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.
Beathawk basic questions and observations
I’ve just bought Beathawk, and I’m loving it so far. Also bought the acoustic drums pack which was probably 50% of the reason for buying the app, and it sounds great.
Some questions:
Does the loop button work in Song mode? It doesn’t seem to, either in the standalone or AU version.
Any tips/tutorials on constructing great drum loops using Beathawk? I love the fact that there are easily accessible velocity variations for the different samples.
Any other “must buy” IAPs for rock/pop that you’d recommend? I was thinking about the Total Bass and String Ensembles.
Is it just me, or is the AU version confusing? Instead of the very intuitive standalone app, the AU version has meaningless symbols that you have no idea what they do until you tap them!
All good, cheers.
Comments
The loop button works here.
Be sure to drag in the timeline to create a loop region. That tripped me up initially.
If you are not confident in the drum patterns you come up with, I suggest using a beat sequencer with some random/generative features to get you going, or maybe a poly rhythmic or Euclidean sequencer.
I like the Guitar Loops pack for rock/pop.
Yeah, the stripped down interface of the AU is confusing. But I believe all the features are there.
Ah, thanks the loop works fine - didn’t know about dragging. I’ll get used to the AU with practice. Cheers
I gave up trying to figure out all of Beathawk’s clunky song mode interface. (As I suspect many here did as well) I do believe that most of everyone here, including @LinearLineman (who will definitely recommend the “Total Bass” sound pack) only use Beathawk for the sounds.
Again, it’s up to you, you can try to learn and understand the Beathawk interface if you want to, but the majority here will say that Beathawk is all about the sounds.
Here’s something to try; just use the Beathawk AU as a sound source in a host (AUM, Cubasis, Drambo, or Loopy Pro) and then send MIDI to it from your favorite sequencer. There’s tons of different sequencers on the AppStore, many that lean towards “drums” specifically.
Octachron is one, or you could just use a piano roll sequencer like Atom 2. These all have intuitive control over velocities, and in many cases, much greater control over measures, patterns, looping etc.
Sounds like great advice Edward, thank you. The sounds are high quality indeed.
Cubasis as a very nice library of midi drum beats that can be used to trigger the Auv3 Beathawk.
I’m on it, thank you!
How's your experience with the acoustic drums pack? I've found that if I load the Acoustic Drums kit (the one that has multiple sounds on a single pad, depending on the pitch), the kick is super quiet, easily a few dB lower than the rest of the kit. Rendered it unusable for me, and I bought Beathawk specifically for these drums.
The Beathawk acoustic drums sound good but I find the best results is recording each kit element separately, or at least the kick (i.e. compose the groove without the kick and record into the DAW a stereo track of snare, hats, etc. & then compose/edit the groove again with just the kick.
As you say the kick is very light and EQing compressing it on its own will solve that shortcoming.
Now what I have been doing is taking advantage of the sample fodder thread here in the forum and Googling "free acoustic drum samples". There's a ton of really nice acoustic drum samples on the web that are free & open licenced.
There's a Ludwig kit that has about 3-5 velocity levels and loading it in Drum Perfect Pro or Patterning 2 yields excellent results. I've
uploaded several kits into the kit cloud in Patterning 2, search JRSIV and they'll pop up.
Good luck!
You might want to try pitching it down 12 semitones, I think they pitched a lot of samples up to save disk space. The kick is horribly clicky until you pitch it back down, at which point it sounds like an actual kick.
I agree as far as the sounds go. I’ve only occasionally used it to make beats within the app, but the sounds are the sweet spots. Some really really great ones.
I have been using the acoustic drums for a couple of days now. I think the one “kit” included sounds good - the kick may be a little low in volume but if used in Cubasis with midi loops, it’s easy to select all the kicks and pull up the velocity.
That said, I have discovered a few issues:
My iPad is plugged into a Focusrite 2i2 and the only mic input available in Beathawk is the stereo one - no option for changing this to the mono left or right input. That’s definitely not an issue with my set up, because all options are available in AUM and Cubasis.
The sound of many samples in the browser is markedly different (and often better) than when the same sound is loaded onto a pad. Initially I was fixing this by changing the pitch on the right hand side of the interface, in the case of kicks this was typically by an octave, but for other drums it could be 2 to 7 semitones to get it to match the browser sound. I THINK I have now fixed this by selecting “Use most suitable basenote on Pad” in the settings options, although it seems Beathawk doesn’t save this setting and I have to reset this option each time I use the app.
I have tried recording some bass notes into Cubasis from the Total Bass IAP (which incidentally sounds brilliant). I’ve not been able to record anything by using the pads within the app (although it works in AUM), but if I use the KB1 keyboard as a midi effect on the Beathawk track, then that successfully records into Cubasis, although for KB1 to generate any sound at all I have to keep opening the Beathawk UI which is annoying.
Is there an easy way to map individual acoustic drum samples in Beathawk so that they work with General Midi MIDI loops? Not been able to work that out yet, but the acoustic “kit” works perfectly straight out of the box.
If anyone can help with any of the above or suggest a better way of working, I’d be grateful.
I'm using 4pockets Nurack MidiRemap for remapping drum apps to GM midi
As well as the above, I meant to ask, apart from the acoustic drums and total bass IAPs, are there any other playable instruments (as opposed to loops) that are recommended?
The pianos, accordions and organs are playable.
Check out Doug Wood's hours of demos in The Sound Test Room on YouTube
When you look at the information details for any IAP it will disclose if the product has instruments/presets or loops or a combination of both. Only a few are 100% loops and they make it clear that they are Loop packs.
I sent the following questions to UVI Support 11 days ago and have chased - no response. Do they normally reply to emails?
My iPad is plugged into a Focusrite 2i2 and the only mic input available in Beathawk is the stereo one - no option for changing this to the mono left or right input. That’s definitely not an issue with my set up, because all options are available in AUM and Cubasis.
The sound of many samples in the browser is markedly different (and often better) than when the same sound is loaded onto a pad. Initially I was fixing this by changing the pitch on the right hand side of the interface, in the case of kicks this was typically by an octave, but for other drums it could be 2 to 7 semitones to get it to match the browser sound. I THINK I have now fixed this by selecting “Use most suitable basenote on Pad” in the settings options, although it seems Beathawk doesn’t save this setting and I have to reset this option each time I use the app.
I have tried recording some bass notes into Cubasis from the Total Bass IAP (which incidentally sounds brilliant). I’ve not been able to record anything by using the pads within the app (although it works in AUM), but if I use the KB1 keyboard as a midi effect on the Beathawk track, then that successfully records into Cubasis, although for KB1 to generate any sound at all I have to keep opening the Beathawk UI which is annoying.
Is there an easy way to map individual acoustic drum samples in Beathawk so that they work with General Midi MIDI loops? Not been able to work that out yet, but the acoustic “kit” works perfectly straight out of the box._
Thank you for this. I was just about to ask if all Beathawk settings stay persisted. Apparently not.
Good luck in getting that implemented into BeatHawk! I asked for more advanced input options (like being able to select input port, left, right or stereo when using USB audio-interfaces as well as being able to normalize and trim the sample before saving it) 3-4 years ago and nada in the updates...
For me Beathawk is more or less an 'IAP Store' for UVI Sounds rather than a fully fledged sampling workstation but that's me.
I might re-install BeatHawk if/when it gets more advanced sampling functionality but for that I can already use other apps...
The UVI engine is capable of doing layers, key-splits, multiple samples pre preset, time-stretching, pitch, amp and filter envelopes and modulation of multiple parameters at once but NOTHING is exposed to the end-user when they wish to create their own sounds or modify existing ones.
It is what it is, some like it some don't...
Cheers!
Wow would love it if they exposed all those parameters. I love Beathawk as a sound module but rarely use it in the way I do Koala or BM3. I assume some do but it’s just not as powerful in that respect. Love it for the sounds though.