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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Loving this thread 😂
I can tune a guitar by ear on acid
I used to have that ability (along with tuning the other guitarist’s guitar as well), but have not put that to test since a lifetime ago😀
Our ultimate dream was to afford a middle-aged woman as a guitar tech. She would dress like a typical 80s suburban mom and tune our guitars for us in view of the audience.
Sadly, that never came to pass.
https://thehardtimes.net/news/ambient-musician-not-sure-play-next-note-yet/
I get bored after about 15 minutes listening to most ambient music. However, I can happily create ambient for hours and hours and hours. I don't think I could stand listening to my own stuff afterwards, so I just throw most of it away or simply forget about it. For me the great enjoyment is in creating it, not listening to it.
This isn't true for other music genres, where I generally suck at making them, so I lose interest after not too long. Those I generally get more enjoyment from listening to those genres than creating, most days.
Interesting ... the above just occurred to me. I never really thought it through before.
😂👏👏👏
The threads of yore largely support the stats, but it is a shame the fairer sex has been excluded.
See:
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/2174/so-how-old-are-we-all-here/p1
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/2785/i-know-your-age-where-are-you-from/p1
Midlife crisis, anyone?
@DMan : “I thought this was supposed to be ambient music,” said noted critic Joseph Palmer. “But she went ahead and played note three after only nine minutes of silence. Apparently we’re getting the drum and bass remix tonight.”
@telecharge : Aged 58, I sure hope this is my mid life crisis.
Kruder and Dorfmeister made ambient beat a thing.
So do I. An iPad is much cheaper than a sports car, but with all the apps I'm buying, the margin in narrowing.
Ambient means soooo many different things. You probably know this but what Eno meant when he coined “ambient music” was music that wasn’t intended to be listened to. It was music meant to be a part of an environment but not meant for one’s conscious attention.
A lot of truth to this. I would compare it to meditating - it's a lot more interesting to do yourself than to watch someone else doing 😂
Does this mean y'all won't be subscribing to my new "Meditating to the Ambients" YouTube channel?
Ambient - relating to the immediate surroundings of something.
"the liquid is stored at below ambient temperature"
"the music that emerges from an internet forum dedicated to application addicts."
The only solution appears to be starting another forum. It's the music that emerges from
our collective talents and interests.
I think @wim hit the bullseye by stating it's boring to hear but engrossing to make.
And we are the "makers", right? The makers that refuse to follow the dictates of an audience.
Where else can we be affirmed for our efforts?
@Linearlineman is out there, raging into the dark night making his
jazz that shows every sign of integrating ambient into his gestalt. But he's
all about rejecting labels.
I might have it looping on some wall projection screens as part of my environment as long as it doesn’t have ads. I’ll do my best not to listen though, but just to absorb it as part of the ambiance.
Yeh, that’s a problem I have. I simply can’t just let music exist just as part of the environment. I always listen to it and think about it and become emotionally involved with it. I think that’s why I get bored when the music doesn’t evolve enough that I run out of thoughts and emotions.
When making it, I’m constantly moving along as soon as I reach that point. I’m in control rather than needing to ride someone else’s piece out until I find more to engage me.
Ambiance - the character and atmosphere of a place.
I am the character and the atmosphere is redolent of farts and halitosis.
"Play on."
"I make noises for myself"
My tagline on soundcloud.
Ambient is great for giving a "sense" of the sounds of nature we all might miss due to civilization. It's what make it popular for me ambience and no need to concentrate on any particular thing. Like sparse noises in the woods, or the hushing lull of the oceans surf. Sometimes it's just the aural equivalent of space, or the travel thereof.
Whoa, really liked these. Thanks for sharing.
Do you think of a specific application when working on ambient sounds? Or is it more inspiration?
Also, to everyone who sees this, do you think of ambient as shaping a world out of nothing ? It trying to express a moment in time? Or taking someone on a neverending journey to self discovery.
Also, is ambient meditation music?
Seon~Ambient music making is a magical heady brew of all of the things that you listed! Cheers, ED
That was my favorite line.
Yeah, ambient is much better with the subtle pulse of a side-chained kick IMO.
I write and produce professionally, but really dig Eno's concept of ambient music. Over the past year, I've been enjoying making recreational 'ambient' music, strictly for myself, to play in the background as I do other tasks around the house. Probably because of having fewer options in environment due to the pandemic.
I'll nake a little generative patch, some drones, or overlapping loops to set a vibe while I do household chores. No end goal, deadlines, pressure, or demands. Background music to take out the recycling/trash or clean the house to. Then I just delete, clear, or pull the patch cables and start over when I'm done.
LOL. The unvarnished truth.
I'm starting my ambient opus next week. Possibly a 3 album thing. Could be more, depending on how much I've learnt about chords etc in the meantime.
@seonnthaproducer Glad you liked them.
I like just patching up stuff to make noises. For instance taking the most horrible of sounds filtering and adding multiple reverbs and delays. Other times its layering up sounds. Various layers of timbre rather than specific notes.
There are go tos though. Layr, Mitosynth, Droneo, Mononoke, Continua, and anything granular. There has been so many great new reverbs and delays put out it's hard to say which is a go to. Distortions like Mangleverb also have their place.
Sometimes it's just a sine wave put through some long ago released apps that do weird shit, like Nebulizer by Matthew Caldwell or apesoft apps.
When I hear something that strikes me I try and develop that. It's mostly happy happenstance when something works, otherwise it's just an exercise and time to take notes and contemplate.
If you like ambient music I'd recommend following this guy @barabajagal on soundcloud.
Feel free to submit more peeps of the ambient nature for me to follow.
This thread has inspired me to make some 188bpm banging techno. Huzzah!
Oooh interesting topic. I’m coming from the space rock school here... always liked spacey sounds in parallel to always loving rawk. I started to like certain forms of what you might call ambient music when I was a teen, Vangelis Antarctica was my first (sparse, echoey, dreaminess), various JM Jarre and Mike Oldfield’s Songs of Distant Earth for example. What drew me in was how it takes me away - the whole sense of wonder vibe.
I never tried to make anything like that kind of music, but now I’m starting to have a go on iOS as many of the apps seem ideal for it. Making it (as with listening to it) is like meditation - and I’m only now understanding the joys of midi controller slow knob tweaking lol
I found this which is quite an interesting article on ambient;
https://www.astrangelyisolatedplace.com/blog/2014/10/12/neither-scene-nor-heard-a-journey-through-ambient-music
He mentions Carbon Based Lifeforms, Solar Fields (and other Ultimae stuff) and early Ulrich Schnauss which are among my favourites. Don’t hate me but I’m not so much into Eno or the likes of Boards of Canada, I just don’t really get it! But point is the range of styles under the umbrella is wide and that increases the chances of more people listening to ambient (of some form).
Out of curiosity... is it a conscious decision for the participants?
I mean, do you pick a genre and work toward that end or just end up with something that needs a ’label’?
I wonder the same, personally I mess around with apps until I find a chord sequence/ melody or noise that inspires and then carry on from there.
I’ve never sat down and thought , today I will write in the style of ( insert musical genre here.
Edit. In fact due to having played guitar for forty plus years ,I find iOS music making very inspiring precisely because I don’t tend to fall into old habits and patterns when writing music with the iPad.
@0tolerance4silence : I had a long and frustrating relationship with music and music technology, writing about it professionally for a while and loving the extremity of electronic sounds but lacking the skill or talent to do anything about it. I gave up on music as a practitioner for over 30 years.
Then a couple of years ago I discovered the sub genre of Dark Ambient, ambients’ deranged and despairing sibling, and found in it a form which spoke to my tastes for dark and twisted things, but in a style which avoided the obvious teen histrionics of goth and death metal.
Not only that, but it’s departures from formal structure and emphasis on soundscape and texture over tunes made me think I might even be able to do it... and so began the most fun I have had in music for years. So yes, in my case, I work very definitely towards it.
For me, if it has no spoken or sung words, no recognisable drum patterns, and an excess of reverbs, I’ll be aiming for Dark Ambient. If it cries out for rhythms, sequences, patterns, vocal loops - it’ll be Witch House. These are my rules.