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.

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Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

White Giant / SynthMaster1 + GeoShred

A rock and roll throwback to the 60s. NeoSoulKeys, 4 instances of SM1, 3 instances of BeatHawk bass and percussion. Guitars from GeoShred and SM1

Comments

  • @LinearLineman I'd love to hear you do more work with the Rhodes tones. Hearing the synths layered with the Rhodes in your track reminded me of some of my favorite Rhodes players: Ramsey Lewis, Jan Hammer, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea...

    This track specifically came to mind (Robert Walter is on keys here):

    Anyway, this was in my wheelhouse so thanks for that.

  • McDMcD
    edited February 2019

    @Daveypoo That's a Down Home style of Jazz Blues associated with the rural southern blues traditions rather than the urban New York Jazz traditions. It's what most Blues Bands turn to when they play ballads using those IV-I plagal cadences. Bill Withers was a master of this type of homey blues that jazz players love to use for improvisations using the pentatonic and blues scales to give it a soul vibe.

    I got the same feeling from the @LinearLineman's track. He's trying to connect and probably can play this style for hours without breaking a sweat. His inner beast wants to
    breaks all the rules of harmonic conventions and break down walls. But it's hard to put that into something bite sized since it's outside anything we hear regularly.

    I wonder if he can improvise in the style of Bach's sparse polyphonic style like the Preludes and Fugues. Improvising a Fugue would be liking playing speed chess against 5 Chess Masters. A real mental feat IMHO and probably something the would need to be practiced. Keith Jarrett can do piano tricks like that.

  • Thanks so much @Daveypoo for listening and liking. I never thought myself a Rhodes style player but I am liking the pure electronic sounds that are unlike other "synthesized" voices. So, probably more to come.

    No, @McD, fugue, other than a fugue state is beyond me. @kuhl can do it in his head sitting in the john.

  • edited February 2019

    @McD I've always been much more interested in soul-jazz or fusion than anything straight-ahead. I understand the appeal of straight ahead (listened to it a ton, played it, studied it, etc.), but walking bass while swinging against a ride cymbal doesn't do it for me the same way a back beat does. I like to dance, and I like things that are easily accessible at first but reveal their many layers upon digging in and this is what I get from the soul-jazz crowd. That's a very long-winded way of saying that jazz in the 70's was appealing to me because everyone electrified themselves, even the horn players (love me some Eddie Harris...)

    So yeah, with the Rhodes on that track it brought me back, is all. Good one - I'd like to hear more of you on the electric piano, @LinearLineman

  • @Daveypoo said:
    @McD I've always been much more interested in soul-jazz or fusion than anything straight-ahead.

    I agree and we are in the majority in this preference.

    Jazz musicians chase the circle of 5ths and learn to play robotically over that chord sequence. They will drill the possibilities until the sound something like Charlie "Bird" Parker in full flight. Many will just forget chord changes and follow Ornette Colman into
    jazz that is held together by the glue of patterns moving with regard for a tonal center.

    The audience tuned it's back on such pure flights of ego and jazz became a monastic exercise in measuring up the to technical standards of mastering that circle and the infinite chasm of patterns.

    Jazz capable musicians that can get an audience include 2 of my favorites that turned their backs on "Jazz as Religion" and towards an audience that was moved by their work:

    Robben Ford - he can play with any Jazz ensemble and played with Miles Davis when he went electric. But when Joni Mitchell added jazz musicians to get someone that could hear what she was playing with alternate tunings and extend her ideas something changed in Robben. Large audiences are like a drug.

    Robben found refuge in the Blues and mastered that idiom while extending the music with his technical competence becoming the guitar players guitar player for a new generation of players.

    Robben admits he will never use a Major 7 chord because the audience will hear "jazz" and just tune out because that music has no real connection to the soul. Don't blame me for the thought. Just look at the numbers for who will pay for music.

    My other hero in this regard dropped out of Berkelee School of music with another classmate and moved to Atlanta to make music that connected to people. He shifted his considerable skills as a player to become a successful singer/songwriter and only after achieving success with that commercial model did he ever play for an audience as a guitar player with a blues-based trio and now performs with the Grateful Dead as a guitarist and still makes singer/songwriter records. He has found audiences in 3 distinct worlds of commercial music. But I'm sure he could walk in and play standards at any jazz jam session and fit right in because it's just a framework of conventional ideas for making melodies against chords.

    What makes country jazz complexing is that fact that it's based upon the more uplifting Plagal Cadence: the A-men sound of southern gospel. You can take the reverse path around the circle with a list of plagal cadences and it just opens the soul rather than the dark decent downward of the circle of 5ths.

    C-G-D-A-E-B-F#-C#-Ab-Eb-Bb-F-C-G-D....

    It's also a lot easier to just connect to the music and forget about being competitive.
    The winner is the person that reaches the deepest into their soul and not the fastest generator of patterns.

    I'm pretty sure you know who the 2nd hero is... Many will hate him because women apparently keep falling in love with him. What an asshole.

  • edited February 2019

    I've spent too many years around musicians who were unfulfilled by any music unless it was the ONE style that floated their boat. On the one hand, who am I to say what gets a player excited? If, for example, a drummer I know was good at everything but only got psyched when he played reggae - can I criticize him for following his muse? Well, no...

    On the other hand - wow you're missing out on some amazing music by being so single-minded. This is how I feel about most hardcore jazzers I've been friends with. The thing that really gets me is that unspoken air of "well, you're not a REAL musician if you can'/t/don't play straight-ahead". I just resist the idea that jazz is the ultimate and any other musical style requires less of a musical investment from the maker/performer. If you can't blast through Giant Steps at 260 bpm without breaking a sweat, you're not a "real" musician. Ugh - I've had enough of that line of thinking...

    I went to an open jazz jam one night in San Francisco, and when I got a chance to play I suggested Ease Back by The Meters. The guitarist Grant Green famously covered it and I figured it'd break up the evening a bit and give everyone a different feel to play over. After the tune ended and everyone was trying to pick the next tune, there were comments of "Can we play something that's not a funk tune?" The next tune called was Nostalgia in Times Square - a totally fine standard executed with absolutely no personality at all. Ugh - get over yourselves already....

    Rant over - had a tough morning and my frustrations are being targeted at jazz nerds.

  • It's not much different from the serious pianists that get stuck in the classical repertoire and maybe will deign to play some Scott Joplin for an encore as a throw way. On the way out you'll hear many say, I wish he had played more like that last number.

    How difficult something is becomes the standard of excellence and connecting with
    an audience is secondary. Finding an audience unfortunately becomes difficult for those down a peg from the elite few that get the serious tours. So, they teach and get very bitter about how real musicianship no longer exists.

    I'm sure a sociologist could unravel the classism, racism and anti-human forces at work that create these conflicts over what should bring joy. I do believe we all have an audience... it's just a rather small gathering for most of us.

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