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.
Roast My Track
I never really make rock and I’m trying to give it a shot. Please tell me where I missed the mark and maybe what I could listen to, to make it more “rock”.
Comments
IMO nothing to roast here. This is rock at its best, albeit pigeonholed progressive, psychedelic, eclectic, space, jazzy ... you name it. Brings back memories of European (german, Italian, British) stuff from the 70s. "Novalis", "Eloy", even "Camel" comes to mind.
I like it a lot. Criticism concerns my personal preferences only. I find the bass a bit muffled (needs more "Rock" punch), likewise you could bring the rhythm guitar a bit forward in places. The solo guitar sounds like a violin. Widely used as a stylistic element, but here I would like to hear a crisper interpretation.
Once again, I dig it, that's right up my alley!
Not a “traditional” rock sound, IMO, but who cares? Has its own feel and I like that. I would try to integrate the organ a bit better. It sits on top and is more immediate than the rest. Keep it up!
really enjoyed that. Agree with both comments above + also wouldn’t call it Rock as such more like early Jazz Rock as per Soft Machine and Caravan. Nice jagged rhythms.
Not typically into guitar heroics, but really like like that aspect of it - very snappy. Nothing to rag on here, very suspenseful!
Thanks for the critique. The lead guitar is actually a violin auv3 so that’s probably why lol. I’ll look into what you mentioned. I wanna see if I can understand this genre a bit better.
I’ll give it a shot. The structure is basically just a pop song so I could try to use the organ a bit more to make it less repetitious.
Are guitar heroics the way the lead is playing?
I didn’t mean more organ. I meant the organ was too loud in the mix.🙏
Ah I gotcha! My iPad mixing definitely needs some work. Thanks!
I can’t quite express it - the guitar tone has that kind of guitar show-off sort of sound, but because it’s not a bunch of empty wanking, I enjoyed it. It’s hooky and concise. It’s a compliment, believe me.
It's an interesting arrangement.
The question of how to make it sound more "Rock" is likely going to vary by individual taste in rock.
All I would say from my perspective. Is I'd like to see this "musical rock experiment" developed/refined/structured into a series of "scenes" or "changes" that would better "showcase" those musical parts that you've already developed.
Early rock music often relied on the use of "scenes" often divided into structural elements consisting of: intro, verse, chorus, bridge, and outro.
It's the changes between these scenes, and how those changes are done, that make the music interesting. There's was an interview of Led Zeppelin or one of the other's of that era. I seem to recall the reporter asked "what kind of music is it that you make"... the answer as I recall was, "first it goes fast, then it goes slow, then it goes fast again".
I think when composing purely instrumental rock, it's really important to develop a strategy for using instruments in evolving sequences and rhythm change, to provide interest in place of how the vocals would ordinarily provide that interest.
Bass can be really important for instrumental rock. The band YES is a great example of a rock Bass guitar. Classic rock bands very often paired Base with Drums as a way of creating a machine like "drive" as the foundation of a song.
Listen to the instrumental intro to YES "Long Distance Runaround".
Pay attention to how the instruments are introduced sequentially. Notice how the Base and the Drums come in together and emphasize each other. When the vocals come in then the pace of the song slows.
The changes in the intro are Guitar... to Base, Drums, and Guitar... then into the opening vocals.
It's the changes that can really make a song. Staggering the instruments and the pace of the song into what can be called scenes... Similar to the scenes of a movie or a story. How an author introduces the reader to the characters and the setting, then describes to the reader what happens in that scene, but then moves to a new scene in the next chapter. Music is similar.
A vocalist of a rock band can provide the main elements of change even if the musical scenes repeat. I think the best instrumental rock need to rely on providing more emphasis on elements of instrumental changes, scenes, and staging to hold interest.
There's an element taught when leaning visual arts called "negative space". Which fundamentally means that the empty parts of a canvas can be just as important as the areas containing the details. Those empty negative spaces can provide a way to dramatically emphasize those detailed artistic elements which they surround.
There's a musical counterpart to this type of "negative space" in the placement of pauses and silence. I think that's an important detail to note when thinking about composing.
Electric guitar options on IOS really suck, in general. I gotta try pushing one of the SWAM violins through some guitar amp sim apps. This is an exciting idea and so much simpler than actually getting my guitar chops up to the task. MIDI to the rescue ro shred with little effort.
Nice track... very non-typical of most projects posted here and worthy of praise for highlighting this
approach.
I love the harp. The organ needs more distortion for my tastes to sound like it's on the same stage with the other "players"... more FX treatment to grunge it up a taste: distortion/saturation and an IR app to give it a 3D image. "Spatializer" is good for the stereo image effect.
What organ app are you using? The better organ apps have "Jon Lord" Deep Purple presets. B-3X, Galileo 2, and another that I haven't bought since my organ needs are covered with B-3X and the 2 Galileos. The Organ IAP in Korg Module is also excellent.
A prog rock band might include a harpist but I can't recall one that did but with Romplers the keyboard player could call up that sound to make a song stand out like this one does.
Your drum mix does something that bugs me where drums that are adjacent jump around in the stereo panned image with a small tom on the left and the next sized tom panned hard right. It ruins the illusion of a live drummer for me. What drum app are you using and did you program all the fills yourself or use a smart app like Lumbeats Rock Drummer for the fills? I wouldn't expect Lumbeats to have such erratic panning across the toms.
I love the prog rocky anarchic school garage band sound, esp the guitar inside lines 😬
PS What mark? Maybe this is you making your own mark, letting the world hear what you sound like. #justathought
@McD I used Galileo 2 for the organ. The whole project was to test out the Yonac apps from the $.99 sale they were running. I ran Swam Violin and Cubasis bass preset through a Tonestack preset. I think the harp you're referring to is a Cubais muted guitar layered with Korg Module guitar preset. The drums are Cubasis MIDI loops frankensteined together and a little bit of programming and processing.
@horsetrainer Thanks for the input. I'll look into the suggestions for instrumentation expansion. I think I might sing over it when I get a chance so the arrangement may change.
@craftycurate thanks! I only listen to a few random rock songs here and there so I didn't know if I was completely off the mark, genre-wise haha
Really good track and composition, I like it a lot. Don’t settle for this mix though, with a few tweaks this thing could really slap.
The bass needs to be louder sure, but it also needs more oomph and grind. If you haven’t done it, make sure the original bass track is mono and panned dead center, turn it up and shape the sound you want. Then when it’s mixed and mastered in stereo it will keep its definition and really stick out. Nothing else should live center panned except the kick drum and vocals. And if the bass track was initially recorded as a stereo track, it will seem flubby and undefined.
The drums have too much cymbal and crash and not enough kick and snare. Not sure if you used one drummer loop or if the drums are all separate components, but the cymbals etc.. are too sibilant and make a lot of wasted noise around the track, and the kick/snare are barely audible. if you can’t separate the drum parts then you just need to re-EQ them to tame the cymbals, smooth out their edge, and get more mids and lows from the kick/snare/toms. MixBox or FabFilter Pro-MB in the drum bus can get you a different frequency shape for your drums.
I wouldn’t turn anything down, just turn the bass up, turn the kick/snare up, tame the cymbals sibilance. You want more mids and lows in your track. I hear a bit of the “there’s a hole in the mix” sound, which is a quick and easy EQ adjustment (Pro-MB “strong mids” preset for example turns a mix into thick and smooth).
Thanks for the mixing tips. I’ll have another go at it in Cubasis and try to really dial in the mix. I’m glad the composition makes sense as I don’t make/listen to much rock.