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.
Public Piano Median Meandering
There’s a Second Hand Store on my walk that has a console piano outdoors with a sign that reads “We like it when people play this piano”. No one around… traffic driving by… so I put my iPhone inside and mused over some median chord relationships.
Median chords are distant by a 3rd interval (major or minor, players choice) and the next chord can be major or minor… again player’s choice. A lot of fantasy film music is little more than a string of median relationships… you can start in one key and end up anywhere.
https://on.soundcloud.com/G6rbpshpa4xVjaMA7
I put the voice recorder file into Neon and added some Crystaline reverb to take some of the cheese out of the spinet piano sound. I can tell they keep the piano tuned since it’s been outdoors for almost a year in some pretty humid weather.
Comments
With the reverb this has (to me) a horror movie feeling to it. I appreciate the explanation on median relationships. I know embarrassingly little music theory so that simple explanation made the listening experience even more enjoyable. Thanks for sharing this!
Medians would be a cool chord generator app. In the most basic terms major is brighter while minors are darker.
It should be simple to make an app that outputs a never ending stream of median relationship chords with random major/minor interval and chord type choices.
If anyone starts building such a thing please let me know… we could send the midi output to orchestral rigs and make cheap film music.
I suspect whole note chords could drive one of the arpeggiator apps or Progressions.
Now this is really inspirational. I love the concept and the fact you just did it. I feel like we always have opportunities to do musically avant garde and spontaneous tinkerings like this but every once in a while it actually makes sense afterwards to the people in which it is presented. The Story the colors of the notes and the out of tune piano are very visual and the car horn beeping at the end. Just cant write this type of thing sitting around in a studio.
It reminds me of the scene in the movie (MY Bodygaurd) when hes walking on the pile of motorcycle parts in the junk yard and hes about to give up all hope for finding the last piece to his rebuild dream.
Cheers!
It's a nice piece.
Very cinematic.
I could picture you in my minds eye playing this piece.
Very cool.
Thank you for sharing.
@zedzdeadbaby thanks for the comment. Maybe I’ll make some more piano recordings on my morning walks. The distance to the piano is about 2.5 miles. Then I can hit the coffee shop and manipulate the recording in some manner and upload to SoundCloud.
That’s my #1 feedback which works for my movie lovers ego.
The Second Hand Store is on a really busy street so you feel like someone is listening. Not sure if that’s a good thing really.
That's a good thing.
You have an audience.
It’s just cars whizzing by which is what inspired me to stick my phone into the console. Next time I’ll try putting near the treble keys maybe. It would be nice to hear the recording while making it. Maybe an iRig device… hmmm.
Some of the drivers in the cars passing by would've seen a person
playing piano and would've thought that's actually really cool.
Nice piece ! I have been using chromatic mediant a lot too lately! These are perfect for modulation ! I also have been using chord transposition using negative harmony which I am sure you're already aware of. Augmented chords are also very interesting chords for modulation.
Watching a Jacob Collier video gave me some insight to negative (mirrored) harmony.
I was skeptical but Jacob did another interview/master class and my doubts started to fade.
The 5th is the mirror of a 4th. Stacked 5ths make a major 7 #4 13th jazz chord.
Mirrored you get a MInor 7th 11 #5. Serious jazz chords you can also build from stacked 3rds.
Thanks for the feedback. I’m thinking I might sample this console spinet for audiolayer use. Just add octave of c then eb then f# and finally a. It it sounds good repeat at 1/2 volume. Koala chops based on transients so it should be easy.
I was skeptical as well. But after looking into it, I found out that on some of my tracks, I sometimes come up with chords which are non diatonic but still seem to have a strong connection with the other chords which are diatonic. And in many cases, those strange chords were connected by negative harmony. Basically, let's say your in A major scale, using negative harmony, each A major diatonic chords will be transposed into the diatonic chords of A natural mino. The funny thing is the order of transposition changes if your chord are simple or if you had 7th, 9th etc... Anyway, that's nerdy!
Upright pianos are the best ! Definitely sample it and if possible, share it with us !