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.
Ask the Artist: @McD
If you would like to subject yourself to the intense questioning of the ABF community
please send me a little bio of your musical life to date. Just a simple list of events:
Got a trumpet at age 10 and hated all the spit on my shoes.
Switched to making music with a Roland Synth
Joined a band and dropped out of school to get famous
Went back to school and got a real job
Still have that trumpet
NOTE: That's NOT my life but is the life of a guy in my failed band "Attention Deficit Disorder".
She has refused to take your questions out of a sense of shame and privacy. Looser.
Don't ask her any questions because I have already disclosed too much in this example.
PM me to play or just start your own thread with "ASK THE ARTIST" in the title.
Comments
I think we all want to hear your story. However sordid it is.
+1...erm, for the hearing your story part.
Brief outline of my Story:
Drum lessons started at age 10.
Music Education Degree from CSULB.
Father bought plan shop instruments and taught me to play them all.
Taught drum lessons and played bars for 10 years scrapping by morphing from drums to a singing/keyboard player at the end.
Decided to go back to college for a 2nd degree in Electrical/Computer Engineering again
from CSULB (a good cheap state school to avoid debt)
Computer Engineer for 30 years in the Silicon Valley.
Retired.
Getting back into music via IOS to keep my brain alive.
McD, McD, McD!
Didnt go to school much but would prefer learning now.
I remember in music class, the teacher got us to record on tape as if we were a radio station but the class ended and so did my interest.
After feeling like a loser on schools last day I see the music room and thought. Why didnt I ask or try more at playing the triangle.
Im still at the radio station stage, with a mic and fieldscaper and not bothering AGAIN.
I guess Id excell in loops.
Who's your drum hero? (or top 3)
How would they compare to Danny Carey (Tool) if you're familiar with him?
I'm stuck at the 'pathetic' level playing djembe. I've always thought timing is the first thing to perfect then move on to improve the technical side... now I'm loosing interest doing the same thing every time. Teacher is not an option, but if there are tips how to best approach it... like 101 'what's missing from YouTube videos' that would be great help.
Thanks
When/where were you playing out and what kind of stuff did you play? Any pictures?
1) Buddy Rich - check out him amusing Charlie Parker
I got a chance to see Buddy live with his Big Band at Disneyland where they put him in the
dancing area like the old Big bands and sat on the floor 5 feet in front of his drums for 5 hours. His work ethic was truly epic and the greatness was on ballads and just the way he
created the grooves and the emotional floor for the soloists. He made every member of his band bring it every night.
2) Billy Cobham - got a chance to see him with the Mahavishnu orchestra. His mastery of
indian style time signatures and focus on not just the snare was revolutionary.
Billy blows my mind because he also plays left handed on a standard kit:
3) Tony Williams - revolutionized the independence of the 4 limbs and took jazz past swing and into something that most modern players can only hint at while bridging the world of jazz into fusion.
Sorry. I tended to loose contact with a lot of music from '85 on with occasional side trips into
someone the press called out like Trent Reznor and the NIN albums. For modern drummers I'd mention Nate Smith for his creativity and Brian Blade.
I haven't given a drum lesson in over 40 years. But I think everyone should aim to let their voice come out. Stop comparing yourself to anything or anyone. Loose yourself in the pleasure of the act of creativity and seek small gains in mastery of the effort.
Play with anyone and everything you can. You going to be better than someone and more will fall behind you if you release the best instincts you have for making interesting sounds.
There's a lot to be said for he development of technical proficiency but honestly in the end it's learning to get out of your head that matters the most. Great players beat themselves up and strive to get better but it's wide to enjoy the process and find your audience.
It's incredibly hard to turn off that inner critic and even harder not to "watch" your self play externally. The self-conscious artist has failed to show up for the gig and is sitting in the audience hoping he doesn't really suck... and he will.
But finding the bliss in the moment will help immensely.
I worked the OC and LA areas. I only worked with about 5 groups over 10 years and was determined NOT to travel. We all needed steady income and had side work. I taught school and gave music lessons. My biggest challenge was moving from drums to a singing drummer to a singing keyboard player while working with the same core of players over the 10 years. Everyone in the band sang and we rotated lead chores but harmonized on every tune.
Top 40 with a a shift towards Country Rock as the market shifted. I moved to keyboards to be able to sing more interesting music like Stevie Wonder and Billy Joel tunes.
In the process I learned to drink for a living and destroyed a marriage. I had to change plans and went back to school for a more marketable degree. I did much better with a BSEE in Computer Engineering.
My Silicon Valley stories are a lot more interesting. I noticed Steve Jobs in the lobby of Sun Microsystems HQ (where I was hosting a customer visit and NDA) and the receptionist called out "Is it pronounced Jobes?" She was quite serious and didn't have a clue who this guy was to see the CEO Scott McNeally. He was there to get Sun to license the NextStep OS. He tried
not to attract any notice by pretending to have the most intense interest in some photographs of SUN motherboards from the Motorola era before SPARC.
SUN did license NeXTstep OS by the way not that anyone ever used it. Windows NT, Linux and jobs return to Apple made SUN irrelevant... except for Java.
@McD Do you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you wouldn’t have gone the college/ engineer route?
Yes and it's not pretty. Success in music requires discipline, dedication and the ability to stay healthy in the face of rejection. Hendrix, Joplin... I think I could have duplicated their endings but never got anywhere close to making a decent living so I wisely chose the path of least failure. I have few regrets... seriously. I dodged a bullet by using a totally different set of skills and getting paid very well to just scratch the surface. I ended up always representing products that we're on the upswing... Unix in the 80's, the Internet in the 90's, Java around 2000, the Cloud around 2010. Just be a quick study and you're always employed and overpaid. Slam dunk "engineering"... follow the money basically. Like picking tech stocks.
I sort of followed the same path with the music by changing instruments to gain control over the band(s) without ever actually getting us any work. I tended to find a good business guy to hang with and then tried to influence the music. But playing others people's music tends to pay unless you are willing to tour and create an audience of any size. I was never very marketable and didn't really make anything more that tributes to my heroes by emulating their art. 4th class imitations with clear ties to the sources. I also preferred Jazz and I only missed that trend by 20 years and it never paid well.
Playing live just taught me how to drink for a living. Some vary scary memories from some dark times when I'd cross the line over my 2 beer limit. I have that gene that craves inebriation. Still do. I like the feeling and plan accordingly.
@McD Looks like you made the right choice. I definitely don’t miss touring. Glad I did it but the the physical and mental toll would have been too much. Grateful for all our electronic musical outlets we have these days.
@McD : Are you the type of artist that won’t listen to outside influences (musically) when you’re composing?
Not at all. I think I err on the side of imitation. Hearing references to other sources helps me
validate the work but I also know it's really a hack and by definition not contributing. Some of the thinks I've done on the forum that really on chance and generative tools have helped create something that is essentially unique but also "other". It's not really expressive of me other than an an editor. But I'm well beyond the age of someone that creates in the hopes of making any kind of mark on the world. I'm actually just learning to enjoy the process and turning off the critic and hopefully enjoying the editorial aspect.
I don't not consider myself as ever being an artist... I don't have the right drive for it. It's just
not in me to take the required risks. But I am a very solid technician and researcher. Driven more by the principles of science than art. Intensely curious.
@McD
1- What is your prognosis for iOS music making and production for the next 5 years, good or bad? What do you think iOS music lacks compared to desktop and professional studios that it could and should catch up on? Do you think it’s a blessing or a curse to be using one portable device as a touchscreen instrument, a recording studio, a rack of gear, and a phone?
2- As someone who’s had a career in computers and tech but who is also a musician, how do you feel about session musicians or sound engineers or aspiring musicians in general going up against tech like AI bass players and drummers, all purpose mastering algorithm companies, or the musical machine of the future. Is iOS helping musical collaboration flourish in the future or is it also changing the face of music and how people grow up playing and learning music.
3- Do you know Ted Goldstein? (He’s my wife’s 2nd cousin)
Very good. I think the toolset is rich and the only barrier to a music producer is mastering them for effective final mixes but that can also be addressed by moving audio between platforms in the financial justification is there. But what' exciting is the potential of very young music enthusiasts getting really solid tools at "Birthday Present" prices. It doesn't take
getting the interest f a record company A&R man to put out a product and build a viable audience for a career. It by passes all the traditional gate keepers on media.
Obviously, the pro tools are desktop but with the max out credit card problem that still puts them just out of reach until you have a steady income. Desktops have memory, CPU and I/O
busses to scale to truly epic levels of production. IOS pulls back scale but maintains audio
quality at wonderful price points... but that low price expectation keeps the big co's from
expecting a return if the port their cash cows over in slimmed down packaging to fit our
storage and CPU expectations.
Blessing. I rarely miss the old phone paradigms even if the form factor of an iPhone is a bit odd the "speaker" capability to lay down the phone and mute for a flush has really been useful while taking calls on the throne. I still can't get excite about typing on any IOS device
because the keyboards are all toys so I really type on one. My text messages are really frugal. Having a lot of carpal tunnel effects also doesn't make we want to use anything other than my MacBook for typing and web browsing. I larger keyboard build into a large iPad case would probably get the iPad on parity with e MacBook something this decade.
I tend to be moved by music that shows obvious signs of human fingerprints... singer songwriter over hardware-based dance music. I like to feed my melancholy with good company and Joni Mitchell's "Blue" has inspired countless albums that continue to
help me feel I'm not ill... just sensitive to the terrible condition we have all been dropped into without ever asking for the privilege. I can on a few odd moments conjure up massive quantities of gratitude and it feels great to remember how vast the spectrum of human
feeling is. Still, I do like hanging with the broken toys more than the radiant unicorns.
The musical youth I'm aware of are all falling into the Jazz Industrial complex and spending
incredible amounts of time learning to play on the technical level that only a handful of
musicans had in my youth. I can see on YouTube that it's happening with guitar, bass and drums too. Music of highly technical and/or complex organization is dominating and the audience is approaching music like a circus act and rewarding fast, loud and deeply committed. Not the broken toys are out there if you know where the good open mics are.
There will always be broken toys seeking to connect with sound.
Only from the Ted talks. I rejected Academia... once I got my BSEE I got a job with benefits
at HP and never looked back on any involvement with Academia. But working for a hardware
company you always had something new to learn and a big one like HP had multiple product lines I could move between which felt like changing jobs as I went from Scientific Computer to CAD to Database Server to Network Management server to... another hardware company with another series of 2 year assignments over a 15 year span and then to some hardware resellers that rep'ed dozens of hardware vendors and each one needed the reseller to have someone trained on Cisco, VMware, Dell Servers, Amazon Web Services, Hadoop, OpenStack, Linux servers and so on. For someone with a short attention span and intense curiosity I really found my niche. Notice I never mentioned music but I now had the income to buy anything that took my fancy so the den was well stocked with toys for my artistic experiments. I did do a few stints where music crossed over to my work life for Holiday Parties, Talent Shows and Awards Ceremonies but nothing steady until I hooked up with a
local Jazz Big Band and returned to my roots as a drummer.
Good questions.
Great advice.
I may have missed it, but...
Of all the instruments you've played, is there one you feel more connected to than others?
What's the role of drumming in your life now?
My iPad dominates my play with a Fender Telecaster for adding live tracks (often over Session Band or commercial backing tracks). I tend to play guitar to add new skills and
develop mastery of the fret board which is a long process to get past just iterating over pentatonic shapes.
I have short flirtations with my Casio PX-560 makes a useful MIDI controller too for the iPad
and sometimes I'll use it to add a live track but less and less. Mostly because the keyboard creates a physical connection to the floor and it drives my wife crazy to hear the non-musical thumping. Non-musical thumping is the story of my life as a drummer.
I purchased a Kat Pad to re-connect to 4-way independence with 2 pedals for hi-hat and kick.
But I took a nice side trip into the approach of @Hypnopad to use these drum triggers to drive sequences of synths. Very cool.
I recently did a stint playing live drums with a local duo of singer and guitarist but I lost interest when they started to tell me what to play which could be served better by a drum machine, honestly and save them the 1/3rd split. I also gave the singer drum lessons so she could sing while playing but she probably won't follow through and they won't use a machine. Anyway, I had fun playing live but usually for 3-4 people and they were a bit too
spacey for my tastes... very new age couple with a strong connection to the spiritual realm.
I would respectfully suggest that my distinguished colleague try improvising up and down one single string at a time in order to break out of shape-based habits.
Another fun practice tip is to set your fingers free to play whatever they want. Tell them to go nuts, do whatever they want, and get chromatic and weird. Then try to reel them back in to tonality. It turns out that reeling them in is the easy part. It's setting them free that requires the most practice.
I hear you but my head is interested in chords which requires learning the neck to the 15th fret. I'm currently drilling string groups for the basic triads. 4-5-6, 3-4-5 first. I already have the CAGED forms down but mostly with roots on 5-6 so I need to learn 4-3-2. Single note
soloing can help learn those notes too so I might add that to the practice mix so I get to play more and drill 1-6-2-5 patterns less.
I've tried to just let my fingers go and figure out how to make it sound more intentional and less random. Miles said there are no wrong notes if the note that follows makes the first note seem intentional. I'm sure that's why he played a lot of 2 note motifs and worked them into longer solos. It made his playing sound innovative when he was often just playing a note to see how it landed and then adding a 2nd note a half step above of below one that seemed to break the scale/tonality of the moment. If you hit a real clam the neighbor is probably OK.
I also have a lot of work to do with muting and pick control. I've seen some Cory Wong exercises that could help me improve my rhythm playing. Thanks for asking a technical/pedantic question. There are not many here that think in these terms of
skills development. They are busy watch Berklee videos and YouTube teachers and think we're a bit limited in our prospects of finding actual work. Who wants to work? I want to play.
Chords are more fun when you practice them in progressions. The best resource for learning fingerboard harmony is:
https://tedgreene.com/teaching/default.asp
For triads the Baroque section in particular contains many gems.
305 PDF's... I'm on it. I love the few videos of Ted giving lessons. He achieved a level of fret board
knowledge that's beyond so many pro's. A true "student of the instrument" on a personal journey to
figure it all out... His "Chord Chemistry" book broke my head just looking at the possibilities for every single chord option. Too bad he died so young. His playing was also beyond description. I get a kick out the fact that he most often played a Telecaster since my beater guitar is a Tele'.