NOTE: While we wait for the @Blue_Mangoo Saturator to drop: AUM has a Saturator and GAIN FX in the product now. We also have a lot of apps that provide saturation to swap in and out to taste.

    So, you can start playing with these concepts right away. There are also EQ's and
    most of us already own an EQ app that can provide the pre and post processing to
    let you try and make some specific tone presets in AUM like the one demo'ed here.

  • Could you try to model Bill Frisell’s guitar?

  • @Telstar5 said:
    Could you try to model Bill Frisell’s guitar?

    Have you got a particular recording of his in mind?

  • Apart from EQ, I can highly recommend spending some time with Audiodamage Grind in the meantime.
    It is for distortion what synth knobs are for synth sounds.

  • @Telstar5 said:
    Could you try to model Bill Frisell’s guitar?

    I think of Bill Frisell's tone as being completely free of any distortion. Just a pure
    amplification of the guitar string with the EQ of the pickups and their placement
    on the body go the guitar. He primarily plays Telecasters so that bridge and neck (Lipstick)
    tone need to be EQ'ed. For amp's he's quoted saying:

    When I travel I just ask for Fender Deluxe Reverb amps, but when playing and recording at home in Seattle I use a 1x12 combo made by Jack Anderson. I also have a beefedup Fender Princeton with a 12” speaker and an old tweed Gibson GA-18 Explorer that I sometimes use for recording.

    I'd like to see if they can produce the Robben Ford "Dumble" tone? Is that also a lot like the
    demo'ed John Mayer sound with his "Two Rock" or "PRS J-Mod" amp?

  • edited November 2019

    @McD said:

    @Telstar5 said:
    Could you try to model Bill Frisell’s guitar?

    I think of Bill Frisell's tone as being completely free of any distortion. Just a pure
    amplification of the guitar string with the EQ of the pickups and their placement
    on the body go the guitar. He primarily plays Telecasters so that bridge and neck (Lipstick)
    tone need to be EQ'ed. For amp's he's quoted saying:

    When I travel I just ask for Fender Deluxe Reverb amps, but when playing and recording at home in Seattle I use a 1x12 combo made by Jack Anderson. I also have a beefedup Fender Princeton with a 12” speaker and an old tweed Gibson GA-18 Explorer that I sometimes use for recording.

    I'd like to see if they can produce the Robben Ford "Dumble" tone? Is that also a lot like the
    demo'ed John Mayer sound with his "Two Rock" or "PRS J-Mod" amp?

    Yeah, I want to ask @Telstar5 for clarification about which of Bill Frisell's recordings he likes best because when I listened to a few, it sounded like his tone secret is "plug telecaster into clean channel of any amp". Of course modeling the bare-bones clean channel sound is important but it's not very challenging.

    About Robben Ford's tone: I thought about working on imitating tone from some of his recordings but I felt limited because I don't have a guitar with a humbucking pickup in the neck position. It's important to get the pickup setup close to what your reference music is doing before you try to model the amp and pedals.

    I'm still a little perplexed about the Dumble tone in general. The settings in the John Mayer tone video would get close. I'm confident that Dumble is mid-scooped similar to the fender preamp (approximately -12 db at about 520 Hz). But Dumble have a lot of switches to get different tone settings out of the preamp. It's quite hard to nail down exactly what is the sound of a Dumble Overdrive Special because it does too many different things. I definitely think of the following artists as Dumble tone players:

    1. Larry Carlton
    2. John Mayer
    3. Stevie Ray Vaughan

    But those three guitarists sound totally different from each other.

  • @Blue_Mangoo said:
    I'm still a little perplexed about the Dumble tone in general.

    It's reported that Dumble builds amp circuits for the person buying one.

    Robben Ford has been interviewed about Dumble and he says Dumble made his first batch of amps using Robben's Fender Bassman head sound from an older recording. It had the sound Dumble thought most players of that era would want to own.

    He reportedly "solders" his circuits using pure silver to reduce impurities in the signal path.
    Lots of small attentions to detail. Not unlike your attention to small but important details in software products. Carry on.

  • @Blue_Mangoo said:

    @McD said:

    @Telstar5 said:
    Could you try to model Bill Frisell’s guitar?

    I think of Bill Frisell's tone as being completely free of any distortion. Just a pure
    amplification of the guitar string with the EQ of the pickups and their placement
    on the body go the guitar. He primarily plays Telecasters so that bridge and neck (Lipstick)
    tone need to be EQ'ed. For amp's he's quoted saying:

    When I travel I just ask for Fender Deluxe Reverb amps, but when playing and recording at home in Seattle I use a 1x12 combo made by Jack Anderson. I also have a beefedup Fender Princeton with a 12” speaker and an old tweed Gibson GA-18 Explorer that I sometimes use for recording.

    I'd like to see if they can produce the Robben Ford "Dumble" tone? Is that also a lot like the
    demo'ed John Mayer sound with his "Two Rock" or "PRS J-Mod" amp?

    Yeah, I want to ask @Telstar5 for clarification about which of Bill Frisell's recordings he likes best because when I listened to a few, it sounded like his tone secret is "plug telecaster into clean channel of any amp". Of course modeling the bare-bones clean channel sound is important but it's not very challenging.

    About Robben Ford's tone: I thought about working on imitating tone from some of his recordings but I felt limited because I don't have a guitar with a humbucking pickup in the neck position. It's important to get the pickup setup close to what your reference music is doing before you try to model the amp and pedals.

    I'm still a little perplexed about the Dumble tone in general. The settings in the John Mayer tone video would get close. I'm confident that Dumble is mid-scooped similar to the fender preamp (approximately -12 db at about 520 Hz). But Dumble have a lot of switches to get different tone settings out of the preamp. It's quite hard to nail down exactly what is the sound of a Dumble Overdrive Special because it does too many different things. I definitely think of the following artists as Dumble tone players:

    1. Larry Carlton
    2. John Mayer
    3. Stevie Ray Vaughan

    But those three guitarists sound totally different from each other.

    For Larry Carlton, one of the great distortion tones to emulate is his sound on Kid Charlemagne and Don’t Take Me Alive. It is a Gibson 335 through a Mesa Boogie. I think the boogie is one from before the Mark III. His sound on that record inspired a lot of guitarists in all genres.

    Btw, I was thinking about your comment about not having a guitar with a humbucker in the neck position. I suspect that it might be tough to develop refine the sort of touch-responsive distortion without such a guitar. I might be missing someone, but all of the players that I know that fully-exploit that potential play guitars with humbuckers. I wonder if the output characteristics (volume response curve?) is different with single coil pickups and limits the degree to which you can achieve that with just touch and relatively fine volume knob adjustments. I’ll have to get my strat out of storage and see if I can get the same range with it that I can with my humbucker-equipped Ibanez.

  • @Blue_Mangoo : Not sure if you have seen this page that provides schematics and detailed analysis of the ProCo Rat.

    https://www.electrosmash.com/proco-rat

    FWIW, I don't know how true this statement is, but I know a few distortion afficionados that insist that the particular dual-band limiting in the Rat is a big part of the characteristic and they imitate Rat's characteristic with software distortion units by splitting their signal, and EQ'ing each differently and sending the signals into parallel distortion circuits that also have different post-EQ before recombining them. I haven't tried it though.

  • @McD said:

    @Telstar5 said:
    Could you try to model Bill Frisell’s guitar?

    I think of Bill Frisell's tone as being completely free of any distortion. Just a pure
    amplification of the guitar string with the EQ of the pickups and their placement
    on the body go the guitar. He primarily plays Telecasters so that bridge and neck (Lipstick)
    tone need to be EQ'ed. For amp's he's quoted saying:

    When I travel I just ask for Fender Deluxe Reverb amps, but when playing and recording at home in Seattle I use a 1x12 combo made by Jack Anderson. I also have a beefedup Fender Princeton with a 12” speaker and an old tweed Gibson GA-18 Explorer that I sometimes use for recording.

    I'd like to see if they can produce the Robben Ford "Dumble" tone? Is that also a lot like the
    demo'ed John Mayer sound with his "Two Rock" or "PRS J-Mod" amp?

    FWIW, he played a ‘71 SG up until about 1990. While his tone is generally clean, it also not a d.i. type clean. I don’t know about his current gear but for many many years, he used a stomp box compressor with pretty aggressive compression which n combination with his touch has a unique character. Reverb and delay are a big part of his sound.

    He runs down his current gear here :smile:

    https://www.guitarplayer.com/players/bill-frisell

    (Mentions that he uses ProCo Rat!)

  • edited November 2019

    @espiegel123 said:
    @Blue_Mangoo : Not sure if you have seen this page that provides schematics and detailed analysis of the ProCo Rat.

    https://www.electrosmash.com/proco-rat

    FWIW, I don't know how true this statement is, but I know a few distortion afficionados that insist that the particular dual-band limiting in the Rat is a big part of the characteristic and they imitate Rat's characteristic with software distortion units by splitting their signal, and EQ'ing each differently and sending the signals into parallel distortion circuits that also have different post-EQ before recombining them. I haven't tried it though.

    Thanks. The electrosmash article is very informative as usual. The key things we see there that make the rat sound different from other pedals are
    1. More high end and less bass in the pre EQ
    2. Mid boost at 950khz in pre EQ
    3. 67 dB of input gain (tube screamer is only 40 dB, big muff: 60, so 67 is unusually high)
    4. Very slow slew rate in output transformer which clips high frequencies more than bass.

    Only 4 is something I don’t know if we can model as shown in the video. I haven’t experimented with slew rate limiting before.

  • @Blue_Mangoo : while looking up info about the Rat (I didn't trust my recollection about how it worked), I found a comment by Vernon Reid that when the Rat came out that it was a big inspiration and was one of the first of the boutique distortion pedals.

  • @espiegel123 said:

    @Blue_Mangoo said:

    @McD said:

    @Telstar5 said:
    Could you try to model Bill Frisell’s guitar?

    I think of Bill Frisell's tone as being completely free of any distortion. Just a pure
    amplification of the guitar string with the EQ of the pickups and their placement
    on the body go the guitar. He primarily plays Telecasters so that bridge and neck (Lipstick)
    tone need to be EQ'ed. For amp's he's quoted saying:

    When I travel I just ask for Fender Deluxe Reverb amps, but when playing and recording at home in Seattle I use a 1x12 combo made by Jack Anderson. I also have a beefedup Fender Princeton with a 12” speaker and an old tweed Gibson GA-18 Explorer that I sometimes use for recording.

    I'd like to see if they can produce the Robben Ford "Dumble" tone? Is that also a lot like the
    demo'ed John Mayer sound with his "Two Rock" or "PRS J-Mod" amp?

    Yeah, I want to ask @Telstar5 for clarification about which of Bill Frisell's recordings he likes best because when I listened to a few, it sounded like his tone secret is "plug telecaster into clean channel of any amp". Of course modeling the bare-bones clean channel sound is important but it's not very challenging.

    About Robben Ford's tone: I thought about working on imitating tone from some of his recordings but I felt limited because I don't have a guitar with a humbucking pickup in the neck position. It's important to get the pickup setup close to what your reference music is doing before you try to model the amp and pedals.

    I'm still a little perplexed about the Dumble tone in general. The settings in the John Mayer tone video would get close. I'm confident that Dumble is mid-scooped similar to the fender preamp (approximately -12 db at about 520 Hz). But Dumble have a lot of switches to get different tone settings out of the preamp. It's quite hard to nail down exactly what is the sound of a Dumble Overdrive Special because it does too many different things. I definitely think of the following artists as Dumble tone players:

    1. Larry Carlton
    2. John Mayer
    3. Stevie Ray Vaughan

    But those three guitarists sound totally different from each other.

    For Larry Carlton, one of the great distortion tones to emulate is his sound on Kid Charlemagne and Don’t Take Me Alive. It is a Gibson 335 through a Mesa Boogie. I think the boogie is one from before the Mark III. His sound on that record inspired a lot of guitarists in all genres.

    Btw, I was thinking about your comment about not having a guitar with a humbucker in the neck position. I suspect that it might be tough to develop refine the sort of touch-responsive distortion without such a guitar. I might be missing someone, but all of the players that I know that fully-exploit that potential play guitars with humbuckers. I wonder if the output characteristics (volume response curve?) is different with single coil pickups and limits the degree to which you can achieve that with just touch and relatively fine volume knob adjustments. I’ll have to get my strat out of storage and see if I can get the same range with it that I can with my humbucker-equipped Ibanez.

    There is a lot of dynamic range with any electric guitar pickups; the distinct thing about humbuckers is the EQ: they are very strong in the upper mid range at about 800 Hz and weaker in the high end. Any neck position pickup picks up more bass and less treble. you can use parametric EQ to fake a change of pickups or pickup positions. I tried with my bridge humbucker the other day and found that by adding a big mid scoop at 800 Hz and a wide boost at about 2200 Hz I could make it sound similar to the coil tap switch that turns it from humbucker to single coil.

Sign In or Register to comment.