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.
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For those that don't have TH-U or any rigs -- the rigs sound good -- but do be aware that when using rigs the parameters you control are not the same controls as the amp being simulated. So, if one is looking to have a similar experience as the targeted amp in order to get the same range of sounds -- it doesn't work that way. For example, a Fender Tweed Deluxe amp just has tone control and a volume control. But the Tweed Deluxe rig (like all rigs) has bass, mid, treble, presence -- and it has a gain and volume control. You can get great sounds out of it (better than with their sim) but the amp parameters are different.
Just worth knowing going in.
I wonder how I would create an Amp Rig like I made tonight. I was using the Preset I found in the "Funk and R&B" Bank called the Dual Combo Riff. This set up splits the signal into high and low channels. The high channel is run into a Fender Tweed Deluxe and the bass is put through a Mild Flanger into a SingleMan (clean) amp into a gate expander. This whole network of 5 devices is first put through a Fuzzface stomp box then the 2 paths are re-combined and sent into a Blues Lux 12" speaker mic'ed with an SM57 and an AustriaGold 414 and then onto a finishing reverb which I deleted for the trusty Digital Reverb.
I was playing it and thinking this is OK but not that inspiring so I added and additional Rig from the ChopTones Fender Stereo Reverb list that's almost as complex as everything listed thus far. And I had it. Something truly breath taking in it's tones and response. Dozens of DSP modeled devices in TH-U and the CPU is probably at a fraction of it's full capabilities.
I'd never get something like this in AUM to survive to this level of complexity but still shockingly clean and responsive. GE Labs can create complexity like this but not maintaining the clarity of signal. It just gets muddy.
I've documented all this to make a point. You can combine Amps and all the additional components and still throw in a Rig or more amps and the damn thing just works.
It's really quite magical. Like that synth inside NS2 running dozens of sampled instruments.
It's something like Korg Gadget that was designed as a whole to be efficient and incredible sounding.
I'm sure an astute sound designer could use these tools with synths too as input sources
in an AUv3 host. I didn't test this Hybrid Rig in AUM yet and see the DSP/CPU value but the sound is the thing. It just makes you want to play and make music... record it and impress yourself later with your work. It ultra Fender but I'm sure it's valid for any of the major amp
families. I just like this one so I documented it here.
Thanks @JoyceRoadStudios for your insight on the different rigs. Appreciated! I may check out Vintage Vol 1 this weekend.
@McD - That’s a very cool concept with splitting high/low frequencies to diff signal paths. That is very prevalent on Helix (and probably other modelers), though I’m not sophisticated enough to really set one up. (Also, HX Stomp only has 6 “blocks” and is really just for straightforward signal chains). I think some of the Choptones demo videos showed presets where they were setting up dual rigs the same way.
That’s a very good point about the rigs, that the knobs and controls aren’t the same as the real amps they’re modeled after. The rig player is basically an all-purpose amp face that you load the amps into, and the knob design doesn’t change as you load different amps. The amp sims in the regular collection, both licensed and unlicensed, are designed to look very much like the models they’re emulating.
With the rigs I actually tend not to adjust any of the settings, except maybe the bass/treble slightly to compensate for my pickups. I feel that each rig has given us dozens or hundreds of calibrated “rig” presets, and so many are almost identical with just half knob adjustments or a different cab, so I tend to find a few dozen clean, crunch, gain rigs that I love and leave their settings alone, then build fx around them.
Where in the chain did you add the SRev rig? I bet the IR cabinet from the rig helped too. So you ended up running 3 amps and 2 cabinets, I wonder if either the tweed or the singleman got to run through the rig cabinet.
Just looking at the “Dual Combo Riff” preset makes me realize how beautifully appealing and informative the TH-U user interface is. I love the free flowing layout of the chain with the cables and how it helps you visualize the routing. I know the other apps are similar but I don’t like the pulling pieces in and out of chains by dragging them, or adjusting tiny looking knobs, or having pedals in a menu under the amp. I love this birds-eye and straight on combination view of your chain and how it uses more vertical space to show it. Ge Labs or Bias doesn’t even come close to this visual, I find it very organic as if it’s meant to be this way...
Only the standalone rigs have lots of different captures. Then bundles that I got did not include hundreds of presets. The ones that are there require tweaking. Any amp is going to need tweaking for one’s pickups and touch.
I am curious as to the whether the parameters on the rigs (bass/mid/treble/presence/gain) behave the same for all rigs (regardless of the amp) or are tailored to the amp being simulated. One of the critical distinctions between some amps is how the eq/tone circuits are designed.
I doubt they go into that much detail. Same parameters for all amps is my guess
That’s more like the Volterra modeling stuff — Which I hear screams on Intel processors these days. Back when I tried it, it was impractical
“ We use VVKT! Vectorial Volterra Kernels Technology.”
https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=194978&start=30
Nothing like running off of an iPad – – which for me is half the fun
Yeah that’s worth investigating if the rig player knobs are all purpose or specifically tailored. I would assume that the rig player in itself is a big part of the tech and acts all purpose, which is why many report that major tweaks to the rig parameters don’t sound good or augment the original rig too much. Minor tweaks sound great I’ve found, such as slight adjustments of gain both up and down. If I find that any rigs of amps that I know in the real world have specific interactions with the knobs, or generally if the same knobs act differently between rigs, I’ll definitely report. I mean, what’s stopping them from making specific amp designs for each new rig and rig bundle, if not the all purpose rig player itself and its tech.
I’m still undecided as to whether I like the rig bundles or the standalone rigs. The deep dive bundles have every sound of that amp imaginable presented to you, but many of them are almost identical and it can get repetitive just switching between 10 rigs where the only difference is slight gain adjustments. Like, I could just do that myself inside the rig player. On the other hand the rig bundles have more variety of amps but a more limited palette, like a greatest hits presets for that amp, but they certainly should and do respond well to tweaks. I still have found a dozen or so presets in each of the Fender rigs I have that are so good they need no adjustment.
That’s similar to what I’m doing. I’m auditioning the rigs as is – – those are my EQ adjustments etc. I’m finding particular mic combinations that I like across settings. In this way, I am learning a lot, just like I did when I went through the American rig collection
When the Rigs are modeled with physical hardware they sometimes use real guitars.
I noticed one Rig had "Les Paul" (french for The Pauls) and "Strat" (french for Stratocaster).
People that obsess about the controls and the accuracy of the real hardware people emulated might prefer GE Labs.
But my Franken-Rig where I dropped a Rig into a 10 Component Network layout probably had well over 80 "physical knobs" but I could simply drop a rig closer to the end of the chains
and have some control over the effective Bass-Mid-High EQ's.
For me this app breaks the reality of the physical world and becomes the lab of the "Mad Scientist" that creates combinations that only exist in these alternate realities. The take away is that I can create a science experiment that melts my headphones and save the whole setup for recall later in any slot (For No Extra Expense).
I can make Guitar is that are so sensitive a Sound Engineer would run screaming in horror.
It's for people that like to violate the rules of the hardware world. You know who likes that
type of sonic madness and they are not even reading this... fools, fools, I say! WoOt this one
with your discrete AUv3's. Rat Pedal? No, I use the "Rat's Nest" to create my mayhem.
Actually... I like really pretty pristine tones and these complex networks deliver that with very low latencies... the noise does NOT compound in these crazy networks of boxes. I haven't made anything yet that made me scramble for a noise gate. It's just clean loud. No hum or buzz added like with the AUv3 stomp apps that require Brusfri.
It really should be Les Strat (pronounced) "Lay Straw" like "A roll in the hay." (See "Young Franketstein").
Les Paul would be Lay Po' as in Po' Boy. You know the french... find a hole.
I hope there are no sensitive French people about... is that an oxymoron?
I'll await the response from my private bunker in an undisclosed region
in the southern hemisphere. Think Ecuador.
For shits and giggles I opened the Dual Combo Riff preset and added the very first SRev rig at the very end of the chain. It did sound really good, extremely round and complex texture with good cab reverb, but it also maintained clarity. Don’t know exactly what was overriding what or how exactly it all came together, but what I heard was very good. I would have expected such a chain to sound cascading and quite overloaded.
Tonight I did my usual tour of the iOS Guitar County Fair, with AUM and iOS14. I had no patience for the Nembrini amps tonight. Somehow they’re the closest we have available for real tube amp response and dynamics, but they’re also unruly and take a while to dial in. The presets don’t help. I was still able to get great sound quickly from the Cali Reverb. I love Nembrini, just not tonight when I’m lazy.
I tried to build some chains using GS Vintage Clean as the clean template. Lots of distortions didn’t really react well with it, Blamsoft DC-9, Nembrini screamer, fuzz, boss, all meh. However Crunck was a great pairing, as was their reverb and delay 3000. Infected mushroom Wider Touch, Eventide Undulator and Blackhole, FAC Chorus, Blue Mangoo stereo lag, cloud reverb, chorus D, the BramBos stuff, Ratshack, Thafknar, TfxEcho, all were used with good results. However, it wasn’t until I opened the TH-U fx collection and started pairing those up that I said “now this is the shit”. GS Vintage clean paired with Brunetti Vanilla and the D-Reverb pedal was magic. It’s possible that the Overloud fx and distortions are the secret weapons. They make the rigs sound great too. I went through all the rig preset banks again which are rigs paired with fx, and it was very much my happy place.
It is truly shocking how many TH-U "boxes" you can enable with out adding any noise.
Now the Blue Mangoo guy asserts that an Amp Sim can be created from a good EQ and a tone shaper.
So I guess all the TH-U basses keep adjusting the EQ and applying more Tone Shaping but don't add anything extraneous so there's no penalty to really going wild with many. many totally illogical designs... a cabinet into a stomp into an Amp or 3 into a chain of FX into a final Modeled Rig. Move them around in order and hear the small changes in the results. It's
like everything is just some arbitrary math applied to buffers. That might be it. Good application of math. Math does not add noise. God does not play dice with the universe. He does occasionally play a little Yahtzee with 4 horseman but that's just to pass the time between "Acts of..." events.
Still... it's magical to me. I have stopped using the other choices. I don't need them any more.
It's like a lot of sequencer apps after Drambo. Why bother? There are some apps that break signficant barriers to getting to the good sounds faster.
When I started guitar out here in the antipodes in the 70s, a teenager, and started reading music mags from the real countries (the 2 whose acronyms both start with U), I was genuinely unsure whether Les Paul might be a French name, pronounced Lay Paul, as I'd never heard it pronounced.
I blame that last name first name thing. Paul doesn't sound like a last name. I suffer from the same condition.
I really had to stretch it for the Strat but it was very close to being easy with the addition of a vowel:
Vintage collection volume 1 by Choptones is legit! Really enjoyed playing through that last night (used a MIM Telecaster). HUGE variety of gain and style types. The “CTone” refers to Ceriatone, which makes Dumble clones. So you actually have closer to 20 “D-style” amps in their and they range from bassy/dark/jazzy to brighter, rock-friendly driven tones. But all of them have an amazing fullness and depth to them.
Yeah it’s a really good rig bundle! The Vintage Collection is not by Choptones though, it’s made by TH-U themselves. In the store you will find Rigs created by 4 different companies, LRS (Live Ready Sound), BHS (Big Hairy Sounds), Choptones, and native TH-U. So all the rigs have the th-u label in the ad design but they’re all created by different companies, as further described on the product page. For the native TH-U I’ve found that the Vintage Vol. 1 is their best rig. Their Bass Rigs is also great. Silver Jub is good. I don’t actually like the capture quality in the American Classics Rig, their Fender Twin Reverb does sound great, but it doesn’t remind me of an actual twin reverb. The actual individual rigs for the M&F and MK50 disappointed me but their bank presets sound good. The rigs I have from LRS and BHS are all good quality and generous in amount of rigs and presets. The Choptones rigs are the best quality, but there are still a few duds in there, I think it’s the amps not being my taste rather than capture quality. Anyway it’s a lot to sift through, and I don’t want players to have a bad impression of the rigs just from one rig of one company. So many variations and so much great stuff in there... Based on the company, the rigs can also come with just 10 bank presets or 100 bank presets, regardless of how many rigs there are. So some of the rigs really make up for it by a large selection of presets, with others like Choptones you’re more on your own but the rigs themselves are just great.
Some of the rigs come off as muffled, distant, and thin, but the many great ones are equal parts present, tight, and fully round.
The Super Lead 72 50 watt rigs in Vintage 1 are pretty amazing, take me back to the Plexi I stupidly sold in 1986.
Yes they are! I also like the Dumbles, and I’m really into those Music Man rigs because I owned that amp 17 years ago! It’s kind of like a good Fender amp but with its own pierce.
As for the Plexi, I actually really love the Plexi Voice 1&2 and the LynchBox Plexi from the Overloud sims collection. Also, @flo26 has the LRS UnChained Rig, it’s the Metropoulos DVL1 amp which clones the Plexis from 1965, 1966, and 1968, and he says it’s a really great rig. It sounds like Overloud has really hit it out of the park with all of these Plexi options. I’ve barely gotten through the rigs I already own, but next on my purchase list will be Tone Impera, Unchained, and Mesa Boogie Fillmore 50.
Do you like the deluxe in the vintage collection better than the one in the American classics?
@espiegel123 Actually no, in the American classics the tweed deluxe reissue is the highlight, as is the twin reverb with the gain around 2-3. The thing is those are the only two rigs I liked in the collection besides one Mesa and one Soldano which are both high gain. In the Vintage collection the blackface deluxe is the weak link but the brown face deluxe is really good. With that rig though it’s all the Dumbles which are great, especially the low to mid gain ones, great Music Man rigs, Marshall, and Ceriatone. I played through both again tonight and the American did play well, I just prefer the Vintage.
Then I went back to the Choptones Fender rigs and it’s not even close. In order of preference Bassman, Edge, Super Reverb, they just blow the others away. The low mid response is tighter with more clarity and roundness, and they all just have more color, texture, bite, fullness. Then I played the LynchBox tweed with matching cab, and it sounded just about as good as the rigs, maybe slightly drier but with amazing articulation and dynamic picking response. Then to the Nembrini Sound Master and it was really impressive. I like that with some amps you get the cranked bite and with others you get the thud of the cabinet air on attack. In terms of tube response to picking dynamics, none of them are perfect. It’s hard to get the gradual break, instead you get volume jumps or no change. But the closest is when you’re in low gain mode to start rather than clean. Then you can actually get saturation results between soft and hard attacks.
Another fruitful session with Overloud and AUM today. Reminded myself how good the Fender rigs are. Anybody using guitar apps with iOS14 and thinking things sound slightly different?
Also loaded Ge Labs in AUM several times and there’s still a loud crackle noise, unusable. Standalone I realized what I find weird about that app. The FX actually sound kind of fake to me, all kinds of background noises and digital trails and releases at the end, just a bit unnatural overall. I loaded just some pre and power amps with cabs and played dry, it sounded so much better. I want to use all the TH-U fx with those. Also I learned that the Gospel Musicians iFX rack and the fx racks in their keyboard apps are Overloud collabs, no wonder those racks are so damn good. Convinced about hopping on the TH-U train more than ever, with ocassional stops for Nembrini. I guess it’s an Italian train with good espresso and bagna càuda.
Exactly. And at one point, I thought gospel musicians would be releasing THU. I’m not fond of their wonky interfaces so I’m glad over loud did it themselves
More discoveries...
TH-U Brunetti Vanilla pedal with cream/tip/fat cranked, put in front of Nembrini Cali Reverb with “Crystal Clean” preset... HOLY SHIT... smokin’ hot rhythm and lead of my dreams, like making babies in a mosh pit. (Putting Vanilla after the Cali sounds horrible, obviously).
Many clean rigs are preset with 0.0 gain and could come off as anemic or even acoustic sounding. Just raising the gain between 1-3 improves them in most cases. The clean Dumbles and Fenders respond well to this. Or putting the Vanilla in front of clean rigs yields great results, it seems like the Vanilla at lower settings allows for actual picking dynamic response from clean to break. The rigs that are preset with minimal crunch are already amazing. However, taking a clean rig and raising the gain too much sounds bad, pretty thuddy and not what they intended I’m sure.
Vanilla set mildly and D-Reverb pedal cranked, put in front of clean rigs, gets an eternal soundscape as good as Blackhole. Plus the Vanilla allows for clean to crunch within the same phrase.
So much magic, so little time...
Yes i have the same problem, i have a crackling tail in the sound, after i updated to ipad os 14. Its not only the guitar appps, everything including youtube and spotify has this crackling sound. But it only happens for the output through the sound interface. If i play the ipad speaker or if i connect the headphones directly to ipad without the sound interface, the crackling does not happen. What interface are you using, im using focusrite scarlet.
Did you fix the problem? How?
I’ve experienced loud crackle loading GE Labs in AUM long before iOS14. It works perfectly standalone. I use an Apogee that’s plug-and-play. Actually this morning I was having some general crackle inside AUM without even doing anything, I simply rebooted the iPad and it went away. So if you’re having a persistent problem it could be so many things. Maybe the Focusrite needs a firmware update, or maybe it’s fighting with the iPad over sample rate depending on what you’re doing. iPad defaults to 48kHz but your interface goes up to 192kHz, and what’s controlling it can depend on which app you’re using. Some apps will always default to 48 when you re-open them while others will save your preferences, then you have your interface and iPad switching it over and over. I don’t really know but it’s possible these are just new kinks of the update. iOS14 also has a new feature that regulates headphone decibel levels, I think specifically for AirPods. Anyway, if it’s not your interface needing a driver update, eventually this issue will be ironed out with updates, and go over all your iPad music and audio settings, there could always be something causing it.
I was wondering about that pedal! The dirt pedal selection in Overloud is actually a bit limited from what we’ve seen in other modeling platforms. It isn’t really an issue because the amps vary a ton, sound great, and with rigs and channel switching, there’s a ton of range there.
But I did kind of wonder if there was something akin to a Fulltone OCD in Overloud. Sounds like this could be one option.