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
@JoyceRoadStudios won’t say, because we all know the only way he is “officially done” is due to the fact he now owns absolutely every piece of kit in the Overloud universe!!! 🤗 😉🤣
Not quite! The full pack was a great investment, as I know most of you will reach that $ amount anyway buying ala carte. As for the rigs, it’s very unfortunate for me and lucrative for Overloud that they don’t offer rig demos, because if they did then I’d be all set with 3 to 5 perfect rigs. Instead I have well over half of them, and of course they’ll keep coming out with more great ones and dangling that drug sack of tone.
I’m not overwhelmed, I’m actually excited to set it all up with IRs and midi. See y’all in 3 years 🤣
Please keep ranking your rigs. I'm buying the one that wins... If you're really done that's the Tremolux.
I like that it tops the Bassman and its mostly cleans: 2 points for my buying criteria.
We only need a few more comments and we can stop at 20 pages.
I spent an hour in the garden today with my:
NOTE: a 2nd set of 2.4Ghz TX/RX units could work to remove that cable to the headphones
but only if I replace the iRig with the Zoom U-44 and add a 5V battery source so the headphone
port is 1/4".
I watched the birds and played until the battery died. Just over an hour I think. Good times.
Nice man, sounds ace 👍
I own only two Choptones rigs so far: the Bassman and the Tremolux. I haven’t seen the Tremolux mentioned here before but I use it often. Very warm and organic, IMO, and it can sound especially good through an Ownhammer IR.
Yes! I think you have the two best rigs, especially if we’re talking Fender. And they absolutely do sound better with Ownhammers. I remember you mentioning the Tremolux before. I think the main difference between the Tremolux and Bassman is Trem is mostly warm organic clean rigs and Bassman offers a few more crunch and krrrang rigs. A couple of the Trem rigs have the gain higher and it’s a truly unique sound, that thick vintage distortion of two notes like turbine engines. The Trem also gets a good jangle. The Bassman can do a more modern distortion and that classic slightly breaky chord sound with clarity. They both have a beautiful Fender clean sound, and enough differences to justify having both.
I’m liking the Prince 68 with Ownhammers, it has mostly clean rigs. The Edge is pretty gritty and scooped tweed deluxe type, lots of crunch rigs and the clean ones are definitely Voxy from the speaker mod. SRev is vintage and a little darker and colder. Bass and Trem have the clarity.
Overloud desktop can load two mono IRs at once into their IR cabinet module which can be mixed to each other. When this comes to iOS these rigs will sing even more in the box with less cpu. The rig IRs can be harsh or murky in some cases, but always some great rig patches to find.
The other thing is using the Ownhammers with amp sims, what a huge difference. I played the Slo 88 with a Zilla and Bogner IR, just great. With some of the guitar apps like Bias etc.. an IR definitely improves it but can often accentuate the bad digital quality or fake tone shape. Not with Overloud. Those sims with Ownhammers are badass. Seems to be a common thread with all these apps, cabinet modeling being a weak point. This is how Nembrini got it right, just going straight for IRs. Now they need a loader as well. No issue with using Thaf at all, but savings those presets with IRs inside TH-U and Nembrini would be a convenient streamline with easier midi control too.
There are some other good TH-U Fenders in American Classics and Vintage Collection 1 & 2. I need to pull them all together into a new library.
Agreed, a few hits in there for sure. But do you get the impression that choptones rigs are better quality capture than thu branded? I have the Vintage1, American, British, Silver Jub, T&B Classic and Puncher, and while they’re all quite good, there’s a certain blanket over them, slightly thinner and more distant or murky sounding. Maybe that’s just my impression?
Perhaps, but as @flo26 has demonstrated again and again, any of them can sound excellent in the right hands. Also, the differences become much harder to perceive in the context of a mix or when processed (e.g. TTOV, Yukawa, Kosmonaut... whoa).
I've slowed way down on buying rigs. With hundreds of options in TH-U and limitless permutations in the Nembrini amps, it's impossible not to find one that's just right for a particular song or mood.
Yeah totally, I wish I had stopped but it became partly about wanting to “have” certain amps I desired or could never afford. It’s good marketing. I would have been more than happy with 3 to 5 distinct rigs covering all the main food groups (plexi, tweed, recto, slo, etc...) but now I have plenty that I’ll barely play. In real life we’d choose one or two amps to get to know and stick with them. I still think swimming through all this and getting a few dozen perfect go-to tones will be worth it. This includes all the great Nembrini amps and pairing it all with IRs and the fx. If all this tech remains viable for the next 3-5 years, then really no regerts.
Well, I’ve been using THU version one for years in Auria — 7 years
Yes I keep thinking every day, THU sounds better than the competition by a long shot. Only Nembrini compares, to my ears. How lucky are we??
R.I.P. Eddie... tonight I’ll be on the Nembrini 8180.
I set aside guitar for about a week (busy with work/family stuff), and then returned to THU last night intending a very quick jam session with nothing more than my Apogee JAM interface and headphones out of my iPad Pro. I started setting up patches in Vintage Collection 2, intending to do just a little bit of playing and a lot of busy work to set up patches. I think I ended up stuck on the Twin Twelve and the Fender Pro Reverb (the mid-boosted one). I couldn't put it down because it sounded so good!
But the real reason for my post is to report how well the rigs in THU take external pedals. I was shocked by this. Modelers and software amps of any kind traditionally do not behave well with external pedals. It's normally a recipe for clipping, problems getting levels right, and general behavior that is nothing how the pedals work with real-life amps. Not the case with THU, though. The Pro Reverb rig was mostly clean but could be pushed with just a bit of breakup. My favorite fuzz pedal is the DOD Carcosa because that thing is like 6 pedals in one. I had it doing everything from clean boost, to Muff sounds, to gated fuzz. Sounded amazing.
After that experience, I had to see how THU would behave with compressors and boosters. My Mooer Yellow Comp really did the job tying those rigs together. I had noted in previous posts that I loved the sound of the THU amps, but they lacked a bit of the saturation and tube compression that I was after. Knowing that I can use external compressors that I already have should stop me from going down the rabbit hole of IAP effects purchases. Also tried the Snouse Blackbox (Bluesbreaker clone), DOD Bifet Boost, and a ZVex Super Hard-On (clone) - all sounded terrific. Was very pleased to find this out, as it adds TONS of versatility to a THU-based setup.
TH-U Tip:
If you scoll to the very bottom of the list of modules they offer an option to start with only the products you own. It speeds things up for anyone that only has some ala carte purchases or one bundle.
I personally don't buy the matching cab when I have bought ala carte amps because I'll never get
that money back and I'm getting the FULL bundle at some point in the next year. I doubt these
folks will offer massive discounts but I'd love to be wrong on Black Friday.
Desktop stuff went half price last Black Friday, I’m holding out for a repeat on that. Also has a 14 day full featured demo which I’ve been saving for when I have a 14 day break (any day now). I’m optimistic about some iOS deals to come.
Overloud has had significant sales on a number of their desktop products over the past few months.
There's always the possibility they will attempt to milk the iOS community for every scrap (since it's relatively new here) but I'm patient.
If they skip the Black Friday deals, I'll just revel in my GE Labs and Nembrini gifts and be perfectly happy.
I've been playing my guitars 40/50% more often since these new launches. Add Saturn and a whole new world of options have opened to me. 🤗
Did we make it to page 20 yet? Can we start a new page for the Marshall or Vox sound?
Stop tempting me! 😂
I posted before about a problem with Overloud TH-U not successfully receiving midi program change messages through AUM. I've just heard from their support that they can reproduce the issue and will work on a fix.
This was with a Harley Benton / Meloaudio MP100 (via usb & bluetooth), also with a Boss RC-50 over bluetooth with a Yamaha MD-BT01. They'd previously tested with a IK Blueboard and that was apparently working fine. CC messages ok, just PC that is the problem.
Well I'm up to 323 dollars on this overloud app. I knew it was a lot but didn't know how much until I tried to get a refund. I tried to get one for lrs serenity. It's just too fizzy on the higher gain stuff. Well I tried but they said it was not eligible for refund then asked me to elaborate more on why I thought I should get a refund which I did and they still refused it, oh well. In the mean time, thinking I was gonna get it refunded, I bought fried Betty which is great. I'm sure there's some good ones in serenity the cleans. But I am done now. Thank you!
That's terrible. I guess the alternative is for these apps and IAP's to check with the App Store to see if an app should be deactivated and I'm glad they continue to work without needing internet access. As the broker Apple has to serve 2 communities while insuring it grows this multi-Billion $ market. We are just chump change in the revenue mix. Still, $323 is a nice investment in Rig's. I sure many are just 'meh' so refunds are needed to encourage try and buy thinking. But buy and "spin th wheel" puts us in the sucker's chair where the house always wins.
@Bootsy You’re sure you weren’t playing with the cab-less “direct amp” rigs right? Those are of course horrible by themselves, and for some reason the rig player still has cab power “on” even though there’s no cab, so I turn that off. You’ve tried it with impulsation or cab sim? I also noticed that the serenity preset bank has all the pedals around the rig turned off as a default, which is weirdly different from the other rig banks.
Personally I’m amazed at the sheer variety of high gain sounds in this rig. Usually with an amp you’ll get a lead channel that does one type of gain really well, like a plexi or rectifier. But with this rig there are several different gain channels and so much color variety, sure there are a few that were fizzy like an Engl, but I found so much more plexi and Slo and American type gains, with many tone shape combinations. There is a beauty to them and also to the clean sound, something Italianate. Of course it is a matter of taste and we all have different gear and preferences, which is why recommending stuff can backfire. To me this rig isn’t even metal, it’s many colors of melodic and hard rock, plus a clean that’s not metallic. And yes there’s plenty of hair on some of the sounds, but tonally unique, not squashed and compressed like some metal amps.
The Fried Betty is just beautiful, I was hooked from the very first rig. Single channel amp, it’s both a Fender with balls and mids, and a Brit amp with Americana grunge attitude. The top strings sing with a pretty echo. I don’t know why but the sound makes me think of a hazy ipa that tastes like hay, San Diego style.
These rigs need to be $10 so people can justify exploring $50 worth of interesting amps and not feel bad about it... or a timed demo or preview like other apps do... I think they know that if people had this chance they’d buy way fewer rigs, because the other way is buying a rig that happens to be amazing and then chasing the rest of them.
Since they split the $'s into 3 buckets:
Apple 30%
ChopTones (or LHS) 35% maybe
OverLoud 35% maybe
I expect the negotiated price to be ~$5 to each at a minimum for the effort involved
in making these products for us. Still, we'll probably see a few more "Hardware Modelers"
in AUv3 format overtime. But I don't expect well see a better implementation anytime soon.
Nembrini does a great job, both with skipping the cab emulations and going with IRs, and marketing their amp tech as using “carefully modeled original analog circuits”. So we’re not necessarily thinking oh boy it sounds exactly like that amp in real life, but we could assume it, and those amps sound really good. And TH-U is marketing rigs as “samples”, “modeled after capturing the actual amp” tech, so kind of like Kemper profiles, and some of us are lapping it up because we want to play and really hear those amps. So one could look at all this tech as just marketing and be doubtful, because at the end of the day both apps sound comparably great. But I think they’re indeed onto something here, and we the consumers/musicians are the beneficiaries.
I could see Nembrini jump into this type of tiered product space by making a "Nem-Rigger"
and selling IAP's of ChopTones and other venders lab models. It lets them leverage their sound engine without giving away trade secrets of their code.
I wonder how much extra work ChopTones has to do to fit their work into a dozen modelers
and maintain quality.
Well, they do have their native “plug-in rig host” on desktop and they’ve mentioned it’s been in Beta for iOS, they’ve mentioned an iOS IR loader. So even just having an app where I can host an amp with all their rack fx and my own IR in one place and not an AUM chain would be welcome, add to that the ability to insert something like Eventide or an amp rig profile, game changer. I know everyone insists that chaining in AUM is the way to go, but still. It shouldn’t be the only way to play on iOS. Some players might want a dedicated standalone guitar app for live shows, or at least a plug-in host that controls the input/output stage of just those combined components.
I have actually read that the exact same Choptones products can vary in quality from modeller to modeller, which makes sense since modellers implement different frequency curves and methods in their programming. So this may pose a problem and would force every collab release to be an “exclusive”. I don’t know the validity of this, but there’s plenty of commentary on the webs about this.
@JoyceRoadStudios Good to know. Thanks for sharing your research.
Now we need to get @Bootsy to dish on his favorites and get some discussion going around the great Rigs people should be considering for Black Friday sales. I always have a list ready to jump.
Indeed!
Hopefully the list could somehow possibly include whether their buy rating is based on whether the user has humbuckers, single-coils and (perhaps) even P-90s.