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.
Duality - iPad / iTrack Dock / HW Studio
After a pretty barren start to the year creatively, it's great what you can achieve when you take some well earned time off work!
The iPad is now firmly embedded in my studio set-up. This one has Z3TA+ providing the sub-bass and Thor doing an excellent job with the main lead line. MIDI from Cubase into the iTrack dock, Thor and Z3TA+ patched into Cubasis with Audiobus. Drumstation and SuperBassStation racks alongside AN1x and RS-5 provide the hardware components and a couple of VSTs (Retrologue and Zebra CM)filling things out.
The whole lot was sequenced and mixed through a hardware mixer (Spirit Folio SX), with Aux sends patched through a TC-M350 providing global delay and reverb. Everything except the drums and vocals was then patched out from Cubase and through a DBX 166xs compressor which was side-chained off a 4/4 sample of the kick drum used in the track. The sub bass from Z3TA+ was recorded first so I could get it on a separate channel from Thor and then the whole lot was multi-tracked into Cubase. The only post-recording work was masterbus limiting and dithering - although I'm planning to revisit the stems at some point and mess around with it a bit.
Comments
"...although I'm planning to revisit the stems at some point and mess around with it a bit....."
I have heard of this place at some point but have never come across its precise location. Do let me know if you find it
In this case, it doesn't sound as though it needs so very much. Very glossy. And perfectly credible as is.
I keep looking - I was told that was where to find that rare beast, the 'round tuit' - Once I've got a 'round tuit' I'll be cooking on gas!!
Cheers for listening - I feel like I'm slowly getting there with the production quality - finishing the damn things is hard work though - getting the balance right between 'just one more tweak' and 'sod it, that'll do'.
Three of my favorite thoughts on this matter:
-Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them. (Joseph Joubert)
-Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end. (Igor Stravinsky)
-Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it. (Truman Capote)
But Da Vinci said it best: Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Very true - setting limits and writing lists (I know, doesn't sound very creative) helps me keep moving towards some sort of end state. Coming up with a tasty 4 bar kick and bass loop with some twiddly synths across the top is the easy part - turning that into a coherent piece is the real challenge. Also, unless you push on to the next stage of the process (which for me is roughly sound design, writing, arranging, recording, mixing and mastering) you don't develop the next set of skills - which is why finding the 'some point' to revisit the stems is important. I need to practice the mixing and polishing skills.
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Ha Ha - see the comment about the 4 bar loop. Some factors in my more recreational youth have left me enjoying long repetitive patterns with just subtle shifts in meter and texture to create variation! When I was studying this stuff at uni many years ago we had a number of assignments where we had to create and record tracks. I still smile when I remember the pained look on my lecturers face whenever I turned in another 12 - 15 minute slice of trance beats for him suffer through and mark
This made me smile, I generally stick with a project until I'm fed up listening to it yet again. Another reason to crack on move through the process at the right pace. Slow enough to create quality, quick enough to get to the end before it gets boring. As ever, the skill is in getting the balance just right.