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.
Little Night time piano improv (as a test mostly)
Used MIDI Tape recorder + AUM to setup a little environment to do some quick night time piano improv when can't sleeping. Love the simplicity of MIDI Tape recorder. This is just a some sample chords to get the sounds married good. Plan to start making more serious recordings using this simple 4 track setup. Used the Soundfonts app for the soundfont sounds.
Track 1: Piano (Ravenscroft tweaked)
Track 2: Finger Bass (Soundfont)
Track 3: DX7+Pad (Soundfont)
Track 4: Light Percussion (Soundfont)
Comments
I love the choices you make… there are pleasant harmonic surprises that just carry me along like a walk through nature.
Very relaxing and some beautiful chords in there. Would like to hear more!
Thank you @McD and @AlterEgo_UK. I’m having fun playing with this simple 4 track live recording setup today. Limited to 4 MIDI tracks, can do punch-in but no editing. What you play is what it is.. Takes me back to the beginning of Tascam 4-track cassette recorder days. Makes me focus on the music more. Sometimes being simple is more I guess.
Thanks for listening. I’ll try to post something more substantial later.
It sounds like you have the chops for laying down compelling music without a lot of extra steps.
Thanks. I just tried to stack another instance of MIDI Tape recorder in AUM, routed more intstrumets to that, and both MIDI Tape Recorders seem to sync up together recording/playing. Would be easy to do this in a DAW, but think it’s neat to do it all in AUM.
Edit: I’m hitting DSP max sometimes in AUM stacking two MIDI Tape Recorders with the 8 instruments.
I'm going to stay with the 4 track for improv recording, but wanted to see how far I could push making a MIDI Tape Recorder (MTR) song in AUM on my iPad 9th Gen. Looks like it can handle 2 instances of MTR giving 8 MIDI tracks. Added some plugins for effects, made a total of 46 Nodes opened in AUM. Any more than that it starts clipping. Used some large soundfonts, so that probably hurt on memory. There's no Quantization in MTR, or overdubbing, makes playing percussion a bigger challenge. When running two MTR, have to make sure looping is off on both, just use AUM controls for starting and rewinding.
Here's a simple test of an 8 track MIDI Tape Recorder for the curious. Not meant to be polished, just threw some bossa nova chords down. Overly busy, but wanted to keep all tracks going for a test.
Extremely good! I love how this develops. Each chord change was a surprise but, at the same time… not. It just flows seamlessly. It just works. I am trying to imagine what your horn part will sound like! I can listen to this for hours.
I started with one of these back in 1983…
I hear similarities between your choices of chord voicings and mine. lol, that’s a good thing. You’re a jazz player.
Another beautiful creation… really inspiring chord choices. Like the surprizes in a Donald Fagen ballad like “Maxine”. I look for artists that can create this type of harmonic artistry consistently. Stevie Wonder has the most consistent ability to find new paths through traditional harmonic material that no one has assembled before. Neo-soul keyboardists are the genre that seem to keep mining harmonic adventures.
Keep sharing your efforts please.
@Paulieworld: I remember seeing that fostex. Those were very good. My first 4-track was a Tascam 244, traded up to a Tascam 688, then I got a couple Alesis ADAT’s - then got married and stopped altogether for many years. The iPad, and this forum with all the great tracks, rekindled my interest in recording.
@LinearLineman: Listening to your stuff has influenced me for sure. Not trying to butter you up, but you are the most unique improviser I've ever heard. When I listen to your stuff, I never know what direction you're going and I don't mind either - I just sit back for a great ride. Also, listening to it over seems just as fresh to my ears as the first time. Never boring.
@McD: Thank you! Funny you should mention Stevie Wonder, I've been practicing singing one of his songs today for a Valentines Day gig Wednesday ("l just called to say, I love you").
Oh my… not that Stevie Wonder song. (Sorry… just haven’t got over the disappointment of that song).
Yeah, you’d be surprised how often that one is requested at retirement communities.
Oh… that makes sense. It’s right up there with “Sweet Caroline” for requests. (“Bah bah bah” everytime).
And Bobby Brown by Frank Zappa 🤦🏻♂️😄
Wonderful work @Dav! 😊
Some lovely work here… more please !
Thanks, @rs2000 & @GeoTony. I appreciate the listen. This is where the real joy of music is, sharing it with people.
Here's another night time improv piece, more complete. Was playing and looking out the window, losing myself in the great nature view I have overlooking the woods and a path by a creek. Started with piano, improving to some ideas I've been playing with the last few days, added bass and 2 other tracks. Couldn't really play with mixing/balancing too much in AUM. I'm DSP maxing out with only 4 instruments with a few plugins for some reason. Crackled when I tweaked things. I think it must be the large soundfont I had loaded. I saved the piano MIDI file in case I want to redo this later in MultiTrackStudio.
MIDI Tape Recorder (4 tracks):
Track 1: Piano (Ravenscroft)
Track 2: Pad Tine EP (Korg Module Pro)
Track 3: Bass (iFretless Bass)
Track 4: Ice Rain (soundfont)
I was digging through my FAVORITES list and noticed there was a new comment on this thread and that the comment had an additional improv.
I love this bonus track and noticed it didn’t have any comments. It’s a gem of a 4 player (all @Dav) composition. Lovely harmonic ideas and a very good performance of the 4 parts.
Thanks to @McD for unearthing this gem. Sounded like a fully formed (and beautiful) composition to me… very nice 🙏
I love the way @Dav plays… such a command of harmonic ideas and the chops to execute.
Hey thanks @McD and @GeoTony ! Glad you like it. This one I redid with all Sunrizer patches, but I prefer the original piano version here. I transcribed this out - may make it more of an arrangement with it when I get staffpad. Have some ideas for it.
Haven’t been recording at all lately, been too busy with gigs. Not complaining, needed the extra work, finally not in red alert panic mode every time the bills come due, lol.
Thanks for listening!
If you would be willing to share any of these creations in MIDI format I would get a kick out of rendering one in Staffpad… while you wait to get a copy. It was on sale for $69 last time I looked.
Sure! Here's the Midi file of the piano part to Walking the Path. Had to ZIP it up, couldn't attach a .MID file here. If you have the 'Midi Sheet Music' app you can load it up and see the notes. I din't play to a metronome click, so it's just free play and the measures won't line up right but you can see the chords that away in the app.
$Staffpad is 69? Cool, may be time to get it. I have an apple pencil (1st gen) to use with it.
Have fun with the song. Thank you for your compliment of my playing!
EDIT: I can get the other parts to that song too if you want (bass, etc).
I’m out for breakfast but I’ve loaded the midi into Cubasis and selected PianoTeq 8 Steinway to hear the music. It inspired me to sing along… there’s a song in there or a counter-point vibe part.
I’ll probably experiment with splitting the midi into channels to make orchestral assignments easier.
My wife was in the car as I tested the midi rendering and she has a dozen ideas and doesn’t want me to mess this up. She will provide QA on the project… she has excellent taste but little technical musical knowledge. She did teach herself to play the slow movement of Moonlight Sonata by asking questions and notating the tricky stuff in pencil.
Wow. Importing the MIDI into StaffPad seems to quantize the rhythms beyond recognition. Not at all what I expected.
It looks like I should use an audio rendering of the piano MIDI in StaffPad and add supporting parts.
Staffpad has this adaptive audio feature where I have align the notated “click” track to an existing audio track so adding parts will sync to the original recording… even if it ebbs and flows a little (or even a lot). The resulting tempo track actually shows all the variations in BPM. It can be a bit buggy but I think that’s the best way to honor the composition and add something of value.
I was hoping to pull the bass line from the MIDI and do some MIDI zone splits to assign parts to a string section and that might be possible in AUM with MIDI FX apps and then record stems using orchestral apps in AUM for import into staffpad too. The tempo of all the audio would be aligned.
I rendered this in AUM by sending MIDI to 4 iSymphonics, 2 PianoTeq 8, Xinematix.
Oh wow! That sounds very good! Amazed how you could split up the parts like that and assign them sounds. I like how the piano sneaks in. Great choices. You even corrected my bad notes.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
EDIT: after listening to my song, SoundCloud went onto your ‘Pianoteq and noiseimprovisation.wav”. Now that is some beautiful noise! Nice one.
I used AUM:
1. I loaded your provided MIDI file into Musk MIDI Player.
2. I started instances of Piano Teq 8 (using Harp and and a Steinway Piano).
3. I started a Xinematix and 4 iSymphonic instances with various orchestra instruments loaded. I found the pizzicato strings to fit the short durations or your piano tremble parts.
4. Then I started adjust which MIDI ranges each AUv3 app would respond to. That way I got some bass for your left hand cutting off all notes above D4.
5. I cut off all notes below D4 (or even higher for some parts. This gave the provided 2 hard piano part some ad hoc orchestration.
6. Then I routed all track to Mix Bus A and recorded the results.
You might notice that one of the app has some really non-orchestral string noises that seem to have portmento… I should change that preset and re-record but I wanted to get some feedback to see if the effort was appreciated since I set expectations for a StaffPad product.
Now I could record each of the MIDI splits into Atom 2 but with staffpad the lack of agreement on the clock makes the conversion to bad notation pointless. Fighting clock issues is really NOT a lot of fun.
Cool. I was hoping someone would like the results. I think the process could be useful since a lot have AUM and AUv3 apps and could ask for MIDI sources without copyright constraints.
Thanks. My nephew also commented that SoundCloud served up that same track. People are reporting that their SioundClould “listen” metrics have taken off. I think SoundCloud figured out that creators might hang in longer of they think there’s a real audience. I’d take an AI audience that can craft positive comments.
I did NOT change a single note of MIDI data. I don’t hear anything questionable to be honest. I think you played a good take.
Here’s another mix… I brought a piano part to the front and added some Glockenspiel, some delay on the piano and glock. Then I mastered the Mix Bus output with “CS Mixbox” which has lovely
studio hardware models for dynamics, reverb and such.
Yes, that's a nice touch. I think this one is best. You really made the piece sound like something special.
Great. I hope you can realize also how seriously good the original piano track is as a piece of music.
The fact that you can improvise these in one take probably prevents you from hearing them like an outside would. You probably hear some of these ideas as something you have played a lot.
Still, my wife is a reasonable judge of quality without having much academic training and she likes your playing. Tomorrow I’ll play the two “orchestrations” and see what works for her.