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.
Why are Synths so hard to mix???
I don't know how YouTube made me stumble upon this video but I found it endlessly fascinating. It certainly put me back on my feet about the differences of the sounds of iOs and the days of old.
They way he speaks about tape, synths and sound got me inspired, I hope you find something in it as well.
Why are Synths so hard to mix???
Comments
I watched this, it’s well done. Thanks for sharing
Christian Henson is really good. I like him a lot but in small doses - he’s quite intense. He’s part of Spitfire Audio and their LABS offering. Really, really good stuff.
He’s written loads of music for film and TV - my personal favourite being Triangle (2009). If you haven’t seen it, you should.
this was cool
Christian Henson's videos are my go-to resource for sampling tips and techniques, as well as sound design in general. I like his "style" too
Really boring story... I saw Mr. Henson while out walking a couple of weeks ago as we both live in Edinburgh. Looked like he was just coming back from one of his video shoots as it was in Holyrood Park. All his outdoor scenes are filmed around there.
I wanted to say hello, tell him about my apps and give him a promo code for his iPhone, but thought it might be a bit weird
Maybe another time, as I walk / hike regularly around there 
Just to be clear, I have no plans to stalk Christian Henson! 
Haha, I'm sure he'd be fine with it. It's hardly as though, in this niche, he's going to have people bothering him in public often 😂
Ah, you say that @Gavinski, but there's another video where he talks about been approached in an Edinburgh cafe by Os from Expert Sleepers (great modular gear, in case you don't know), so I didn't want it to be a case of "oh, no... not again..."
Os is also a friend of a friend - it's a small world!
He’s like a musical James Burke. He makes several good points, but also misses a few, with a couple of plain ol’ fallacies in there too.
That was truly epic. Thanks. Explains why early Jarre sounds so good. Lots of old electro mechanical keysboards and tape echos...
That part made me bristle, isn’t a simple synth’s bandwidth huge? Isn’t a simple fm synth capable of complex overtones? But, I think he was musing on the human ear being able to easily pick out repetitive harmonics as something unnatural. I think he was looking for adding chaotic overtones to make the sound read as more organic. More of a musician’s perspective than a university professor, but I think it’s valid.
That is my take away of it, I guess. Chaos. Humans easily distinguish order from, euh chaos ? Organized chaos ? Harmonic chaos ? And it not easily being replicated by mere mathematic equations?
have to agree with mister max here
The message I got from the video. Is that he was exploring the idea that the human mind has evolved to perceive natural sounds as information about one's immediate environment. Thus, a mother singing stimulates different areas of the mind than would a Tiger growling.
I think he was overall contemplating natural sounds as having spectral composition that the human mind responds to in innate ways. Then he constructed a sound based on a hypothesis about chaotic harmonics being a factor used by the human mind as a source of "meaning" for a given sound.
Kind of like a hypothetical concept that speculates natural sounds contain harmonics arranged in a "code like" way, and a subliminal part of the human mind is capable or interpreting those encoded harmonics in an instinctive way.
The comparison with synthesizer sounds was simply to suggest that they had harmonics, but they were not "encoded harmonics" having intrinsic meaning as compared with sounds from the natural world.
Don't be shy broseph. You're a giant in your domain. It would be his honor to meet you.
@horsetrainer I agree - that’s what I got as well. He’s not making any value judgement - he’s trying to understand things on a more biological level, perhaps. And he’s definitely not slighting synths.
IMO....
By "intrinsic meaning" relative to harmonics, I'm referring to any sorts of information that the human auditory system has the ability to detect from an innate/instinctive level of awareness.
Example. I'm an experienced Horse Trainer. Part of that job is horse care. When one horse in a barn of 25 is sick, I can often hear the difference in the overall sound of the barn. Sometimes I'll have an instinctive feeling of what the issue is, and which horse is in trouble. It can be that something is missing from the normal barn sound, indicating a listless sick horse. Or it might be a horse abnormally rolling in its stall because it is colicing.
When I ride a horse, I hear its foot falls. The sound of foot falls contains subtile clues about how the horse is moving. If a horse has a loose shoe on one hoof, I can often notice it by listening.
In the animal world, sounds contain information about any particular animal making the sound. The size of the animal, the health of the animal, the location of the animal. A wounded rabbit will move differently than a healthy rabbit. A predator like a fox can pick out that sound from amongst all the other sounds in its environment. For a fox a wounded rabbit is an easier meal to catch.
For a more urban example. Many people can recognize the make and model of a car by the sound it makes. An obvious vehicle sound is a Harley Davidson motorcycle. Some people can hear engine problems with their car, like a sporadic misfire of a cylinder.
The overall point is that sound can contain all sorts of information about what is making the sound. Sometimes that information can be very subtle. But it's a part of the nature of both people and animals to be able to interpret the subtly "encoded" information in a sound, and derive information or emotions from sounds.
The difference with a synth, is it's not a living breathing thing, nor an object of the natural world. But a sound designer who understands something about those subtly "encoded" bits of information found in natural sounds, might be able to isolated certain elements from natural sounds, and encode them into the sound to give artificially creates sounds, hints of natural sound eliminates that can alter the way a listener perceives a sound, and the emotion it invokes.
This is a very theoretical sort of subject.