My Hardware & Software setup for Melodic Improvisation and Composition

TLDR; iPad, iPhone, 2xZoom U-24, Sennheiser e835, Logitech X-230, cables,ThumbJam, AUM, AudioShare, ToneStack, VisualEQConsole, Chordbot, Enso Looper and YouTube.

This article describes my setup for improvising and composing instrumental melodies over pre-recorded accompaniments or “beat tracks”.

It is not a setup for full music production. If I was doing full music production, then I would most likely need a Mac computer of some kind. But I’m not doing full music production, so I don’t need that.

(I do have a desktop computer, which happens to be running Ubuntu 18. I do not use the computer directly for real-time music production - however it is useful for managing the downloading of files from the internet, converting files from one format to another and managing the upload of files to my iOS devices.)

Hardware List

• iPad Pro 12.9" 2nd generation with 256GB memory

• iPhone SE 3rd generation with 256GB memory

• Zoom U-24 USB Audio Interface

• A second Zoom U-24 USB Audio Interface

• Sennheiser e835 cardioid microphone

• Logitech X-230 speakers

• Various cables

Historically iOS has been far superior to Android for music production, having better audio latency, and more apps. Whether that is still true I do not know, but iOS continues to work well for me, and I have an accumulation of apps that I have purchased and know how to use, so I will be sticking with iOS for the foreseeable future.

There are many high quality music production apps available for iOS which are quite cheap compared to what similar software might cost on a Mac. Also you only have to pay once for the same software to run on both an iPhone and an iPad.

For anything involving audio input, you will want a separate USB audio interface. And if you’re doing something involving audio input on two devices at the same time, for example, using an iPhone to record a video of yourself singing into the iPad (or even if you just want the output sound quality from a separate USB audio interface and you need to re-input that sound into the second device), then you will need one USB audio interface for each device.

If you want to listen to the music that you improvise on speakers, and your improvisation includes singing (or even whistling), then you will need a cardioid microphone, ie a microphone that only “hears” sounds from close to the microphone.

The Logitech X-230 speakers that I have are an older model of non-bluetooth computer speakers. Bluetooth as used in normal consumer audio products is unfortunately not at all useful for music production, because it has significant latency. Latency doesn’t matter when you are just listening to recorded music, because the music will play when it plays, but for music production it matters a whole lot, because you want notes to sound when you play them, and not some noticeable time later. Most modern consumer speakers come with bluetooth whether you like it or not, which can be a distraction - for some speakers there is no way to turn the bluetooth off, even when you are not using it, and any nearby bluetooth device can potentially hijack your speakers. So it’s best just not to have bluetooth at all.

If I had to buy some new speakers now, I would probably buy something like Logitech Z200 speakers.

With regard to cables, you’ll need something to connect your microphone to the USB interface, and to connect the Zoom U-24 to an iPad or iPhone you’ll need an Apple “Camera Adaptor” (specifically Lightning to USB3 in my case for the iPhone & iPad models that I have).

A table-top microphone stand will also be handy, so that you can use the microphone hands-free if needed.

Software List

All of the software in the following list is available in the iOS app store. It is a rather small subset of all the musical apps I have ever bought or installed or tried out. However the list contains all the software that I currently actively use in my instrumental melodic composition efforts.

• Thumbjam

• AUM

• AudioShare

• ToneStack

• VisualEQConsole

• Chordbot

• Enso Looper

• YouTube

ThumbJam

ThumbJam is, for me, the best musical instrument ever. It works very well for certain types of instrument sound, in particular flute, string and “wah” electric guitar.

ThumbJam can also be used as a midi-interface to connect with other iOS instrument apps to good effect.

With ThumbJam you have a 2-dimensional interface, where one dimension is the notes on the scale, and the second dimension can be used to change other aspects of the sound (for example, the aforementioned “wah” effect for electric guitar). You can additionally use the tilt of the device as an extra dimension of control (in practice this only works usefully with an iPhone where you can hold it in one hand while you play on the screen with the other hand).

ThumbJam does not make any attempt to simulate a traditional piano-style keyboard. Rather you choose what scale you want to play, and it presents you with an interface containing only the notes of that scale. So, to a first approximation, you cannot play a “wrong” note.

Also, you can play notes on the scale without ever lifting your finger (or thumb) off the screen - and the notes will transition in a sensible and musically useful fashion as you move from one note to the next on the screen. Among other things, this makes it very easy to do trills.

All of this makes ThumbJam really powerful as a tool for improvising melodies against pre-recorded beat tracks.

ThumbJam also has the ability to do voice-2-midi, where microphone input of your own singing or whistling can be used to drive the instrument sound.

AUM and AudioShare

AUM and AudioShare are two apps provided by the same company (Kymatica) which work together.

AUM is an audio mixer/router app, which can be used to wire together different plugins and apps.

AudioShare is an audio file manager. Audio files can be uploaded to AudioShare via a builtin web-server, and they can be played inside AUM by the builtin File Player function.

AudioShare is where you will want to put your beat tracks that you want to improvise or compose over. Also, you will find it very convenient to use folders to group together beat tracks where the melody is on a particular scale, because you can set up ThumbJam to play that particular scale, and then sequentially practice improvising against all the beat tracks in the same folder.

(In my experience most tracks work particularly well with one specific scale. Also for the purposes of grouping, the difference between different “modes” such as A minor or C major doesn’t matter, and in practice I only bother with a single folder called “C Major”, which will include tracks where the melody is in C major or A minor or E “phrygian” or any other scale with the same set of notes.)

ToneStack

ToneStack is a an Inter-App Audio plugin that I use for a distortion guitar effect with the ThumbJam “wah” electric guitar sound. (Because of how ThumbJam works, the distortion effect has to be applied after the “wah” effect - which may not be ideal, but it gives a good result in practice.)

VisualEQConsole

VisualEQConsole is an EQ console (aka graphic equalizer) plugin, which is just something generally useful to have when doing any kind of music production. (My original motivation for installing it was that my Logitech X230 speakers are too bassy when playing most of the beat track files that I have.)

ChordBot

ChordBot is a basic app for producing programmed chord sequence accompaniments. The accompaniments that it produces don’t sound as good as professionally produced beat tracks. However, if like me, you are not a professional beat track producer, and sometimes you just need a track with a certain repeated chord sequence at a certain BPM with certain instrument sounds, then ChordBot is the quick and easy way to get what you want.

Sometimes ChordBot doesn’t play 100% well with AUM. In this case a simple work-around is to export your ChordBot track as a WAV file into AudioShare, and then in AUM use the built-in File Player to play that WAV file on loop, which works OK without any issues.

Enso Looper

Enso Looper is a audio plugin that provides “Looper Pedal” functionality.

For my own purposes, I actually use it as a practice app, by setting it to automatically record and play back on a fixed loop.

One way to practice playing music is to record your own playing, and then stop the recording, and play the recording back, and listen to it to see how it sounds. When you play back a recording of yourself playing an instrument, you will notice all sorts of issues that you didn’t notice in real-time when you were playing. (And even more so when you try singing.)

However there is a significant interruption and delay in the process of recording, stopping the recording and then playing back.

With a “record and playback” looping setup, you can choose to automatically play back your own instrumental playing in a way that is synchronised with the beat track you are playing against.

For example, I can play against a programmed two chord sequence that is Am G in 4/4 time at 80bpm, and I can set the playback delay to be 6 seconds.

The playback will then be correctly synchronised with the next repetition of the chord sequence. (This actually works better with ChordBot than with a professionally produced beat track, because ChordBot is giving you a simple exact repetition of the same bars of music every time.)

So you can play for 6 seconds, listen to the recording of the 6 seconds of melody that you just played, and then immediately try playing the same musical melody again.

You are limited to short 2-bar 6-second melodies, but, the simple repetitive nature of the practice scenario makes it easier to quickly learn to sharpen up your playing.

YouTube

YouTube is the best place to find beat tracks. Many beat track producers post their beat tracks on YouTube so that singers and rappers can use those beat tracks to make complete songs. To use a track in a commercial song you almost always have to buy a license (often from beatstars.com). However many of the tracks are advertised as “FREE” for non-commercial usage, and in some cases direct links are provided to download free versions of the tracks. The free versions usually have “tags” to identify the producer who owns the tracks - but in most cases the tags won’t prevent you from successfully improvising melodies over the top of the track.

If you have a “Premium” YouTube subscription, the iOS YouTube app will allow you to play music videos in the background, so that you can use an app such as ThumbJam to play a melody against a beat track playing in YouTube, all on one device. One limitation of this is that the YouTube app does not have any internal volume control, and iOS does not have any option for adjusting the volume of the output of any particular app. So if the beat track is already at full volume, then the combination of the beat track and your top-lined melody will be too loud, and you will likely get digital clipping. (A possible work-around to this issue is to use separate devices, and use a separate mixer to mix the audios together - or alternatively use a dual USB audio interface setup as a de-facto digital mixer.)

Voice

One thing missing from all this is the set of apps that I use for vocal improvisation.

My own singing is strictly work-in-progress, and I will write about these apps in a separate article.

(The TLDR; for that yet-to-be-written article is ClearTune, QVox, Zero Reverb & SoloistFX.)