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Jon Hopkins kickdrum drifting, what app or midi tool?

edited January 2022 in App Tips and Tricks

hello forum,

I like to play guitar but my first love was techno music. I like Jon Hopkins a lot. In his music, as I hear it, some elements drift in and out of time. With the kick drum this is the most pronounced. Like the kick drum is sucking, or push and pull, in and out of time (or the straight 4/4 tempo). The effect is pretty delicate, not like a stutter effect, or a kick that sounds backwards.

Now I am wondering, is it possible to reproduce such an effect dynamically, for an amateur like me, in AUM.

My first idea would be some tool in Mozaic, so I can send the midi notes from a sequencer like LK to Mozaic, some kind of device with a knob you can turn to add positive or negative midi delay to the notes before they are send to the kick drum sample or synth. Or some audio effect with a buffer?

What do you suggest for this kind of effect?

Comments

  • This would be easy in Drambo or mirack. I’m happy to go in to more detail if you have one of those or are willing to get one of those. Both are great for experimental techno/ guitar and both could be hosted in AUM.

  • He does a lot of his drum by hand or purposefully unquantized. So really any app would work as long as you can turn off auto-quantize while recording or editing. Lots of good interviews with him where he talks about his technique for this sort of thing.

  • @Tarekith said:
    He does a lot of his drum by hand or purposefully unquantized. So really any app would work as long as you can turn off auto-quantize while recording or editing. Lots of good interviews with him where he talks about his technique for this sort of thing.

    I have no clue what this sounds like, but from the description this makes sense - finger drumming would be my guess.

  • edited January 2022

    ha, I should have known, Drambo is the answer on everything, like the number 42....

    I was avoiding Drambo until now, from what I have read here it´s a pretty technical and complex piece of software. But this could be the last push to jump in. I like to make a techno jam from time to time, let some sequencers run and go wild with efx, and real time pattern modification. I think I have the basics covered when it comes to drum machines, synths and efx in IOS.

    Is Drambo more all-round then Mirack?

    And when we are talking about techno and guitar, Darkside - Psychic is also a favorite of mine.

    I thought, when I load a kick drum sample in a sampler, and I can move the start point of the kick drum in real time, forward or backwards, it would work too.

  • edited January 2022

    okay, I see more answers, that crossed my reply. thanks!

    if I would build a lineair track, unquantized drums make a lot of sense. But it would be cool if I can turn a knob to make the kickdrum sloppy, and go back, and go sloppy, and back, in real time, with a sequenced loop. Or automate this knob movement.

  • Can you post an example of what you mean? I love Jon Hopkins but can’t remember hearing a ‘drifting’ kick, except for maybe in Luminous Beings, where he stretches a bass note out so far, it becomes the kick.

    If you’ve not heard it before, his song exploder is well worth a listen:

    https://songexploder.net/jon-hopkins

  • edited January 2022

    thanks for that link, I will take a listen.

    I think you can hear it in this song, Collider. Maybe it is not the kick alone but other elements too. I hear a push pull in the music.

  • My first thought was also modulating the start time of a sample. Super easy to plug an lfo of something in and have it push or pull, either in sync or not. It’s definitely a deep app (drambo) but in this case you only need the sample player and an lfo so it’s easy to keep it simple

    Drambo is the better all around app. It’s more straightforward, designed for iOS and the dev has better business practices than Mirack dev.

    Mirack is a eurorack emulator. I love it because I like the happy accidents and I get to eurorack without breaking the bank.

    At the end of the day they do really similar things with a different workflow. Having both is like 100,000$ in hardware.

  • @gregsmith said:
    Can you post an example of what you mean? I love Jon Hopkins but can’t remember hearing a ‘drifting’ kick, except for maybe in Luminous Beings, where he stretches a bass note out so far, it becomes the kick.

    If you’ve not heard it before, his song exploder is well worth a listen:

    https://songexploder.net/jon-hopkins

    As someone up-thread posted, he often plays things by hand rather than just running a loop. And when he does use sequencers and what-not, he sometimes plays with tempo and lets the tempo drift a bit. He is an accomplished pianist even if he never does anything show-offy. He certainly has retained an interest in dynamics and phrasing that comes with that territory. I think it is one of the things that makes his electronic music compelling. He uses the form of electronic dance music and imbues it with a human element that is often not obvious. Singularity is one of my all-time fave records.

  • edited January 2022

    @raabje said:
    thanks for that link, I will take a listen.

    I think you can hear it in this song, Collider. Maybe it is not the kick itself but other element. But I hear a push pull in the music.

    Oh yes I completely see what you mean! The way it meanders through the time signature is amazing.

    It sounds like it gets slightly ahead of itself, then returns to time. Like a lazy drawn out swing effect.

    @espiegel123 said:
    Singularity is one of my all-time fave records.

    Same here!

  • edited January 2022

    @gregsmith said:

    Oh yes I completely see what you mean! The way it meanders through the time signature is amazing.

    It sounds like it gets slightly ahead of itself, then returns to time. Like a lazy drawn out swing effect.

    @espiegel123 said:
    Singularity is one of my all-time fave records.

    Same here!

    At some point in the song you can hear the kick get behind, and ramps up again, somewhere at 75% of the track. Pure genius!

    I like this song also a lot, when you play this you turn up the volume automatically, there is a lot of energy inside this track, but it is thresholded at some point (the way I remember this song)

    edit:

    I have found this Mozaic script, from Wim,

    https://patchstorage.com/multi-channel-midi-delay/

    and this one, but is still in progress.

    https://patchstorage.com/jaymeter/

    Getting the kick ahead of the grid, then you have to give the whole midi track a negative offset before you start. And compensate with a negative delay to get the beat straight on the grid.

  • edited January 2022

    okay people, I have got an solution

    I used the midi delay script in Mozaic. I changed the max. delay time to 100ms in the script (stock = 50). I can turn the knob on channel 1 and my kick on that channel drifts back You need some reference sounds on the beat to hear the effect. When you ramp up again you hear the beat coming locked in again.

    Getting the kick in front of the grid needs more thinkering. And with this solution I am still no Jon Hopkins, in his music you hear some sucking effect too, or compression.

    I also think the music of Burial has this in and out of sync sounds a lot, but that is dub-step, so broken beat already.

  • @raabje said:

    Getting the kick in front of the grid need more thinkering.

    Delay everything but the kick.

  • edited January 2022

    ah yes, you are right, I can do that with the midi script too, I will try now.

    Edit, yes it works. I changed the delay time of the knobs to 199 ms. When I tap a button it jumps to 100 in the middle (midi cc 64). I use in this picture only channel 1+2 in my setup, all other channels need to be set to 100 too, I can program this in the script, at load, all knobs to position 64.

    I have an offset of -100 and +100 this way.

    Only thing is, I think, when all the channels have an offset of 100ms, time based effects that rely on midi clock from AUM directly are off. That should be corrected too. And this way you introduce a global latency of 100ms in your system, that is an unwanted side effect. You can't have it all... A positive delay only is free of this negative side effect.

  • edited January 2022

    double post

  • @raabje said:
    okay people, I have got an solution

    I used the midi delay script in Mozaic. I changed the max. delay time to 100ms in the script (stock = 50). I can turn the knob on channel 1 and my kick on that channel drifts back You need some reference sounds on the beat to hear the effect. When you ramp up again you hear the beat coming locked in again.

    Getting the kick in front of the grid needs more thinkering. And with this solution I am still no Jon Hopkins, in his music you hear some sucking effect too, or compression.

    I also think the music of Burial has this in and out of sync sounds a lot, but that is dub-step, so broken beat already.

    Dope, I was going to suggest Mozaic.

  • edited January 2022

    .

    Heck with it. Unnecessary opinion. (From me)

  • edited January 2022

    An improvement could be when knobs can be chained together, for example you turn 3 or 4 knobs with different midi channels in one time, to send the same offset value.

    There are some empty knobs on the Mozaic interface, those can probably be programmed for such a purpose.

    And I have to admit, it's a pretty useless tool, I played with it for a bit longer now. It is mostly a lab test. I can now can reproduce (the spirit of) this effect, but gets annoying when over used. A stutter effect is more pleasing. And if you want random offsets, you have to turn the knob very fast, otherwise the effect is gradial, you go slowly up and down again.

  • @raabje said:
    An improvement could be when knobs can be chained together, for example you turn 3 or 4 knobs with different midi channels in one time, to send the same offset value.

    There are some empty knobs on the Mozaic interface, those can probably be programmed for such a purpose.

    And I have to admit, it's a pretty useless tool, I played with it for a bit longer now. It is mostly a lab test. I can now can reproduce (the spirit of) this effect, but gets annoying when over used. A stutter effect is more pleasing. And if you want random offsets, you have to turn the knob very fast, otherwise the effect is gradial, you go slowly up and down again.

    To me that all sounds like much more hassle than just using reversed samples and a piano roll (i.e. the LK Matrix)..
    I'd move the notes by fine, unquantised amounts until it sounds right.

  • edited January 2022

    Just use AR-909. The kick is automatically late with that thing 😈

  • lulz...
    i never get tired of AR-909 jokes.

  • Bram bos Rozeta rhythm app?
    Sounds like funky quantising and fx
    Looped odd synced beats?
    Nice drift!

  • @id_23 said:
    Bram bos Rozeta rhythm app?
    Sounds like funky quantising and fx
    Looped odd synced beats?
    Nice drift!

    I don’t think it will drift per se, but if you set it to midi trigger you can easily get some oddball polyrhythms.

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