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 is ambient super popular (for iOS Producers)?
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Thanks for the link...
From the article:
This ^
Yes, Samplr is a masterpiece of touchscreen ui. As well as is CapCut vs Luma Fusion when it comes to video editing. I love the former while totally not using the latter. Most of devs choose the lazy route of copying or straight porting stuff from the mouse land. Such a pity.
Loopy comes to mind as another example of touch excellence vs fake knobs of gauss, Enso and straight repro of quantiloop independently of their technical merits.
Here a funny site if you want to know what kind of music is the most popular in your city
https://components.one/posts/map-and-category-bandcamp
I like ambient stuff but I come from very much a classic song structure type background. Making a complete track with all the changes and layers and production is a challenge on iOS but it can be done. But I can throw a cool ambient jam and modular craziness together in minutes in AUM. And it’s fun!
Been into ambient since 89 when I bought a copy of phaedra by Tangerine dream as a teen. Making music has been out of my price range until now.
So this “witty” joke didn’t land at all, and I apologize to anyone who took it the wrong way. It was meant to highlight the potential logical fallacy of the OP’s question. But it’s from another era and it's famous maybe only to dudes of a certain age. I'm sorry; I posted it without thinking and logged off. My bad.
I think my generation’s equivalent would be “Does your mom know you’re gay?”
@ExAsperis99 : I am of a certain age. I got it. The barristers’ provocative question where any answer at all, or none, incriminates you. For the record, I am not offended. Or (any longer) a ‘dude’. Though obviously, I highly resent the assumption regarding the gender normativity of ‘dude’. Hope that is all straightened out. (meaning no offence to those of a curved persuasion, obviously.)
I don’t think this was directly mentioned here, but ambient music (and all the different subgenres of EDM and hip hop) can easily be made by just one person on one device. Contrast this with any type of rock music in which you need a drummer, a bassist, a guitarist, a vocalist (unless you’re Trent Reznor or Prince) and a practice space that won’t annoy the neighbors.
Sure, being in a band might be more fun due the social interaction and groupies (though more potential for drama), but for the average person with a 9-5 desk job being able to jam out a track everyday after work without having to deal with other people’s schedules while sitting on the couch drinking a beer/smoking a bowl is quite liberating. This a huge reason why my musical tastes shifted from being into metal/industrial to being into EDM: the fact that I can now make an entire track on my own in a DAW and not just a cool guitar riff over some crappy pre-programmed drum patterns that I made.
Contrary to some other responses, I actually prefer iOS DAWs over desktop DAWs for track creation because I’m not tethered to a desk in front of a computer in a study. I can create a track while on the couch (like I mentioned earlier), in the car while waiting on someone, during my lunch break, on a plane, etc...This can be done with a laptop too but iOS DAWs also just feel more creative to me due to the interface and being able to use touch rather than a mouse and keyboard.
However, when it comes to mixing and mastering, I’ll take a desktop DAW every time over an iOS DAW.
DISCLAIMER: I still haven’t made an ambient track on iOS 🤣
I don’t know if it’s ambient or not but I find myself making more quiet music at slower tempos lately. I’ve noticed that part of the reason for this is the mood I’m in at the time. Often my music making time is at the end of the day when I’m relaxed and tired or in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep.
I think the OP has provided no information to support his assertion of ambient music being the most popular for iOS producers. A more useful, less click baity question would have been, “How does iOS/iPadOS facilitate the creation of ambient music?”
People never seem to disappoint me in their ability to put down other people who do things differently than they do as there have been several posts on the thread which give variations on the theme of it being easier and not requiring skill to create ambient music.
@d4d0ug you may avoid a lot of DAW hazzles by just stepping back in time and use oldfashioned or outdated stuff.
Neither SAW Studio nor Pro Tools TDM annoys me in any way.
The 1st one is my perfect cutting tool and I really enjoy snip-arranging with it, while PT is visually less convenient, it can act as a great fx unit.
I‘ve configured the mouse in PT with USB Overdrive to make it imitate SAW‘s action and do quick section looping just by clicking.
ps: that PT on a G4 Powermac is connected to AUM via iCA4+
It's the music I prefer. Listening to SomaFM Drone Zone all day at work.
Hah, that’s awesome. My city did not surprise me at all with the results
Learning a lot more about ambient music and iOS. I’ll be honest and say that I never knew ambient was a style of music until the past year.
Also, updated the thread title to be more in line with the original intent (wrote the thread super late last night). I’m actually interested in what ambient means to a lot of people.
@seonnthaproducer : plenty of variety under that label, from the early work of Eno, who gave it a name, (overlooking, obvs, all those wonderful 50s and 60s French and Russian experiments in musique concrete, Delia Derbyshire, the Barron’s work on Forbidden Planet, through the trippier elements of Tangerine Dream , Vangelis, the sparse clear severity of the works of Hans Joachimm Roedelius, some of Riuchi Sakamotos projects, the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Coil and Psychic TV on occasion, to the fusion of death metal, industrial and ambient that spawned Dark Ambient. And extending even unto ubiquitous whale music meditation apps ‘n tropical rainstorm Muzak for spas!
Me, I plant my tattered black flag in the cavernous subterranean halls of a decayed elder race, listen to the echoes, and wait for the monsters to come...
(Shameless self promotion follows)
I am a bit surprised by my city as the most popular music is...medieval...
Apparently to punish me.
"Hey, what if we took out drums, rhythm, vocals, a bassline, and melody and instead just took a note and held it for about two minutes too long and drenched it in reverb and delay?"
I do like ambient music to go to sleep to or if I want to relax on a plane trip. I couldn't imagine creating it (with any enthusiasm or passion, at least) or listening to it attentively.
I became a listener of ambient music in the last couple of months to help calm me from all the crap out there.
Not a producer of ambient.
The Bandcamp map is indeed amusing. In my area the #1genre is "electronic" which is meaningless.
The next bigger circles are more standard for a metropolitan area: rock, jazz, hip hop, house, punk, and ambient.
Then there are "modular synth", "Dischord" (a record label, not a genre - not all Dischord releases are punk or hardcore), "adventurous" (an adjective, not a genre), etc.
Same. I came from a Classical, metal/rock/pop guitar background for almost 40 years (I’m 52) and somehow ended up here on the couch with an iPad in my lap. Yeah, it’s easier, “ambient”.
I try to make ambient, because I do enjoy listening to it, but I always end up adding more to it. A drum track or two, and by then it’s something else. Don’t know what, but something else.
@ipadthai: “I couldn't imagine creating it (with any enthusiasm or passion, at least) or listening to it attentively.”
Ok, each to their own. I like to think I do both. Live and let live etc. But this begs a more interesting question:
Should the making (and indeed the listening to) of music be ‘hard’.? Is it bad if it is ‘easy’? Can it only be ‘good’ if it is hard? Is there a hierarchy of disciplines? Are you making ‘better’ music if you can play jazz than if you can play punk? What about bad, technically proficient jazz, and brilliant, stumble bum garage bands? What, in this context, constitutes easy anyway?
And if quality isn’t just a question of how hard it is to execute a thing, then is there any point even in attempting to compare jazz apples with punk oranges. Or dried up and probably rotting Dark Ambient grapes?
Also: where is the ‘hardness’? Is it a question of formal technique, being able to sight read and harmonise, physical mastery of multiple instruments? Why then are there far more technically excellent session players in the world than there are sometimes woefully under skilled yet strangely loved stars?
During lockdown I am attempting to learn to play the guitar, for the fifth or sixth time. It is very, very, hard. If I keep at it in a few years I might be a really poor guitarist. That’s ok. I embrace the discipline of trying to learn to play a real instrument as a thing in itself, regardless of the so far woeful results. And, like, the world really, really needs another bad guitarist, right?
As it happens though, in the months of listening to other people’s good, bad, and indifferent dark ambient I have learnt to discriminate between holding down a note for two minutes too long, and real, moving, symphonies of decaying echo and cavernous reverb, orchestrated subtly by a knowing hand. Another kind of skill, and musical sensibility is in evidence here, and seems as worth aspiring to as being able to ‘shred’ like Stevie Ray.
Just my two cents in defence of the non musicians making music...
Well that reminds me of one of my favorite mixes I’ve come across on YouTube, the Medieval Hardcore Party Mix
Endorsed, @Svetlovska.
I do think it is very easy to make bad ambient or bad soundscapes. It's like bad abstract art. The whole "my kid could do that" school of art criticism. It is true that the apps on an ipad allow people to make a passable facsimile of evolving pads and decaying bell bongs. There's a lot of uninteresting ambient stuff out there today: the modern equivalent of muzak.
But you should listen to Brian Eno's "Discreet Music." It was really revolutionary in 1975, and it still resonates. There's real tension to the music. It's not just a pastoral wash of nice sounds. It's music about music and composition.
@ExAsperis99 : agreed. I did. Eno was my gateway drug to ambience.