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.
Let Go Of Your Fear - Dream Pop/Indie
This track has a backstory, which gives some context to the song:
When I was in my twenties my older sister became extremely ill with breast cancer. Sadly after a couple of years the situation only got worse, as the cancer spread through her lymph nodes to her pancreas and liver.
Towards the very end I spent a couple of nights with her in hospital. I was sitting by her bedside when she woke up at around 3am with a panic attack. She grabbed my arm, and with a look of absolute dread on her face she told me that she was scared of dying, that she didn't want to die.
In the moment I was dumbstruck. I didn't know what to say to her. We both knew that not only was the end inevitable, but that it was also imminent, a matter of days. I couldn't find a comforting lie, or even some soothing words that didn't sound hopelessly false, so I just looked at her with an expression as lost and hopeless as the one she was wearing.
And that memory haunted me for a long time. It's natural to imagine that when a big moment comes we can rise to the occasion, but sometimes the occasion is too overwhelming. I wilted when faced with my dying sister, who desperately needed some words of comfort that I was not able to summon when under pressure.
So that little slice of human frailty and fallibility is what this song is about. Thanks for listening.
Technical details in the first spoiler for anyone who is interested:
The song started out on acoustic guitar with a couple of simple chord progressions, which I recorded in AUM. Then I used NS2 with 4Pockets Multitrack in place of audio tracks (for the guitar) to add drums, bass, and synths. Everything was exported to Auria where I did the final guitar and vocal tracking and mixing.
The high harmonies in the chorus are sung, although with the reverb and compression they actually sound like an effect, but they're real 
Lyrics in the second spoiler:
I see the fear
That’s in your eyes
As you say you’re scared to die
You hold my hand
I look at you
Because that’s what you need me to do
And while I’m not much help to you
It’s hard for me to face it too
I am completely lost for words
There’s nothing I can do
Let go of your fear
Just watch the darkness near
As you turn to the night
And fade out of the light
Let go of your fear
As you disappear
And you turn from the light
And fade into the night
The look you gave
So cold and grey
Will haunt me to my dying day
And more than fear
Was in your eyes
As I pretended otherwise
But I don’t know what else to do
So I'll just have to struggle through
There’s nothing I can do or say
That can make it all ok
Let go of your fear
Just watch the darkness near
As you turn to the night
And fade out of the light
Let go of your fear
As you disappear
And you turn from the light
And fade into the night
Comments
Hmmmm. I cried a bit reading this and listening. The lyrics…. 😢. Great track. I am sorry for your loss. I hope you don’t beat yourself for that moment.. Peace man!!
Thanks for the listen. These events happened 25 years ago, so it's OK, thanks for your thoughts.
Wow, that’s haunting. It feels like a track on a Go-Betweens record that keeps pulling you back despite not being “cheerful” until it’s the song that you obsess over. I love the guitar line that sounds like a bassoon. Stupid to say something like “your sister would be proud,” but I bet she’d recognize the emotion, which is all you can ask.
Thanks for sharing that.
We never know what to say. Sometimes saying nothing is the best option. The important part was that her brother was there to take her hand that night. I hope she found some peace and comfort in her journey into the next chapter.
Great job on the song! Great sounding production all around, the mix is good, the vocal harmonies are all spot on per usual from you. I’d normally say keep up the great work, only lets not have any more family members dying mmkay?
Same!
Thanks - the emotions are confused and conflicting, so pretty hard to get across, it sounds like they somehow made it through. But to me that was why the subject was interesting, like the famous Leonard Cohen line: there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.
Thanks very much for sharing this. It's very lovely.
I've tweaked the mix a little for more balance (updated in the original post as well) so this seems a good enough reason to bump this back up:
👍
Pleased for the bump, I hadn't seen it previously....love the spread on this mix. This is a good song and I fancy that there is the killer version of it somewhere in your future....
Thanks for the listen! Out of curiosity, what do you think needs changing to make the killer version?
My instinct (FWIW) is it might be a bit long, that it might benefit from some more variance in the amount of sound somewhere (bring it down, bring it back) and that the voice's place in the mix could be bolder, but I think I've been saying that to you since Gordon Banks was in goal
Thanks for the constructive feedback, I will definitely bear it in mind.
It’s a lovely track, effectively using the sound stage to deliver a soothing, dreamy concoction with a melody that lingers after the tune concludes. I don’t know if it’s the case but it certainly appears to me that you can summon these songs and dress them up in nice clothes with relative ease.
That said, the song doesn’t deliver the immediacy or poignancy of the story you told about your sister in the post above. All art exhibits some distance—some artifice—from the source or inspiration. I trust you made the decisions about the distance in your art intentionally and honor those choices. The distance you chose in the words you wrote about your sister in the post above (or lack thereof) will stick with me longer.
Thanks for the thoughtful and very valid critique, I appreciate it.
I think that the verse lyrics really were a sincere attempt to express the ambivalence and inadequacy I felt in that moment, but a song is necessarily more abstract than the four paragraphs of direct prose I wrote as the backstory. The prose is more immediate for sure, since it's so direct, and that makes it feel raw and more real.
It would take a better writer than me to preserve that rawness in song form, with all the constraints of rhyme and meter. All I can say is that I made an honest attempt at that, but without spelling the story out as explicitly.
And the chorus of course departs from there, to try and deliver a cathartic moment of beauty, the words I can only say after the fact.
But yes I totally get what you're saying, and it's given me some food for thought.