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
Sounds cool.
Yes it is! Gadget has some very nice Chiptune gadgets with Kingston and Kamata. Tokyo fed through the decimator is great for drums.
If you’re considering changing a chord, I think it would be better to consider Bb/Dm in the second line as the melody contains two F notes, and Dm is the diatonic iv in Am. The F fits though as it’s the VI. The Bb is of course an accidental, so it gives the chord a different quality depending on whether the F or a Dm is used. The F gains a 4th, and the Dm gains a flat 6th.
How does that E7 sound in the last measure? It’s going to sound really unresolved isn’t it, especially following the borrowed chord? I guess that’s the intention though?
Not in front of the piano right now, but will play this tomorrow.
wait, how come you don't respond to his post with a dad joke like you did mine?
With the exception of notating music, gonna have to disagree. My knowledge of theory is practically non-existent (Like, lesson 1-2 of a beginners-course levels of 'basic'), yet my musical output might suggest I'm somewhat more learned.
…and I’m certainly not the only one who’s ability to write music outweighs their knowledge of writing music.
My musical education has come from over 4 decades of listening to a wide variety of music, as well as having the great fortune to have been around musicians who were much more capable than myself. All of it, combined with a smattering of discernment, has seemed to have left me with the ability to make music that at the very least breaks out of the 4-bar beat/loop paradigm.
Same! The Strokes early stuff had those great intertwining guitar lines. Probably the later stuff too but I kind of lost interest in them after the first few albums.
And now I have Fugazi Repeater on loop mode in my brain for the rest of the day haha
i dont know music theory after 20 years of making music, 15 or so "professionally". I always wanted to learn, but i just fiddle around until something sounds right. With recent tools like scaler etc, theres less of a reason for me to learn at this point.
I think so. I think @jwmmakerofmusic considered a return to Am, so the E7 won't be the end but the dom7 to Am. The previous Dm - C - Bb is of course in Dm, with Bb as the VI of Dm, pivoting to become a Neapolitan of Am. That's why I suggested the 1st inv. for N6. That's just my take though. Love to hear @jwmmakerofmusic's chiptune version! 👍
Playing more than one note at a time is invalid and cheating – what the musician is actually doing when they do that is (perhaps unknowingly) engaging in additive synthesis to achieve a different spread of harmonic content – it’s still one note, with wider harmonics in varying places, and trying to fake the harmonic content pattern by playing ‘strings’ I think they’re called, no wait, ‘ropes’, no wait, ‘chords’, is just rigging it to pretend they’re doing harmonic design by additive synthesis.
Instead of playing a chord, the musician should be passing that note through a set of static band pass filters to impose a formant, and then if they want to change the harmonic distribution for the next note that has complex harmonic distribution, quickly change all the parametric settings of the filter bank and then strum the next note
Obviously we’re not there yet in technology, all our filters and harmonic enhancers are designed from a monophonic perspective, so that’s why you see musicians having to fudge it by as I say, cheating, and having to hold down more than one note at the same time, which as one can imagine is a usability disaster, has appalling cognitive overload, and really should hardly ever work properly or reliably
Almost all the times I’ve ever tried holding more than one note down I get neighbouring notes joining in too, which wasn’t the intention – it’d be better if I simply described the new complex harmonic distribution and initiated that as one tone
I disagree on both counts.
It’s entirely possible to make music that doesn’t fit that pattern without having a clue about music theory, especially if you work in unusual counts and loops based on time rather than rhythm. That’s not to discount your experience, if you find it a useful tool to break out of that pattern. I’d find it more of a straightjacket, I think. Different strokes and all that.
And I’d argue that for some types of music graphical scores etc are way more useful as notation than dots on lines. Depends what you’re trying to notate. NB I don’t attempt to notate my stuff: the recording is the finished article. Which plainly won’t work for a lot of other circumstances, obviously.
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😂
Not clear what it is you'd find to be a straight jacket.
I did think about that, but there’s no repeat, so expected a final measure that resolves it. Probably should have added that as a comment too.
“I never bothered with all of the courses in bones and organs and such. Didn’t want to restrict my creativity on the operating table.”
The cherished ignorance of “creators” of electronic music is staggering. There’s a reason why you stick with 8 bar loops.
Can we form a band?. 🤟
I can remember 2 moments that caused a big impression on me, I was doing “stuff” without knowing it
Do you believe that art should be considered in the same way as something as precise and delicate as surgery?
Despite my frustration at having stuck to the idea myself, for so long, I don't think it is completely without merit. Nor do I think it's an indication of ability to steer away from theory. Musicians who lack theory can make great music, also.
It all depends on the will of the artist. Rules can indeed inhibit expression, if not checked, and lack of rules may not make a blind bit of difference.
Also...who are you referring to as ignorant creators, stuck in 8-bar loops?
If that approach works for a musician then what’s wrong with it?
Ah yes, that would be ear training.
I started playing piano by ear before I took formal lessons. I say if it works for you, it works.
For me, the only audio performance I live record is my Ambient fodder in AUM.
I usually dive into Gadget, NS2, Ableton Note, Auxy Studio, etc to create melodic ideas, but I found myself being constrained to the 8-bar loop. So I'm diving back into notation to create melodic ideas. 
Indeed, rules can inhibit expression. I sometimes try to employ counterpoint in my melodies and harmonies (such as avoiding parallel octaves and parallel fifths), but it's a pain, and if I find trying to utilise counterpoint is constipating the flow of the idea I'll toss it out of the window.
If it was in the least bit important, it’d be an elegantly designed system that is apparent as soon as one looks at it, it’d make sense, and it’d be hard to make mistakes in
What western “music” “theory” currently is, is the opposite – an inelegant system where it starts at c instead of a for really no good reason other than stupidity, things on the keyboard are called keys, yet guitarists also play in a key, scales have Ancient Greek names but we’re not in Ancient Greece any more, why not ancient Mongolian? Modes are scales, scales are modes, except modes aren’t scales and scales aren’t modes, intervals are gaps in frequencies not time, crotchets quavers semibreves and minims sit on lines that really aren’t an optimal visual representation of what people actually hear, the massive gap between the bass clef and the treble clef suggests a huge oasis of silence where nobody ever plays notes, yet it’s a smooth continuum in reality, key signatures are possibly the most obtuse and gate-keeping way of designing a system to prevent comprehension outside the music guilds of old, names of chords are just utter stupidity – augmented, diminished, major, minor, seventh (ah, I see a pattern here – except any of them), using roman numerals all over the place for too many things, not really caring whether the roman numerals are upper or lower case just whatever you feel like, describing the steps of a scale using absolutely contradictory names such as subdominant (well which is it – sub, or dominant? It can’t be both) using suspended chords – how can they be used, they’re suspended, they should be at home watching telly, laying out the piano keyboard so that it can only ever play C major music unless you accidentally use a black note which is so far out of the way that it suggests they shouldn’t be used for safety, deciding arbitrarily across a whole culture that there’s ‘dissonant’ combinations of tones which are to be avoided because they violate some cultural ethos of what harmonics should or shouldn’t occur at the same time even though birds and parrots and frogs do it all the time
western music theory is the most beautiful system i ever studied. It's incredible IMO. The music which has come from western music theory fills my soul with wonder.
You got some good points here. For me, music is math. There’s intervals and relationships that imo are more clearly understood on a guitar fretboard than on a piano keyboard. The piano keyboard indeed looks a bit opinionated… it’s not evenly spaced out, and it’s somehow imposing, black keys vs white keys… Why is the C major scale the measure of everything?.
Having just tried out the “grid” layout of the Push or Launchpad I think it makes a lot more sense. You can see the maths, the patterns. It’s democratic, all little squares are just notes. Evenly spaced out and equally important. I have a predilection for D# and I feel like on the piano 🎹 it’s sort of an “extra”, only meant to be played sporadically.
I agree with @u0421793 in that we’re stuck with an inefficient and imo not very logical method of learning. The first step would be to get rid of the 🎹 dictatorship.
Also, rename the tones so that they don’t have sharps and flats, give them actual names like the ones that aren’t sharp or flat, it’s not as if there was a shortage of letters back then and they all stopped at G – just keep going (or use emoji)
Most people, including ourselves, live in a world of relative ignorance. We are even comfortable with that ignorance, because it is all we know. When we first start facing truth, the process may be frightening, and many people run back to their old lives. But if you continue to seek truth, you will eventually be able to handle it better. In fact, you want more! It's true that many people around you now may think you are weird or even a danger to society, but you don't care. Once you've tasted the truth, you won't ever want to go back to being ignorant
Socrates
Not having theoretical knowledge seemed to work for me. Now it doesn't. so things have to change
One day, I'll know what that means.
You missed the bit about the whole and half - steps, semi-tone and tones
Anyway...Who cares if it's all archaic nonsense. As long as enough people learn said archaic nonsense, they're able to communicate with each other and to expose themselves to a wider range of musical possibilities.
That's how I compose. i just start by throwing some shape down on the keyboard, manipulate it so it sounds nice, then go from there. However, I wonder (in your case) how much you're able to escape the influence your learning has had i.e can you unlearn...unsee?
Even if it isn't obvious at the time, you've forged neural pathways and built certain foundations around certain core principals and skills. So even if you aren't consciously tapping into some set rules or patterns, are you sure they aren't influencing you in any way? Not saying that you aren't the final arbiter of what sounds good; more that the options that appear for you will only be apparent because of your previous study and abilities.
you must be one of those boomer "creators" that only use's a sax and a tape machine eh?? so much more advanced in your musical studies than use mere 4 bar electronic loop creators.😁
I think that's exactly it: A solid toolbox to build upon. It doesn't tell you how to write a good song but it provides the fuel to move forward with an idea.