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.
Comments
Aren’t those two cellos playing on a single staff?
Hummingbird…. That’s excellent. You’re such a romantic. Your barque is bigger than your bytes.
It’s a virtual cellist with 2 bows and 4 hands. I do wonder sometimes if my Staffpad parts are even playable by humans.
They don’t apply any rules checking and just render whatever nonsense I can notate. Works for me because no one with serious skills is going to play my shot for free. Apps like Staffpad and such tend to make the Pro’s irrelevant. Sad but the Philharmonics are following Blockbuster Video Stores into extinction… not all but many smaller markets.
You should mention my project naming? You’re the king of cool names for your work.
And you only think I’m a romantic for sending you flowers on your Forum Start date.
I was playing with Time Signature Changes in a Score made from a series of Cut and Paste gestures when the app crashed and every attempt to re-open the score makes the app crash. On the forums people say “Send it to Staffpad Support and they will fix it.” But, I tried rendering to audio and the last version came out. Good enough for a sketch…
That’s a beaut. I’m glad you were able to capture it. The combination of xylophone with the strings, especially, was very good. The StaffPad instruments are excellent, indeed. Strangely, I just posted a mallet piece, Part Q.
Man, that xylophone is epic ! I guess after performance, your player went straight to his kinesiotherapist !
It’s Marimba (Hard Mallets) and Xylophone with a piano… all cinesamples versions.
I suspect I’ll need to get the Berlin and Spitfire percussion libraries to scratch this itch.
Nothing else in Staffpad has this attack. I wish the rumored big band library would drop and have some biting trumpets.
And a updated score I found and worked on today:
“Sonix”
Synth track imported from Cubasis and reverb-y Staffpad instruments added. Zero gravity sound but with an atmosphere… like that exists somewhere in some random contained cloud of gas?
“Fallen Heroes” dedicated to the soldiers and victims in Ukraine defending their country and freedom to live free.
Mission Improbable
Like the last percussive section, it comes unexpectedly!
Thanks. I wanted to have a completely different section which required finding a way to segue from one time signature 7/4 to 2/4. I also tried a tempo jump but decided to just write something super fast.
Thanks for listening and sharing a comment.
I’ve been cranking out sketches and slowly adding new techniques.
I’m using some of your dotted rhythms in a work in progress to get my Melody to sound more fluid like yours do. You end up choosing something akin to Euclidean rhythms where notes are distributed evenly across a space which is a feature of Brazilian boss’s nova and Latin clave patterns. It’s the best way to make even 8th or 16th note rhythms “swing” with out resorting to triplets.
I would be curious to understand more about this dotted rhythms you're talking about because I am not aware of it. I have no real understanding of rhythms but I am eager to learn if you have any reading suggestions
If you take 3 notes of any type and dot 2 of the three if fills the space of 4 notes and has approximates a 3 against 4 rhythm which swings in the way triplet do.
Look at your metropolis score and just look for little runs of dotted notes and the lack of triplet runs.
It's a simple tip to make melodies more interesting rhythmically... they tend to float and not march like my runs of quarters, 8ths or 16's. To fix that I was using well know latin rhythms like bossa nova (the clave) or salsa but just dotting note sequences is a better approach.
You do it without thinking of it as a rule... that's pretty cool. Do didn't recognize the rule.
Now that you mentioned that, I understand what you mean. I remember that while writing the arrangement I found out that there was this kind of strange rhythmic pattern. But it is not something I am conceptualising beforehand or do on purpose. I just transcribe melodies and rhythms that come to my mind, which probably make me a complete amateur, because you're able to put a name on the concept, which I can't..
But I have been working a lot on the 3 against 4 polyrhythms on my guitar right hand technique, with the thumb pulsing in 3 and the other fingers in 4 or the other way around or even alternating between both pattern on the fly. This might have influenced the way I write now.
Groups of dotted notes can be very tricky to sight read. I suspect professional arrangers would write them as tied notes that help indicate which are in the beat and which are off beat.
But in Staffpad it generates cool patterns with minimal pencil markings… and I love that. I always seek short cuts like this.
Consider guitar tab: they rarely bother to show complex rhythms are just expect the player to follow from an existing recording. So they don’t have to learn the notation but they learn to hear and reproduce complex finger patterns like your doing between thumb and fingers. No one teaches piano like this but many teach themselves to play by ear. In the end the play by ear seems to make for a more creative musician that invents music… Mike levy is somewhere between these two worlds as am I. My sight reading is terrible but I can work out music parts slowly.
Ha ha … I can imagine a Carnatic version of Allegra… that would confuse the bots!
Some great pieces here… especially liked Echo of the lost score, Bazaar Incident and Mission Improbable.
That's also why I use dot too. In Staffpad, I also discovered the double dot which I didn't know existed, but that's also a very nice short cut !
Here’s the sketch where I use a lot of dotted rhythms to make the melody sing and swing… it’s notated in 4/4 but the use of dotted patterns make it approach a 3/4 feel: 3 against 4 then I switch over to more quarter note based melodic ideas to help recognise the difference.
The chords came from a Scaler 2 MIDI import into the piano and then copied to a string section with notes assigned according to it’s relative position in the section and in the chord: 5 note chords.
Nice piece. To my ears it sounds really 3/4. Maybe it could be interesting to include some element in 4/4 to bring some polyrhythmic ambiguity
Yes. That's the magic of those dotted rhythms placing 3 notes (dotted quarters in the starting melody) in the space of 4. Having the chords change on 1 helps allow you to go with a waltz feeling.
Here’s the same music with a drummer to show the notated time signature of 4/4. I also added more dotted rhythms where ever I saw a on beat quarter note. This shorted the bar by 1 16th note but I don’t care and the score shows these bars as incomplete (not adding up to 4 quarter notes of sound) but it plays as desired so more pencil work saved with a simple dot addition changing a quarter to a dotted 8th.
Practicing creating transitions between sections…
That last one’s a great track for a car chase in a Hitchcock movie 🚔
Thanks… I always see movie images and I should probably try and break that as a habit but I recognize I add images to all music.
“Classified Intrumentation” started with a busy piano part and grew from there:
An experiment on building instruments on an existing AUM track: