Flying by Wire

My father-in-law is a pilot and some years ago told me about the transition on airplanes from traditional "mechanical" style of flying to the newer "fly by wire". Basically, the old electric, servo-motor, pneumatic type controls were replaced by embedded computers (I'm oversimplifying). What this meant was that instead of sending electric impulses that directly controlled motors, flaps, etc, binary messages were sent to embedded controllers that would in turn, control the motors, flaps etc.

This would allow for "manipulation" of the pilot's action where the embedded device had a "better idea" (he was not a fan!). So a violent movement on the controls might be changed to a less violent movement that would prevent the plane from stalling - or at least that is the general idea. So instead of relying on Sam the mechanic who has a nice greasy shirt, cool pin-up calendars and a beard, you are relying on Simon the programmer who plays fantasy games and always smells a little like cheese. Quite a transition!

The reason I bring that up is I do quite a bit of music making with traditional sounding tracks (saxophone, trumpet, bass, guitar) and yet I don't even have a microphone in my studio. Instead of passing analog waveforms electronically into my music, I tend to send binary messages that the computer then takes up and uses to create noise. Seems to be a very good analogy.

In the case of MIDI keyboards, this is pretty common. Whatever you are doing on the keyboard is being encoded into numeric messages that are passed via MIDI cables, or USB cables into a computer that then passes the events into software that is creating sounds, applying effects and ultimately making noise.

A good friend of mine, Marty, uses a much more complicated method of soundmaking. He starts with a manual exciter which creates oscillating vibrations, these go through an echo chamber made of shaped wood which modulates the waveforms projecting them out of a round hole into an irregularly shaped rectangular space filled with other shapes that affect the waveforms. Some of the randomly bouncing waveforms are "captured" by a membrane that vibrates in time with the excitations in the room, produces an electronic signal that is ultimately transformed from analog to digital format and stored in a file. Because I find this entire process mind-boggling, I tend to stick to the simple MIDI method myself.

In the case of trumpets or saxes, I like to use a wind controller which is "played" like a traditional instrument with keys to finger, a mouthpiece to blow into and, of course, a USB cable coming out the other end. The fingerings change internal note numbers, the breath controls a pressure monitor that also sends numeric impulses continually via MIDI. A few other sensors allow me to send modulations as well such as a thumb control to "bend" the note or create a "growl" sound (these are configurable). All in all, this is much simpler to me than analog!

Like the airplane, the receiving computer can "manipulate" the raw data I send it. It can use any program it has to create the sound. So, with the same inputs, it can produce saxophone sounds, trumpet sounds or entirely electronic or digital synth sounds. The possibilities are endless using just one input device. As time continues and software develops, even "analog" sounds can be modeled effectively to where even if not perfect, they are hard to distinguish from physical instruments.

I suppose I'm just rambling, but technology always fascinates me and usually delights me! Maybe I should grab a beer with Simon the cheesy computer guy.

Beatmaker 2 and Bus news

  

I mentioned in my last post that I was using both Music Studio and BeatMaker 2 as Audiobus targets. Here is the piece I put together in BeatMaker 2. Of the two targets, I reported that I prefer BeatMaker 2 overall for its functionality despite its non-intuitive interface. 

For the piece above, I started by building up a groove using Loopseque - a really unique beat making app that recently added Audiobus support. At the time I started this piece, the Audiobus support was not there yet and I created the beat first using Audiocopy/paste to put it into BeatMaker 2. For drum beats I often prefer to use Audiocopy/paste rather than Audiobus since it is easier to get an exact size for the drum loops this way.

This is where Beatmaker's semi-intuitive interface first twarted me. The size of the sample exceeded the 32 MB default that beatmaker allocates for in-memory samples. BeatMaker 2 can either use samples "in memory" or can stream them right off the storage. For the life of me, I could not find out how to convert the "in memory" sample of Loopseque to a streaming version so I needed to expand the memory buffer for BeatMaker 2. Is there an option in the app? No, actually. You have to go into the Settings app on the iPad, select BeatMaker 2 and there set its buffer size. I'm sure there is SOME WAY to change from memory to streaming, but I didn't find it in my cursory forum mining on Intua's site. The good new is that the samples you bring in via Audiobus will by default be set to streaming. 

After getting the basic groove track in, I started to use Audiobus for the remaining tracks. I brought in a nice ambient sound from Animoog and recorded that directly into the app. I then added a DX7 sounding lead from Propellerhead's Figure which I "played" directly from the app into BeatMaker 2 via Audiobus. 

Having this basic melody established, I filled in the gaps with a few native MIDI tracks using BeatMaker 2's string samples and one of their synth pads. I put an LFO on the strings with a square wave to give a stuttering electronic feel to the track.

Finally I decided to give the some some background ambience with Mixtikl which was recorded via audiobus into the final track.

Overall, once you get used to Beatmaker's bizarre interface, it works very well. I applied some light compression to the overall mix to bring everything together.

As I was completing this, Garageband surprised me by suddenly supporting Audiobus as a target. This is very exciting and gives me yet another good option to use my many synths on the iPad into Garageband, add some parts from its powerful instruments and if I really want to go crazy on the mixing, I can upload it to my iMac and complete the effort in Logic 9 or Garageband on the iMac. This will be fun! 

In typical Apple fashion however, they are sticking to their "Roach Motel" standard - you can use Garageband as a target in Audiobus but not as a source. Music gets in, it doesn't get out (easily)! 

Bussing with Xewton music studio

I've had yet another few weeks with Audiobus and have been working a bit with Xewton Music Studio and Beatmaker 2.

In my last posts, I discussed the pros and cons of some of the other DAWs as Audiobus targets so here are 2 more. Auria and Multitrack DAW are both good targets but work only with audio files. The appeal of Beatmaker 2 and Music Studio are that in addition to acting as targets for Audiobus, they also provide MIDI tracks natively. This lets me combine their native sounds with other Audiobus inputs.

Both tools provide this but both also are imperfect and have their quirks. The quirks are more shortcomings in what they provide natively and not so much Audiobus. Beatmaker 2 is the more feature-rich of the two but suffers from its often counter-intuitive interface. It started its life as a low power iPhone app and that history shows. Many folks have used Beatmaker for years and for them, the issue is moot. For me, learning it is frustrating in many places. Most functionality is there and if you mine their forums you can figure things out.

Music Studio on the other hand has a beautiful interface and is fairly simple to use but has some glaring functional omissions. Fading out a song is almost impossible if you mix audio and MIDI tracks. The effects chain is also somewhat bizarre but if you are patient enough, you can get good results. For fading, you might do better to mix down and then copy into another app for posting.

My verdict for these two tools is to give Beatmaker 2 the nod. I need to get used to its weird interface, but functionality wise, it provides good audiobus support with decent MIDI capabilities. It's native samples are meh, but you can add your own.

Overall, MultiTrack DAW remains my favorite when I don't need MIDI. Auria is just too crash prone with audiobus (I'm on an iPad 3 with nothing else running but it is flakey with Auria).

Here is a track I put together primarily with Audiobus on Xewton Music Studio:


The beats and bass were created in the Korg iPolySix and it was easier to just mixdown and audiocopy/paste those into Music Studio - so no Audiobus there, though Korg does support it. The next few tracks were Audiobus from the Moog Animoog synth. I added a couple of native Music studio tracks for muted guitar, muted trumpet and flute. Then I added some ambient bells/drones via Audiobus from Mixtikl.

So, Xewton does work with Audiobus fairly well if you really want to use it. I think I may stick mainly to MultiTrack DAW with perhaps a little BeatMaker if I can ever wrap my head around its interface.

More choices, less focus!

Well after a long time gawking, I picked up a copy of Komplete 8 for my iMac and now have an even larger plethora of choices for my music making. I did this with some trepidation since this is actually stressing out my disk storage - the collection is around 110 GB!

But I know have several additional synthesizers including Massive (Skrillex - look out!), FM8, Reaktor and most importantly, the sampler - Kontakt.

I've lately been combining some of the synth sounds with my Samplemodeling and Wivi EWI instruments and have a few songs to show for it:




These songs both feature a few Kontakt samples along with FM8 (the DX-7 clone) and a few other assorted sounds. I'll probably be using the new sounds extensively in future compositons. Komplete is a  large bundling of all of the Native Instrument synths and sample libraries.

Its always good advice to focus on the tools you have and to master them, but I've never been one for good advices! Rock on....

Furthur on the Bus

Now I've had a few more weeks with Audiobus, I'm starting to form some workflows and processes that are making sense to me. I'll try to put down a few of my own observations about Audiobus and where/how it works for my circumstances.
First, since I usually include a song plug, here is a piece I made combining many synths with Audiobus into the piece.



In the piece above, I recorded tracks one at a time via Audiobus into Multi-Track DAW. For the synths, I used: Sunrizer, Animoog, Magellan, Samplr, iPolysix, DM1 and PPG Wavemapper. This was almost entirely with Audiobus except for the vocals which were first processed in Hokusai, then pasted into Samplr and then audiobussed into MultiTrack DAW.
So after making a few songs in Audiobus, I've experimented with different target DAWs and combinations of synths. One thing to "unlearn" is your Desktop DAW mentality. Rather than think about having one umbrella app with everything as plugins, start thinking of the combination of your synths as being your palette. So the "equivalent" of Logic is the combination of synths, audiobus and target DAWs.
Remember that Audiobus has 3 areas you can plug apps into. The source(s), the effect(s) and the target for the audio to land in. The target has to be a DAW that accepts audio files. There are many potential targets such as samplers or DAWs - I will focus on the DAWs for now. There are five I've seen written up:
MultiTrack DAW - This was available at launch and is one of the oldest DAWs available for iPods and iPads even before Audiobus. Multi-Track is very good at what it does and it doesn't try to do to much. In fact, it is my favorite as I will come back to in my conclusions. It has some fairly simple effects processing available and little to no automation capabilities. It is lean, simple and well thought out but not feature rich.
Auria - Auria is the kitchen sink of DAWs for the iPad. It provides up to 24 concurrent recording sessions, tons of plugins which are actually converted VSTs from desktop technologies, full automation capabilities and much more. With all this power, comes quite a bit of CPU utilization. In fact, some of its effects have to be turned off when using Audiobus. Its a bit fiddly to set up for Audiobus and I find the product buggy - no show stoppers, but lots of niggling errors. If you need full power and intend to put many effects and processes on your tracks after recording them, this is probably the one to use.
Loopy - Loopy is a weird target and is made by the developers of Audiobus. It is sort of more a live looper that you record into and then trigger the loops manually. This makes it almost more of a live performance tool. I have it but haven't used it much yet. It really doesn't fit my workflow well.
Cubasis - This is Steinberg's "mini Cubase" for the iPad. From what I read, its pretty good interface wise, a bit limited in automation and damned expensive (for an iPad app) - $50. I don't have it so can't comment further but its Audiobus implementation is supposed to be very good.
Meteor - This is the 4pockets DAW - less expensive until you add in all the In app purchases. I also don't have this one.
I have personally used Auria and MultiTrack DAW frequently with Audiobus. I rarely use the "effects" slot of Audiobus - usually just put a synth in the source such as Animoog and record to one of the DAWs. All of the effects are dialed directly into the synth app.
The philosophy behind the highly capable Auria is to get more or less "bare" uneffected audio into the app and to then do the effects processing with the extremely powerful effects available in the app. Many of these are in app purchases and they are costly! This can make some incredible sounds but in my own compositions, I tend to process each track in its source app more or less exactly how I want to hear it. I don't really want or need to apply tons of post processing - maybe just some EQ and Compression.
Because of that, I really prefer the very light DAW provided by MultiTrack DAW. It doesn't do much, but its interface is good and very touch friendly. It provides the light EQ or compression and is reasonably cheap. I may put Auria to use again in some of my pieces, but I am really liking the power of Audiobus when combined with MultiTrack DAW.
Just for some price comparisons - Auria has a list price of $50. I was lucky enough to get it on sale for $25 for the full version. Now there is a "light" version for $25 and the full is back to $50. It comes with many great effects out of the box, but other effects that you buy will cost from $10 to $30 - not at all cheap, but to be fair, you do get what you pay for. Cubasis is also $50. Meteor is $20 and if you add all the in app purchases for effects, it goes to around $64.
MultiTrack DAW lists for $10 for 8 tracks with basic send and effects. For $8, you can unlock another 16 tracks for a total of 24. Pricewise - this is very good. The effects included are very basic and there are no in app purchases but when coupled with Audiobus, don't forget that you can put other apps into the effects bus slot and use them with MultiTrack. This is the combination I see the most potential for.

Even Realer!

Well, I took the plunge and got the Samplemodeling saxophones. They have a new release out that uses their own sound manager instead of Kontakt and I decided to add better saxes into my mix. In the past I've been relying on old sampled versions or the Wivi Band Tenor Sax. Of these, the Wivi Tenor isn't bad but none are in the same league as Samplemodeling.

The new version includes 4 saxes - bari, tenor, alto and soprano. So far I find the sound with the Akai EWI to be terrific. I quickly put together a basic jazz piece featuring the bari, tenor and alto saxes:






For this piece I took a basic jazz brush kit for drums, added a basic bassline with the Bari sax, a repeating theme with the Tenor and a solo throughout the piece with the Alto. The performance is far from flawless, but the intonations, bends and note realism really come through well. As I get better with the EWI, I expect to use these extensively.

One thing to note is that the engine is a bit CPU hungry. I noticed with two samplemodeling tracks that my CPU was almost spiking (2.5 GHz Core2Duo). I chose to "bounce in place" the bari and tenor which freed up the CPU for the Alto part. I didn't use the soprano in this one. Setup was very easy and using these instruments is almost effortless with a good wind controller such as the Akai EWI.

How to inefficiently produce!

I've been experimenting with more apps on the iPad that I have been underutilizing and put together a electro-funk piece in kitchen-sink fashion:


I don't present my workflow as a model of efficiency, but for anyone looking to compose on the iPad, here are some thoughts from making this piece.

First, the hardware: The iPad is "sandboxed" which means that all apps are isolated from one another (trust me, overall this is a GOOD thing). This is why its easy for almost anyone to pick up and use it without worrying about where and how their files are stored. All files relevant to an app are stored with it...period! The downside is that having many apps working on the same files is mostly a no-go. In music making, this is somewhat alleviated by 3 technologies on the iPad:

1. Audiocopy/Audiopaste - This is the simplest and has been adopted by most serious music apps on the iPad. Like clipboards for documents, you can copy audio from one app and usually paste it into another. Some apps only support Audiocopy, some only audiopaste depending on the nature of the app. 
2. Virtual MIDI - Many apps support virtual midi and will send their MIDI events to other running apps or will process MIDI events from other running apps. This is analogous to wiring MIDI hardware together but is done virtually over one of the 16 MIDI channels. 
3. Audiobus - The newest technology that many apps are now supporting! This allows the audio of any app to be chained to other effects or target apps. Similar to virtual MIDI but its audio signals that flow from app to app and not MIDI codes. 

The piece above, used all 3 technologies in a somewhat cumbersome fashion! Funktank uses several apps to combine its sounds. The apps used to play the sounds are: Sampletank, Alchemy and Animoog. These apps were combined using a Virtual MIDI sequencer and two DAWs: Genome for the MIDI sequencing, Multitrack DAW to record the Audiobus from Animoog and finally Auria to mix and master all of the tracks. 

Sampletank has some of the best sampled sounds on the iPad and was used in Funktank for the drums, the bass, the rhythm guitar and the synth lead. As good as the sounds are, its interface is a confusing mess and its recording is frustratingly slow. You can put together up to 4 instruments, get sounds going in each but to record, you have to record each one one at a time! There is no audiobus support yet and I truly hope its added soon. In Funktank, I decided to use the Genome MIDI sequencer to create rhythm patterns rather than using Sampletank natively and banging on drumpads. This worked pretty well but the recording was particularly cumbersome since there is no way to record in Virtual MIDI. Instead, I had to go to Sampletank, hit record, switch (quickly!) to Genome, "play" the pattern I wanted recorded, then go back to Sampletank and stop the recording. Then I used audiocopy and audiopaste to put the WAV file into my DAW - Auria in this case. Finally, I edited the sound clip to remove initial and trailing blank space - simple no? NO!

Genome lets you remotely sequence any other running app that supports virtual MIDI. In fact, Genome does not make any sound at all on its own - it has to be "wired up to something". In addition to apps, it can use wireless MIDI to control your desktop DAW which is pretty cool! One thing to be careful of on the iPad is the memory and CPU limits. If you have 4 or 5 running apps at once, you can easily run into memory or processing problems. This is why Sampletank was appealing. Most apps only take in one MIDI stream at a time on one channel. Sampletank will take 4 separate MIDI channels at once so for one running background app, you can have 4 voices going. This is where I got sidetracked in my workflow. I worked out pattern after pattern (each one a single bar!) and programmed them into Genome. I could hit play and go through step after step and worked out the first 20 bars of so of the song. Sounded great to me! But...there was no easy way to record it! I could resort to wiring up the headphone jack and recording, but I wanted to have more flexibility with the editing in the DAW. I should have just recorded one set of patterns for each instrument, recorded them as above and done all of the song creation in the DAW. So I painfully played each unique pattern, recored each single part, audiocopied/pasted and edited into the Auria DAW. This took a long time! 

Auria is the DAW I used primarily in this piece. As DAWs go, it is by far the most complete with its own brand of VST support for plugins, rich architecture and support for 48 concurrent live tracks if set up with audio interfaces. In my case - overkill! I was only audiopasting in tracks and then applying light effects such as compression or reverb but it is extremely powerful! Once I got all of my "pieces" and patterns recorded, this is where I combined and processed the audio. Auria does not yet support audiobus so I can't just directly record there but it is coming soon and that will greatly simplify this whole process. The best practice for Auria would be to record the tracks "dry" with no effects and to then apply them in Auria. Insert effects, send effects are all supported. I did not do that in this piece though. The sound from sampletank was already more or less processed as I liked. Since I didn't really do much rich effects processing in Auria, I could have used Multi-track DAW instead which has very basic effects but supports Audiobus. I really wanted to get familiar with Auria though so that is what I used.

Animoog by Moog music is one of my favorite synths on the iPad but it was used only for a few bell like ambient backgrounds in this piece. Animoog does have its own 4-track recorder built in but since it supports Audiobus, it is much simpler to simply connect it to a DAW and record into the DAW. I used Multitrack DAW to record the Animoog part. To make things easier, I mixed down the other parts, audiocopied/pasted them into Multitrack DAW so I could hear everything at once while recording. 

Once I liked the track in Multitrack DAW, I audiocopied/pasted the Animoog track into Auria with the other tracks. 

Alchemy is a synth that I haven't used that much on the iPad yet but is very fun to work with. Alchemy runs mainly from rich synth samples but lets you tweak tons of parameters for every sample giving you many variations. Alchemy supports audiocopy/paste but not Audiobus yet so I recorded, copied and pasted the Alchemy parts of Funktank. The "pseudo-vocals" and some of the ambient backgrounds came from alchemy.

When all of this was assembled into Auria, I worked there to mix, copy/paste and master the final piece. This was more or less like working in any DAW. Lots of audio file manipulation, dragging and copying and then finally mixing the whole piece down. Auria works very much like desktop DAWs - maybe a bit too much like them. Audio editing is very interactive with full touch support but many functions require navigating menus with your fingers which while easy enough, is not revolutionary. Due to the great depth of features though, this is probably unavoidable. Multi-track DAW on the other hand is less full featured but much more touch friendly.

So what do I conclude from all of this? I enjoyed using Auria once I got everything there and will probably use it again but for an efficient workflow I think I would recommend using Audiobus with compatible apps. The good news is that Auria should support it shortly which I look forward to.

As things stand, it is possible to make music solely on the iPad with multiple tools, but still far from optimal! Every month though is bringing new and better tools. As cumbersome as this was, I had a blast figuring all this out.