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
They say WTF was kept hidden from the public, and both feared and secretly envied by the rest of the family for having extra sets of arms.
…… and a Modular Synapse. 😎
Lovely! I think W.T.F. Bach should have been into period movie soundtracks!
👍🏽🧔🏼 Far away from paranoid. But I really enjoyed it.🙏🏽
It was reputed he would write the treble clef notes with a right hand and the bass clef with a spare left and often each hand had its own rime signature and key. Definately ahead of his time but without an audience… to this very day.
I did edit it way back from some real chaos because “editors” really do get to change the artists work… mostly out of spite for their role in history.
This is extremely good. Would you care to discuss the process?
I started with a workable bass line… constructed by ear and not really using chord theory.
Just notes that seemed to tell a story of a logical progression.
Staffpad has this “Chord” tracks with auto-chord recognition. The bass line doesn’t trigger it but
Making the first melody and targeting notes that are a 3rd or 6th (really an inverted 3rd) does. So, by making a melody that seems good with the bass line I had a notated chord progression. Adding the 2nd melody that fit with the bass and 1st melody continued to defined a fixed chord progression.
Now with a defined chord progression and checking to make sure I didn’t have too many duplicate notes in the 3 original parts I added some extra 16th note busy parts that flowed around the chord progression using a lot of neighboring notes (one below and one above a chord tone as a good jazz soloist would to outline a complex line that fit the chords).
So, now I had 5 parts to assign to instruments. In a first version I assigned them to orchestral parts and it tended to kill the connection to a Bach style composition and just became a cluttered assault.
So, I took my 5 parts and started again with 4 pianos to let the parts enter every 8 bars.
After presenting all the parts I added flute and then strings to the mix.
I wanted the construction of the “fugue” approach to be as obvious as possible. Music students in my day were taught to analyze Bach’s Fugues to learn how chord progressions were embedded in the complex melodic flows. That targeting of 3rds at major rhythmic points and traditional chord progressions (targeting V to I cadences for forward motion) is the key. It becomes pretty procedural and similar to solving a Sudoku or a crossword puzzle. Making one with a really nice melody and rhythm is probably the only reward.
I tried to make a melody that Bach would have discarded using some odd leaps of large intervals but as I added more parts and some parallel 3rds between moving parts it started to sound more and more conventional. I should have broken that rule and done more 4ths to make it sound unlike the master and more like a rebelling teenager seeking the devil’s music as teenagers do.
What’s really cool are the improvisers that can make these types of compositions by ear on the fly. They get there by playing all the Bach stuff until the patterns of harmonic counterpoint become a part of their brain map for music and their hands just know how to coordinate on the fingerings to follow the scales in 6ths or 3rd or run down against up and skip the right notes to still land on 3rds or 6ths and follow some interesting chord progression.
It’s like the chess masters that can play 10 people and once and just walk from board to board and win because their have spent so many hours studying the board and building mental maps of the best moves. Computers just take that “learning” process to levels of pattering than humans can’t approach in normal thought processing rates.
Now computers will do that with music… but will there be recognition of quality of just reams of musical output that sounds rather meh. Do we want more art based on existing art that has a million instances to learn from or do we want a totally fresh take? Probably both because audiences exist for both approaches.
Thank you. There is a lot to take in here. I will be rereading this over the next few days to see what I can incorporate into some new material. I like when people tell me what apps they used, but I'm much more interested in the writing process. Recently @LinearLineman discussed a 'staggering' process that I am currently using in a new piece. Rather than drums, I am using it between a piano and an acoustic bass playing the same part, but slightly... staggered. The effect is quite nice.
I hope life is treating you a little better. Best wishes to you and yours!
Thanks for asking and elaborating on the process. Fascinating, and a very musical result. Discussion around WTF reminds me of another 'forgotten' Bach, PDQ Bach :-)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._D._Q._Bach
Fer’ sure… I ripped off the wonderful Professor Schickele’s clever P.D.Q. Bach idea.
I had a college Professor that attended Julia’s when Schickele was also a student and wrote many of his subsequent pieces for the records.
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Hi McD,
Great musical composition, and the process is so fascinating.
On this creation, I thought am hearing @LinearLineman !!!
Very enjoyable and melodic Bach!!!
I love this recording a bunch!!!~
With love and appreciation,
Rene
I appreciate your feedback Rene. It’s nice to have someone to listen and react top the steady stream of creative content.
Eventually most forums will have a feedback bot using AI and building a model based on your legacy of positive encouragement. I wonder if the AI Bot will throw in comments like “Nice use of plagal cadences to add extra emotional depth to
An otherwise rather bland creation. Keep ‘em coming.
I really like the way this builds, especially when the strings enter around 2:24. If my music reading skills weren't so abysmal I'd buy Staffpad on the strength of your output with it.
That is an exceptionally well crafted joke. You don’t see it coming until the very last word. Of course you also have to imagine the music being played live by a single person. But I intended that so it hit me right where the funny lives.
FYI: There’s a new desktop app called “MuseScore 4” that’s free and runs on Mac and Windows that gives Staffpad stiff competition for rendering music notation.
Musescore 4 is an open source project that was 4 years in the making.
Loved it, fascinating to read how you tackled the composition.
By the way the reason JS had 23 kids was that even though he was a virtuoso on it he never learned how to stop his organ!
You nailed it @McD !!!
I recognize my own music writing workflow in your description.
I gave up on staffpad. It isn’t what I thought I was looking for. In the end what works best for me is the good old paper and pen.
🤣
Very inspired and inspiring piece, @McD.
You got a beautiful mind !
I like the way you mix the academic side of counterpoint with your usual dose of irreverent (quasi punk) attitude towards formal classicism (the repeated satanic tritone and the occasional use of polyrhythm that I think I spotted at times)
I agree that improvisers that reached the level of proficiency at creating counterpoint in real time are impressive and really cool. For exemple, this video of the very underrated genius Ted Greene, creating beautiful intertwined lines on the fly while explaining what he is doing to one of his student never ceases to amaze me...
A lot of kids, ultra productive and creative, life before Tik-Tok was good. A lot more time in our hand to create and procreate.
Ted Greene! Yes... his video'ed lessons are a glimpse into the mind of a guitar genius: history, theory and musical taste.
For jazz piano, check out the lessons of Barry Harris on Youtube. Very similar analytical treatises with off the cuff examples.
For a modern master the lectures of Jacob Collier of course have exposed the world to a level of theory even academics have not considered like "negative harmony" which goes down in a circle of 4ths. It's the basis of plagal (amen) cadences.
He can even navigate transitioning from A=440 to A=432 while singing through modulations in "just" (vs well tempered) tuning. That's perfect pitch with the precision of an oscilloscope... he's a machine.
WTF, indeed. We are not worthy.