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 do YOU get those original tunes out of your head?
So I'm taking a shower and I start singing this soul jazz tune in my head. I know it's not 100% original - I've been listening to a lot of soul jazz lately so I know I heard it SOMEWHERE, but I can't for the life of me remember the title or the artist, and the more I "sing" it I'm sure I'm probably morphing 2 or 3 or 8 tunes together.
Mother of mercy, I can't get this tune out of my head. So I make a choice to try and lay down a demo of it. I figure, hey - most of the players I admire borrow & steal ideas from each other, and everything has already been written anyway. I'm not trying to make a buck with someone else's tune - I just wanna jam. So I set this song on a loop in my brain all the way through the showering, through the drying off, the shaving, the dressing, etc. so I won't forget the damn thing until I have the space to at least play the melody into the onboard mic on the iPad or my phone.
Of course, by the time I actually get it down in a skeleton format (basic drum beat, bassline for changes & melody), it's become an earworm. Now I can't get it out of my head even if I wanted to.
So I spend the next 90 minutes adjusting the drum beat, laying down a true bass line, playing in an organ melody with Hammond B3-X, playing a unison sax line from Geoshred, and generally getting this thing to sound kinda like it does in my head.
Do you guys & gals ever go through this? The song builds itself in your head and it's a race to get it down before you forget it? I have a voice memo app on my phone that I sing into all the time for ideas that seem like keepers. These are the days I wish I could plug that cable into the back of my head and just download the damn thing....
Comments
Yes, and Gadget is still my #1 notepad when it's gotta be quick.
I don't always do this myself but I've heard others describe a process where they "sing" out what's in their head in the moment, like into a voice recorder. You're not necessarily singing out the full arrangement but instead just trying to get a rough copy of the main ideas down (melody, rhythms, feel, etc). Loopy Pro might be a useful tool for this as it would allow you to quickly overdub multiple parts.
My singing voice is just the worst, but it’s good enough for a voice memo.
Once I had a song stuck in my head that I swore was an 80s ballad, and even its name was on the tip of my tongue, or so I thought.
I worked out the melody on guitar, recorded it, posted it on Soundcloud, and asked around. Apparently it was original. Or as original as an arpeggiated I–V–vi–IV can be.
So where is this shower soul jazz? As for mr, I never have a musical idea and almost no musical memory. Hence, no problem 6for me). I do get an occasional phrase lodged i some cerebral cranny, but it’s always a friendly guest and knows when to leave.
@LinearLineman Hey - you keep your cerebral cranny to yourself, buddy. This is a family establishment!
All the time!
And the shower is the best place to come up with parts. If I have a chord progression or something stuck in my head, I’ll get it going and have it looping while showering. Here I’ll experiment with different things with my singing/vocal “virtual instrument”. By the time I’m out of the shower, I’ll have some new parts to record.
Sometimes I’ll have come up with something original. Other times I’ll have recreated a song from many decades ago that my young self heard somewhere and I’d subconsciously stored it deep in a dark shadowey corner of my mind.
But I have been wondering the same thing also; how to “delete” all those notes out of your head! I mean, some of us need a Mental Init patch or a way to reset or clear the slate. Weed doesn’t help, it only adds more notes on top lol..
I like weed @Edward_Alexander but I've found that it doesn't help me creatively. It helps me NOT CARE, and that has it's place at times, but I'm always better when I'm sober. I have more FUN after a couple beers, but I'm best when I'm sober
Everything I create tends to remind me of something. It's one of the reasons I rely on random generators so much. I'm always afraid something "I created" is just cribbed from someone else. At least I know the randomly generated bits aren't subconsciously "borrowed". Like you, once an idea gets lodged in my brain I can't let it go until I at least try to record it.
I usually just sing the idea into koala and then figure it out when I get into my lab. With koala I can easily do several parts and have it all in one place so I don’t get confused later and then I can work it out into what I wanted in cubasis with instruments
@MadeofWax I used to obsess over trying to create something I'd never heard before, because I was frustrated at the idea that everything had already been done.
Then at a certain point I realized that embracing the idea that it's already been done can be incredibly liberating - it freed me up from caring. I mean - how many blues songs are there? About a million, and a majority of them are nearly identical. The thing that's different is YOU, so it doesn't matter the tune so much as the delivery.
Of course this varies depending on genre - you can get away with certain tropes in some that you can't in others - but ultimately it is all the same. Most of us are writing music with 12 notes, and humans have been doing so for let's say 600 years or more. I think by now we've come up with pretty much every combo, or nearly enough to assume so. Once I embraced that, it made it so much easier to just enjoy making music rather than spending my time getting frustrated.
In the words of the immortal Gary Coleman: Different strokes for different folks. Not trying to poo poo your process, just offering an alternate side of the coin
I appreciate your viewpoint. No worries about poo pooing my process. If I'm completely honest with myself the random parts I cherry pick for my music are likely the ones that sound familiar. Using a degree of randomness helps me get outside of my head a bit. I've also gone the "chemically enhanced" route while recording and/or mixing but I already have a dodgy quality filter so I try to listen to anything I've recorded in an altered state multiple times before I release it.