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.
This is impressive…
Comments
Beautiful!
I wish more people were into sound design.
…or, if we could time travel back to the ages when Mozart and Bach was in their best musical shape, and, then give them some awesome synth from the past, like DX7 M1 or an D-50 - holy shit what kind of music they would have produced!
I've only experienced the DX7 through emulators. A lot of musicians back in the 80s just went for the presets given the difficulty of programming the thing, so perhaps we'd all have Für Elise on E Piano 1 from Beethoven?
Amazeballs
Looking at Modest Mussorgsky, I can recommend to give Tomita's interpretation of "Pictures of an Exhibition" a good listen.
I've rarely encountered a synthesist who spent so much time in creating sounds.
What does sound design mean to you???
Changing the filter cutoff =-D
Hahahahah
You re more advanced than me
Randomize
To make sounds that catch my attention
@yellow_eyez : what does sound design mean to me? For me, the totality of the sound, scene and mood which is created by the sound. Tomita was one of my gateway drugs into electronic sound back in the day, along with the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet, and the heat ray sound from George Pal’s War Of The Worlds. Much as I loved Wendy Carlos’ somewhat literal transpositions of orchestral elements into electronic ones in Switched On Bach, it was Tomita’s exquisite and intensely evocative sound design in Pictures At An Exhibition which first drew me in, along with a boxed LP set by Nonesuch Records to Electronic Music borrowed from my local library. I think I was about 10 at the time, though the Nonesuch set came out when I was six:
From that it was just a short step to Silver Apples:
And then Suicide:
And Chrome:
The outer edges of John Peel, of course. The Radiophonic Workshop. And so on…
Case in point. My first ever ‘band’ at the age of 15 was called Cello and Silly Noises, because I had a friend with a cello. And I could make silly noises… like recording him bowing overtones miked up through a speaker in a zinc bin while I dangled another cheap mike hooked up to a cassette recorder above it, and then rattling and banging the bin, and messing with the resultant din in a twin deck hifi deck my dad had.
…So before I encountered electronic music as music I first encountered it as sound, soundscapes, mood and noise, not tunes, and that joy of constructing a sound, rather than a song, (which, frankly, I can’t do) together with the allied trades of field recording, musique concrete, and tape manipulation has been what has stayed with me my whole life.
A man after my own heart lol
Tall order for such an experienced user
Svetlovska - awesome answer and great reply with examples….you were the one who taught me about Wendy Carlos, and while she’s not my favorite you underlined to me how important women are for the development of sound design and synthesis
Sisters with transistors should’ve had Wendy
Another questions - where does sound design end and sonic production(music) begin for you? Are they often chronological or do you go back and forth to tweak kind of like a mix?
You get the vibe that quite a few of the other sisters with transistors were disappointed at Wendy’s relative musical conservatism compared to the experimental tangents they were operating at (isn’t that a fab documentary?) and I can kind of see their point.
I’d say my stuff is all sound design, really. I just start making some kind of a noise, usually by setting something running - a midi generator hooked up to a synth preset or a piano, a noise looped and time shifted in an AUM audio player - and then I just leave it running and start seeing what it needs - certain effects, or maybe duping and running at half or double speed, or some sort of scritch-scratch percussion randomly happening, or a bass line. And then it’s just an iterative process, until I have about 8 or 10 channels of something running, then I’ll mix them through a final channel to audio share, set that to record, then mix and mute channels on the fly until it is done.
The one thing I have in common, sort of, with @LinearLineman , is that my stuff, too, is a kind of improv. It only exists for the time I am making it, and I would never be able to repeat it or play it again. Each recording is the only time that piece will ever - can ever - be performed.
I’m trying usually to create a mood of - well, depressed awe, I suppose. Something often muted and dusty, the sense of walking through vast halls of a once mighty now defunct civilization. A soundtrack to that… on one of my good days
if I could consistently conjure the mood I think I got to in my recent track Black Site I’d be satisfied, I think. But these come like lightning in a bottle, not so easy to capture twice and yet retain novelty and experimentation, two other touchstones I try to aim for each time. Ah well, nobody said it was easy.
It’s quick and dirty, and imprecise, and I could achieve more structure by feeding the audio to a DAW for proper arranging, but a) I like the speed and spontaneity of this and b) I’m lazy with a short attention span. If I can’t go from nothing to finished track in about 1 to 2 hours of noodling, I’ll bin what I’ve been doing and move on.
Life is too short for DAW arranging!
Don't want to distract too much from the modern synth discourse but want to throw this into the mix too. Classical composers were on the lookout to stretch their art and use 'new sounds' too.
My favourite story is this:
Tchaikovsky first heard the celesta while walking in Paris prior to traveling to America to play a concert. He needed to leave for America but sent a letter to Pyotr Jurgenson, a close friend and music publisher in Russia, asking him to order a celesta for around 1,200 francs. In his letter he wrote, "I don't want you to show the celesta to anyone-especially not Rimsky-Korsakov or Glazunov. I am to be the first to use this instrument!"
The end result, the Nutcracker ballet, featuring the Celesta used for Dance of the Sugar Plum fairy, wasn't too shabby.
I always feel like I should be quiet when someone mentions Wendy Carlos, as I don’t get the adoration. She’s obviously a very talented musician and pioneered the use of synthesizers in music, but musically I just think her output is ‘OK’.
When I think of women who really brought something to music I think of Delia Derbyshire first of all, yet she never really got (or looked for) the credit she deserved.
Which reminds me, I need to work on our collaboration.
A great read as ever, Svetlovska. Please remind me why it is you prefer recording into Audioshare than inside AUM directly. You did tell me before but I can't for the life of me remember.
Hi, @Gavinski : simply, to record a natural decay to effect trails when I stop the AUM transport, is all. A single feed from a final summed AUM mix bus (with Bark Filter’s Triple Band as my sole automatic mastering device, maybe a touch of Alteza as sonic glue, and Speakers for some colour) into AudioShare turns out to be the quickest way to do this that I know of.
Oh yes, that was it - you know what tho, there is now a way to do that in aum itself:
"Recording continues even if you stop the transport clock by tapping pause. This allows recording effect tails after playing has stopped.
Tap the record button again while transport is stopped to finish the recording."
Ooooh! I did not know that! Well done, Gav, you’ve just streamlined my workflow even more.
I thought many people would not yet be aware of that one. It came in on an update some time earlier this year, handy indeed!
The DX7 is famously difficult - or at least non-intuitive - to program for lush, analog-adjacent sounds. It really is nice to see someone put the time into it. Years ago I saw Mannheim Steamroller live, and was very surprised to see that they had converted almost all their touring gear to DX/TX, and were still getting their signature sound out of it. I spoke to their leader, and he said that they’d gone to the effort because the new digital synths were so stable and road-worthy, which of course was one of the important selling points of the instrument.
Debussy is pretty much the canonical tonalist, and Tomita’s choice to realize that music was spot-on. I’ve always felt, though, that the classical composer I wish I could have handed synths to is Wagner. His orchestrations are so complex and novel. Even the simplest things… the opening of Das Rheingold, where he slowly runs up and down the scales on brass, sound like sweeping a good resonant filter and hitting the harmonics.
I love the short history of Svetlovska’s exposure to sound design. It mirrors my own in some respects. The endpoint of Chrome is kind of a jump surprise at the end… Helios Creed is such a damned madman.
Ah, Wendy… I can absolutely understand why one might not be impressed with her actual music, given the other more beautiful or engaging or interesting things to which to compare her. But context is very important. Switched on Bach and it’s followups were the proof that synth music could be music, in and accessible, understood sense. Sure, Derbyshire and the Barrons and Subotnik, etc were seminal, but her realizations were so careful, so correct, that they changed the world of commercial sound. Her own compositions were aloof, sure. But she was rightfully renowned for her sheer mastery of method, and the application of cold technologies to the classical mode. And she did come up with some really arresting sounds. The entire soundtrack to Clockwork Orange, but most especially that Funeral March of Queen Mary, is just a masterpiece.
Finally, thank you for that note on recording tails in AUM. That has vexed me, and I’m so happy to know that the solution is there.