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.
Bandcamp album release: The Shining Trapezohedron
Released to a storm of indifference and polite yawns everywhere bad music can be purchased: a small compilation of my most explicitly Lovecraftian noises, now available for your listening pleasure:
https://cthonicist1.bandcamp.com/album/the-shining-trapezohedron
Comments
These are the soundtracks of some truly epic nightmares. Bulls eye.
Nothing about this music inspires indifference... I've heard a lot of bad music
that wishes it sounded like this. I'm sure self-deprecation is a good strategy
but this is music worth learning more about.
I'll start... what's your favorite reverb? This music swims in large subterranean spaces
that are very pristine in the treatment of the original sound quality: Not an easy trick to
pull off and it requires excellent FX apps.
Do you collect sounds or are there also apps that are great for the non-instrumental
noises?
What DAW is involved and what's your process to assemble music?
@McD : Wow, thank you for those very kind words…!
Regarding what is my favourite reverb? - all of them, probably, all at once!
But seriously - my go-to is Fred Anton Corvest’s FAC Alteza, with usually just a minor tweaking of it’s default, but I will also layer more reverbs on that. I really like the gritty static edge you can add with Eventide Mangleverb, and their Shimmerverb seems more flexible than some of the other shimmer fx I’ve tried. Once in a while, when you absolutely, positively have to deep six every single sound in the room, there is none finer than Black Hole for all your cavernous needs. And I’ve just lately been getting into rymdigare, which can do a lot of the above in animated, interesting ways due to it’s eccentric lfo ‘planets’ metaphor.
I also use the free Zero reverb for one specific thing, 100% wet, in tandem with Fractal Beats and Rozetta Particles, to generate semi-random metallic clanks and bangs in the middle distance. Final ‘specialist’ reverb: ToneBooster’s TB reverb, specifically it’s wonderfully named ‘Far Away’ and ‘Station’ settings which do indeed manage to create an aural impression of both of those places.
Yes, I do collect sounds, and sometimes use them in tracks, usually horribly mangled through multiple passes in AUMs File Players at various speeds and through various fx.
I enjoy the adventure of field recording, spent an hour last week tapping, thumping and shaking various parts of a deserted childrens playground to effect yet to be employed in a piece, sometimes using just my iPhone, sometimes a couple of cheap Zoom handhelds, or a pair of binaural earpiece mikes.
I have a lot of apps, so I usually make new noises just by messing with one or two picked at random in AUM. For really quirky non-connectable things, like the now zombie noise app Giant Isopod which sadly lives only on this iPad, or Dr. Om, say, I’ll resort to video screen recording, and stripping out the audio in AudoStretch.
I used to use Cubasis as my DAW, and spend ages arranging in it. Then I moved stuff over to Ableton. But generally, it’s a lot simpler than that. I just build a thing incrementally in AUM, and when it is running pretty much as a complete piece in that, with minimal intervention from me, using MIDILFOs, MM1, the probability settings in Atom and so on to generate changes, then I’ll just create a mix bus, and hit record.
If I want to capture pre and post transport effects and tails, I might even just screen record the whole session, maybe live riding the AUM faders, and then do the audio strip thing in AudioStretch out into AudioShare. Nothing fancy. I don’t know enough to do anything fancy…
There's a lot of value in this report. I have purchased and experienced most of what you document here.
For anyone that likes this type of sound I recommend they use this report for Black Friday shopping.
I haven't done much field recording but I did a few experiments just recording into Koala and I recommend that since the iPhone's Mic is getting better with every new model.
I also have played with the speed adjustments in AUM's file player and it's epic to create those
subterranean monsters that haunt our collective unconscious.
Stay humble... but know your work has value. In a perfect world you'd get a shot at doing sound tracks
but that's like loving basketball and wanting a shot at the NBA. Too many talented people in that
market.
Excellent work @Svetlovska
I’ve only listened to the first two tracks so far, but I’ve got to say, I really enjoyed ‘Celephïas’!
And thanks for sharing some insight on your workflow! I feel like we share similar strategies.
Just for info, Dr Om still works as IAA in AUM. I started it before loading it into an AUM slot, which seems to be de rigour with IAA apps these days. And if you launch Dr Om in portrait, when you rotate to landscape it works fine, whereas if you start it in landscape it’s woefully misaligned. So it’s getting shaky, but still usable, lovely gnarly drones and all. Noisemusick has the same quirks regarding rotation. This is all on 14.8, so can’t vouch for it on 15.x
@Edward_Alexander : thank you! Celephais was my Day One noodle with Brams’ excellent Mononoke, recorded pretty much as one lucky take on its’ own as I bumbled around with it. Don’t think I ever captured anything as good with it again…
@bygjohn : that’s good to know. I got fed up with the whole screen not rotating/disappearing off the side thing at some point, with Dr. Om and Noisemusick both, and just decided to use it in screen grab mode after that. Maybe I should dig them out again for another try.