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.
Keytar live rig built with iOS Audiobus
Hello all. For the past month I’ve been an ardent lurker as I tried to build something new for a live music performance. I had a few songs that needed a variety of key sounds, but didn’t want to stand behind a full-size keyboard and sing. I also couldn’t justify the minimum $250 cost for a pro-am level keytar, and where’s the fun in just jumping to the answer out of the box? Here’s what I ended up using:
Rock Band 3 keytar: I bought the Wii version for $15. It’s a two-octave keypad with MIDI out and battery power, along with a touch pad for pitch and mod. Once I sorted how to connect it, it was the most trouble free part of my setup.
iPad Air: I did already own a newer iPad Air, and wouldn’t have really tried this with something too much older. Also, my particular performance didn’t lend itself to lugging a laptop onstage.
IRig MIDI 2: Other users had suggested a basic MIDI cable connected to the iPad would work, but I could never get the keytar to sync properly with just a cable. This box kept things sorted properly.
Audiobus 3: I built my system around Audiobus 3, which worked well as long as the apps were AU3 compatible. I saw a few too many crashes with non-updated apps to ever feel at ease using them on stage.
BeatHawk: After hours of exploring, most of my keysounds ended up coming from BeatHawk. It can be challenging to figure out whether a pack has a key extension rather than just loops, but between the organ and mellotron packs I found what I needed.
Ravenscroft275: Yep, it’s the best piano sound, and AU3 compatible. I did have to be careful how I loaded it, as it’s stability wasn’t rock-solid with everything else running.
Tonality: In a couple of songs, I wanted to just play chords with a single key. Tonality was the best answer I found and worked very well.
Midi Tools: I somewhat foolishly decided that in order to play multiple sounds in the same song, I would split my keyboard and use chords on one side. Getting the split to work properly was the hardest part; I nearly gave up at a few points because the approaches I tried to build were so unstable. Once I built the split in Midi Tools, everything was finally stable enough that I didn’t have to worry about hard restarting an iPad on stage.
All told, this system did what I needed it to do with one hiccup I was able to correct on stage. This forum was a real help.
Comments
Keytar's live rigs are my field... thanks for sharing!
Good job!
a video would be great
Did you manage to get the mod strip to work on the keytar? Mines hanging on the wall
Yes, it works for both tone and pitch in BeatHawk. I set BH to accept only MIDI from AU3; the slider changed tone on its own and pitch when the button is pushed. There are a couple of issues: the direction is reversed from what it should be, and somehow in setup I managed to shift the pitch accidentally.