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.
One by one, or all at once? How do you create?
Are you comfortable recording one track at a time into a sequencer, or perhaps the audio equivalent, recording one audio track at a time onto the multitrack tape recorder? The future tracks haven’t been recorded, so there’s nothing to ‘play along to’, you just isolate your task to the one track you’re recording.
Or are you more comfortable having thousands of synthesisers, all running at once, whereby when you record you could easily just record all of them at once into your thousands of audio inputs on your thousand track tape recorder or thousands of midi inputs on your exceedingly wide midi sequencer, and in order to make a move, everything else has to be there already even if it is only in rough form until it all gets replaced with the real things?
Comments
One by one, as long as the music is still playing in my head.
The first rough sketch is the very basis for me, and nothing works better than an iPad for writing it down quickly.
What this alludes to is the constant long-running question I often ask myself, “do I need more than one synth?”.
I treat AUM and everything I can stuff into it - synths, FX, and, most particularly, File Player loops from earlier iterations of the same idea - in effect as one big modular ‘synth’ with the musical idea running live and evolving track by track within it. When everything is there or thereabouts, usually at 8 tracks, as that is the most I can export at once into Cubasis, then I export the full tracks, no mixing, to Cubasis, and then mix and edit all the tracks as wavs in there. I’m not really a musician, so I don’t know what the ‘tune’ will be until I hear it.
One by one here usually.
I had the same worry initially. Now, I’ve come to accept that inspiration can come from different sources.
Advice I can give is to record everything you play, and organize them. For me, it’s as simple as using Blocs Wave to organize audio files and loops, Xequence 2 for MIDI files, BeatMaker 3/BeatHawk for samples, and AudioShare for all of them. Also, if you want to get a new Synth, keep a comparison with older synths you have, and what make “x” synth unique.
For example:
1. Why do I need this app?
2. Can I do what I want to do with the other apps I have?
3. Do I need it now, or can I wait for a sale?
I’ve also stuck to a new rule called the “Rule of 4 and 8” - To make a decent song, you need only 4 layers - Drums, Bass, Chords, Lead. To make a full set, add FX, vocals, percussion, and a variable layer (if needed).
Start as simple as possible, then if you need to expand on each layer, more power to you.
One by one, till AUM starts groaning or I can’t hear some parts. Then I pair it back till I find the right amount of timbral and rhythmic space between parts.
This. That's my process, too, pretty much, and for the same reason - I don't know what it will sound like until it's done.
I build up the sequencing for all instruments in a track in a pretty whimsical way (which usually requires a lot of tweaking throughout a performance to actually perform the track). When the piece is 'finished' I multitrack it over in to my DAW of choice (Harrison Mixbux) via an iCA4+ unit.
I’ve always been a ‘build it up one part at a time’ guy, whether it was as MIDI tracks or as audio, mainly because I have trouble playing two parts at once, but I recently invested in some bargain synths and had a go recording some live improvisation using 5 keyboards. Having each keyboard dedicated to a sound I could choose from while improvising was a really liberating experience and I can understand why keyboard players of old used to end up with huge keyboard rigs (aside from not having programmable presets in the early days).
On reflection, I think I’ll still build up composed pieces one part at a time, but for improvisation, I’ll definitely stick with multiple keyboards.
That’s how I used to do it in the 90s, just buy lots and lots of synths. It’s interesting in that I had an unnecessary ‘performance’ ethos about it, whereas there was nothing live or real-time about it in reality, I could have got by with exactly the same results with just one super-capable synth and laying down one track at a time, keeping the rest of the future composition (in extremely vague form, more a specification than a score) in mind while I do it.
Unnecessary performance ethos. That’s what the problem is.
Also I’ve noticed that there’s a difference in approach regarding “sketch ” and “final “ as one goes along.
Do I take an instrument’s track to as final as soon I can, and only then move on to the next one on the slab never to return? Or do I just slap down something as a rough maquette made of twigs and tissue paper, and as soon as some later layer or two of future rough work shifts the context, come back and (also rough) remodel the earlier twig & tissue paper representations.
I don’t think I’d create the same music with the different methods. When I improvise, not only is it spontaneous, where I decide which synth to play and what to play on it based on what I’ve just heard, I also don’t always play the notes I intended, which I then have to make musical sense of. When I compose, it’s a far more rigid affair, even if I don’t have all the parts mapped out beforehand, I record each part multiple times until I’m happy with it.
I have used synths to play back via midi since before I had an 8 track reel to reel. My first multitimbral synth was an E-MU Proteus and it had 16 channels which was more than enough at the time. I added loads more hardware synths and samplers over the years but the method remained the same.
Every track was MIDI and I never ‘printed’ synths to tape. When I got my 8 track I synced it to my Mac and all the synths would play back ‘live’ alongside the vocals and guitars on tape.
I always liked the advantage of being able to tweak the MIDI right up to final mix down to 2 track.
When things started to go more ‘in the box’ I just continued in the same way. When CPU was limited I’d freeze tracks but they were always effectively just MIDI.
Since I’ve been using iOS to create sounds I’ve changed this quite a bit. Everything gets mixed to audio very early on. I can then use loops I’ve made in various apps and devices and use them to arrange in a very different way than I used to when I just used Logic (and digital performer and studio vision and plain old Opcose Vision before that).
But at the moment everything still ends up in Logic. I find it so much easier to tweak and mix in Logic especially with a huge 27” imac screen.
If I make music just with logic on my Mac then I still create the same way I always have, one track at a time but each track as MIDI so it’s tweakable and can be changed at any time.
I am far more erratic on iPhone and iPad. Partly because there’s no one app like Logic that can hold my focus. But I’m quite liking it. It feels more like playing and takes all the pressure of creating off. I just play with a drum machine instead of angry birds (or whatever is flavour of the month in the games world) when I have 10 minutes to kill it I like the sounds I will bounce a quick loop and save it for later.