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.
Chorda by Artiphon
Artiphon started a new Kickstarter this week for their newest instrument, Chorda. Looks like a nice piece of kit, a cross between their original product Instrument One, a very responsive midi instrument and the Orba, a 4 track looper/controller. Seems quite reasonably priced for what it does, a device that loops 4 tracks with over 100 sounds built in and you can add your own. It’s also an MPE keyboard with Bluetooth, which was the main complaint I had with the Instrument 1. The company has a good track record with three products under their belt, and they keep pushing the envelope. If anything, it’s very portable, so it’ll be fun to take to the beach.
Comments
Looks pretty cool. Kickstarter
I want one.
Cool. My main question is - can it do what the Instrument 1 did. Like can I get 4 octaves on that playboard?
Only by transposing on the fly, from the look if it; each pad can only trigger one note or chord, so it's essentially the same as using the I1 in pad mode. A version with a full I1 control surface would be amazing, but this seems essentially an Orba 2 with four more pads in an I1-style chassis – not that that's anything to sniff at, though nobody's going to be playing Tiger Rag on it. US & Canada only for the KS, which makes sense after the grief they had with international shipping & associated clearances on their previous Kickstarters. But standing at 1279% funded as of this morning.
Can it run Crysis? 😜
Unfortunately Crysis doesn't support MPE.
I have trust in new developers 😉
This guy might have some tips…
https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls/comments/2fndr6/i_completed_dark_souls_using_only_a_guitar/
Is this an app?
Hardware. See the video at the top of the thread.
Why in the General App Discussion thread I wonder?
The OP has 24 threads:
1 in Logic Pro
1 in Other
22 in General App Discussion
This often happens when posters only read a few Categories so they post where they read.
Is there another 1 octave MPE device that sells for under $250? I’m coveting the Seaboard’s by Roli but I think I want
2-4 octaves. It’s not laid out for piano fingerings and that’s a bit of a factor for me.
I was gifted an Orba 1 and I was really surprised by it’s benefits as a MIDI controller… not for me but for handing to
A non-musical person and letting them experience hand made sound. It’s similar to giving a teenager an iPad with Gestrument Pro loaded up. They just get pulled into a world they didn’t know exists. I think the linear layout vs the thumbs on a hockey puck form factor will be a winner… it works in guitar, flat “keybed” or handheld note pad so existing skills might transport across for some.
Looks to me like it's not meant for that. But, given that each pad is fairly long and sends out the longitudinal touch (y-axis) position via pitch bend or midi cc, it should be possible to rig things up in Mozaic or something else so there are zones of each pad that have 0, 1, 2, and 3 octave (or fourths/fifths)transposition. There won't be any marks to delineate the zones (though there's dot in the middle that could divide upper two octaves from lower two), and you would of course lose most of the ability to modulate some other parameter with the y-axis, but I bet it will work. Maybe good enough for some uses, not for others. I expect setting up for fewer octaves on a pad, maybe just 2 or 3, would work better than 4, especially since some people complained about accuracy/mistaken hits on (6-string) Artiphon.
Now that’s a great reason to buy one of these. Once I was done writing scripts to make the Orba do things it wasn’t attended to do, I put it in a drawer and haven’t touched it since. But those 2 weeks of problem solving were a lot of fun.
I hard to look on patchstorage and the script I created converts the Orba “bass mode” to act as an Intervalic Keyboard called the “Samchillan” as implemented in the Eventide “Misha Synth”. I think I should break out the Orba and play around with it again. I also have a script that implements the keyboards right on Mozaic pads and there’s another implementation available from Alfred Rademakers (https://patchstorage.com/samchillian/).
https://patchstorage.com/orba_rig/
The Chorda did get me to take yet another look at the Instrument 1, and this time I finally ordered one.
Maybe in 8 years or so I’ll order a Chorda. 😄
That’s what it was making me think instrument one always intrigued me but I never went for it…
Do you want “6 string” guitar layout to cover from E1 to E4? Or are you open to another number of virtual strings?
With some other tuning than E-A-D-G-B-E or the bass E-A-D-G which impacts the range of notes.
The Emmet Chapman Stick tunes its strings by 5ths for example. 4 strings tuned in 5ths can cover from E1 to C#3 which is 3 half-steps short of the 4 octaves (3 full octaves + 1 more root actually).
Any number, I like my Geoshred layouts. I also own an Instrument 1…which I like a lot, it’s just evenly spaced frets and so it is more guitar like than actual guitar…and your muscle memory has to catch up. This seems to give a bit more freedom, almost like a hardware Mononoke or a sensel morph on each of those pads.
Great. It would be fun to hack a solution for this use case. I was intrigued to read that the Instrument 1 can play multiple notes as detected on a single virtual “string” at the same time. Does that complicate “Bar Chords” or is that an option a guitarist would generally just turn off.
It's a setting you can turn on and off. There's a guitar mode where you're fingering the chords with your fretting hand, and using the rubber bridge triggers as virtual strings; you can sort of play barre chords that way, though half-barres are much easier. But it works best in one of the tap modes, where you're controlling the sound entirely with your fretting fingers. You can also turn off the frets and play it like a violin, and there's a pad mode where it's basically a Chorda without the onboard sounds & looper.
I have an instrument one and I don’t use it nearly as much as I thought I would. If anyone is interested in it PM me to let me know (and sorry if that breaks any rule). I’m in the US and I’d sell it for the same I paid (much less than it usually goes for, I found a good deal on Craigslist in NYC). It’s definitely a cool controller, but it just didn’t really gel with me like I thought it would. I guess I’m too locked into a traditional bass setup and it doesn’t feel anything like that.
The Chapman stick comparison was a good one though, I had a stick at one point and the layout is a little similar.
This looks pretty cool.
Listening to this YouTube on it...
Looks great but as Orba, when used as MIDI Controller, it probably spills a river of Midi information because of all the tilt and position sensors.
Would love to hear anyone's real life experiences though.
Just got the Chorda. This is 1000% the case. GeoShred goes wild with it. I’d like to use it mostly as a midi controller, with AUM, etc. Any Chorda/Geoshred users have some tips? Totally lost at sea here. Thanks.
@zilld2017 thats what I thought 😂
Seems to be an "artiphon thing". Any progress in taming it?
You say this like it's a bad thing. More information is generally better. What's your problem with it? You can always route it through a midi filter/processor to filter out midi messages you're not interested in.
Yes! Mozaic and this patch: https://patchstorage.com/midi-monitor-and-filter-v1-0/
Just a fact. There are for sure users who can benefit from it. I guess it depends on your patience. In case of the Orba I didn't invest any time in mastering it since it had too few "keys" to become my only midi Controller.
What are your experiences with artiphon products?
Cool. Thanks for the info