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.
First go with Tomofon - The Kindly Ones
“Spirits of Destruction, Speed of Grief, I command you: come out of her now!” - extract from an exorcism.
In Greek mythology, the Erinyes, aka The Furies, were female chthonic deities of vengeance, born of the union of Night and the Earth, dedicated to the destruction of any who broke a sacred oath. People called them The Kindly Ones, in hope of avoiding their attentions.
Created from a single sample of a Kaiju roar, screen swiped from You Tube, and processed in Tomofon using the automatic import. Three separate instances, sequenced from Atom, from a live improvisation into Atom using KB1, usual shedload of reverbs. Rozeta Scaler kept the sausage-finger playing honest. No other instruments used.
As I am habitually a preset tweaker rather than a hard core sound design type, I guess I will be relying on the kindness of strangers on patch storage or elsewhere to leverage my investment in this synth. Tomofon is clearly very powerful, but I found the presets underwhelming, and things only picked up when I shoved my Kaiju roar (Grand King Ghidora, I believe, fact fans!) into it and spent forever messing around with zero understanding at all the things it has to fiddle with. Ended up with a noise I liked, stopped messing, and started playing.
Can’t see me doing that every time I just want to noodle something out.
Still, my iron rule is: ‘If you buy it, use it.’
So here it is.
Enjoy! (I hope!)
Comments
Sounds like the fabled trumpets heralding the end of the world.
Most excellent to my ears.
Aren’t Furies those mythological children who take on the identity of small animals, thus heralding the end of the world? I must be confusing things. 😆
Out and about so only listening on the phone speakers, but this is lovely. I hope for your sake 'the kindly ones' agree!
The sound of Vangelis scoring the Apocalypse.
This ability to squeeze gold from any old stone smacks strongly of some ungodly deal with one (or more) of these great ones...
Can we hear the original Kailua roar you sampled?
I really like this - definitely shows what this app is capable of beyond what I heard on Doug’s recent video.
Definitely think I need to buy this.
@LinearLineman : your wish is my command. Most spectacularly dull video on You Tube coming right up:
I filled the whole of that Koala screen and the next with variants of Kaiju roars. This one seemed to have a nice brassy edge to it, so I imported it into one of the brass models, one of the vocal models and messed with everything, , pitching it up and down by an octave, overdriving it via the internal controls, adding delay and reverb internally, then AUM DJ eq and a lorra lorra reverb, Alteza mainly. Then I did my usual thing, of making a loop of what I had, duping it a few times, and Hainbaching the hell out of it, half speed, double speed, and one with the speed controlled by a random lfo. Then live mixed the channels as it played into AudioShare.
I have wanted to use a Kaiju roar in something since falling in love with Steve Beresford and David Toops production work on Frank Chickens We Are Ninja Not Gaisha 12” back in the day: (comes in right at the end). In fact, I interviewed them about it!
I am also a huge fan of the kind of doomy, huge, ripping edge of distortion brass blares which are common now in sci Fi and horror movies (in fact I am sitting here while the title screen of the horror super hero movie Morbius plays. Doomy, blaring brass? Check.
) I blame the amazing composer Hildur Guðnadóttir for setting the tone on her excellent soundtracks for Chernobyl and Joker:
https://tidal.com/album/110137098
https://tidal.com/album/118942327
Great!
Agreed. Just amazing what Svetlovska can do with a single sample of a Kaiju roar.
Thanks all for your listens and comments, and @CracklePot : very funny! @NeuM : “ Vangelis scoring the Apocalypse” - I’m taking that one to the bank
@Gavinski : it’s got a lot of bass energy, and I didn’t test the mix on phones, so I hope it didn’t sound too meh…
Haven’t had a chance to check out Doug’s @thesoundtestroom vid yet, @michael_m, but I suspect proper keyboard players like him will have a very different relationship to it than ham fisted, ah, ‘experimentalists’ like me. It seems to lean into ‘proper instrument’ territory, like AudioLayer and others like it, where it is all about a pro crafted polyphonic experience, setting up real, deep, expressive ‘instruments’, where the real magic will come from a competent player, not just the preset.
Tomofon is definitely a very thinky sort of synth. I suspect it needs some mad genius like @Spidericemidas to get to grips with it and show what it can really do.
I was pleased, very pleased, with the noise I somehow ended up making, thank you @Pxlhg and @MadeofWax for those kind words, but it was luck, tbh, @Krupa’s suggestion of pacts with dark forces notwithstanding
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It took a long time of me randomly messing about, and I binned a whole other piece using only its own presets close to completion, because it just wasn’t coming together. This is unusual for me, as I usually push on until it does work, at some level, at least. This time? Nah. Frankly the second go round was slightly desperate: “Have I just blown fifteen quid? Maybe if I shove something of my own in there…?”
On the basis of that experience, and until/unless sound packs start arriving, I definitely think you have to import your own raw material, and prepare for a long sound design session before getting something good. I also think unless you are a big brain sound designer it’s not always going to be obvious how your samples will interact with the import analysis process, especially if you then meld them with one of the existing voice models, and find out whether you end up making something cool or a dud.
On a side note, I’m keeping the Koala Kaiju roars set I made. I love the textures they bring. Might use them as textural elements in other things in the future.
Tldr: it’s been… interesting.
I took the detour and found a Ghidora Roar and screen captured it into Koala and exported to a wave file and loaded it into Tomofon and AudioLayer. Tomofon changed it into something pretty synth-y and able to build chords with: not much Dragon roar left but it did morph in ways few synth preset do so there was respect for the overloaded spectrum of pitches.
Audiolayer pitch shifted the pure roar sounds so I could scale my dragon according to pitch. I like that and might make some short roars someday as Sound FX. I then played with the start/end points and made a kind of steady state roar tone and played with filters and such.
Good way of looking into sound design starting from material I’d never think of… so thanks for the clue.
The whole exercise only gave me more respect for your magical arts to pull content from what some might consider useless noise. You have mad skills.
Ooh @McD : be very interested to hear what someone like you, who definitely does know what they are doing, comes up with! A sound pack of your Kaiju roars would be something to hear! P.s.: ‘Magical arts’ = ‘randomly stabbing at on screen buttons until the screeching stops’ !
This is a total classic. Fink also did an excellent track using some of those vocal samples
Ha! I’d never heard the Fink thing. Always interesting to see how much material can be repurposed/worked/cycled. Very chill piece, thanks!
Amazing track given your starting point, loved the brassy organ sounds. At some stage you have to realise that continually claiming that results are down to luck is really just diversionary tactic to hide your talent 😊
Wow, I am impressed with this composition.
Very cinematic, and quite intriguing.
Truly amazing track!
You are an artist, and your creativity is on full display on this creation.
Love this.
Rene