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.
How did people record music before DAWs and visual timelines?
Trying to imagine my ideal recording and composition setup on iPad using mostly AUv3 plugins, and thinking about AUM and its lack of a visual timeline, and it occurred to me that most music pre-DAW supremacy must've been recorded without the visual cues of a visual timeline. Is this true? Was there some other way they visualized tracks before DAWs?
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pre-DAW/MIDI Sequencer? Recording was on magnetic tape. DAWs and MIDI sequencers have been with us a long time though. There have been piano roll sequencers basically as long as MIDI has existed. There were some CV sequencers pre-MIDI but they were pretty cumbersome to use.
Even when sequencers and DAWs existed, a lot of us still primarily recorded to tape.
Well for at least a hundred years there was the music written on staff paper. Which is totally still a visual timeline.
Incredible point!
Porta-Studios. Google it.
The timeline was in your head. Or in your ass if you shook it.
This and 4-track
If you search youtube for 4-track you'll loads of people recording to cassette and get an idea of how people recorded stuff back in the day.
Another thing to note is some of these recorders had an A > B function or Punch-In Punch-Out, where you could define where the recording would start and stop, thus defining sections, for example
I'm so old (feel free to tune out at this point...) that I can remember going into recording studios, sitting around for hours while f*&(ing guitarists tried to get their amp to sound perfect (and ignoring the suggestions of the recording engineer), then having the drummer try to get mic levels sorted out, then you found the keyboards had wildly different volume levels across patches so that had to be dealt with, then the vocalist needed a break because he was struggling with the lack of attention to his needs... As the bassist, I'd plugged in, checked levels on the board and in my headphones and I was ready to go in maybe 2 mins.
Then you'd run through a song and listen back to find out just how bad your band sounded. Stuff that we thought we'd absolutely nailed had a ton of problems we'd never noticed before. Aside from that, the vocals, keys, guitar and even my bass were all sitting in the same space in the sound spectrum, and at the time you had to fix that before it got to the desk so it involved a few rounds of messing with EQs for each instrument. I found out later that took some serious expertise from the engineer to sort out, but seemed to happen very quickly - it's almost like he was the only person in the room that had a clue
At the end, we all got a pristine recording on tape of a bunch of songs from a pretty average band, that we copied to cassette and probably all lost our copies a month or so later. I don't remember any overdubs happening, but maybe they did - I'd probably gone out to get a drink at that point.
You could do it like this,
I really enjoy this video.
They had to work on their computer by candlelight (gasp!)
I used to have one of these babies.
I made tons of music on this! 😢 I miss her. I’d love to see this exact machine as an app.
To answer the OP @tsamba - I listened to my music as I was making it. It was a totally different approach. Nothing to look at but levels. Everything else done by ear.
Absolutement. It's also and exactly why I like the OP-1
For that guy that wants to know how much money I have spent on Apps... I'd guess 12 Porta-Studios. New not the Ebay depressed prices.
Imagine using the phrase "Timeline" with musicians in the 80's. "Timeline" was probably a brand of calendar we all used to book gigs. Remember when we had "gigs". Got paid for live music events. Good times.
Someone dig up a video of an engineer splicing tape in an editing session involving razor blades.
"Home Recording" had it's own magazine to teach techniques. It's time for @Lady_App_titude to show up and tell some Music journalist stories from this era of the home recording artist... Google "Moby".
I used to do this with my speech reports and interviews as a radio journalist at LBC/IRN in London. I remember I’d have various breaths stuck to the editing console with tape to insert into edits to make them natural. Green leader tape spliced at the beginning and red at the end.
And before that it was passed generation to generation, seasoned with herb, mushroom and moulding wheat.
The Homeric epic poems were actually sung, in some fashion, and passed down through the centuries as song.
You pre-edison guys are killing me with trivial details.
Stone tablets we using to kill roaming musicians that the crowd did not find easy to dance to. "Play something with a beat! Not this ambient crap to evoke your view of the cosmos." or words to that effect. Something akin to "You S-U-C-K!".
We DO. And we like it you drunken slobs. Get a juke box.
The original Dr Who theme was all about recording on tape, cut them up and putting together like a puzzle.
Seeing the Tascam I recall that just some days ago I watched a video about the well known Techno producers FJAAK and was surprised how central this machine seems to be in their studio.
First appearance at 0:13
In a former life as a music journalist I interviewed the late, and very great, Roy Orbison. I asked him about the difficulties of recording his masterpiece ‘In Dreams’. He explained that the main problem was fitting the string section, the backing singers and the band all in the room with him while they recorded it. Live. As a single take.
Nah, Timeline was definitely a prog band!
In the early/mid 90s I remember borrowing a friends (crappy) 4-track for a while, I think I most likely recorded a stereo pair of sequenced synths (Voyetra on a PC XT clone maybe) and vocals alongside. Sounded like sludge.
Tape machines? And from what I hear it sucked.
Now people beg for THAT LO-FI SLUDGE in an AUv3 FX app. "TapeBile" for $3.99.
Of course when recording on your 4-track in your bedroom (I had a Fostex), the tape counter was your friend, the closest you had to a timeline as you knew that the second verse started at a particular count, then the chorus at another count etc.
Immediately before Cubase and Atari changed everything for me in 1990 it was all about chaining patterns together on TR505 and Kawai R50. Before that it was all about playing live
😎👍🏼
It was done by using your ears not your eyes.
Still done nowadays to to some extent. Just look at the used prices for reel to reels (ATR’s) and cassette 4 tracks.... They’re through the roof. Still to this day nothing sounds quite as good as a high end tape machine being hit hard.
In theory you could replicate the 4-track workflow in AUM, except you can't because you don't have fast-forward and rewind controls, so it's not practical to use as a virtual tape machine.