My day with GuitarTone, Instant Drummer, FourTrack and the iPhone

I've been spending a little of bit of my spare time lately playing guitar on my iPhone. I have a few different apps to choose from in regards to amp and pedal simulators and I love the majority of them.

Today I spent most of my time in the GuitarTone and Instant Drummer apps. And I actually spent most of that time in the FourTrack app. I must say I love how Sonoma Wire Works have made it so easy to get from one app to another as you attempt to construct your own piece of music.

I ordered the GuitarJack for my iPhone 3S today too. Hopefully that improves the sound quality I managed to get today. I'll explain that ...

Now.

I have the Griffin GuitarConnect Cable and the Peavey AmpKit Link currently which both allow me to connect my guitars to my iPhone. Today I was using the Griffin GuitarConnect Cable. I was initially trying to determine if it worked when using the JamUp Lite app (which it apparently does).

Of the connecting cables I have so far, the Griffin GuitarConnect Cable is probably the noisiest option (AmpKit Link is battery powered which assists with feedback or noise issues). Having said that, I'm an absolute amateur and have a lot to learn about amp/pedal settings in the virtual world (I like to set everything to 10 first to see what happens).

So, the first thing I did today was crack open Instant Drummer.I'd already worked out the little riff I would use for my experiment today and decided I needed some 80bpm backing drums. So I created an intro, 16 bars of standard drums and a closing outro. Once compiled, I copied the audio tracks—the drums are exported as two stereo tracks—and opened FourTrack in anticipation.

Instant Drummer screenshot

Oh, if you've not been to my website before, I try and remove colour where I can. These apps are in colour on your iPhone.

In FourTrack I imported (pasted) the drum tracks to tracks 3 and 4. This left tracks 1 and 2 empty for the guitar parts. I then used a preset I'd created in GuitarTone to record my little riff into track 1 and again (as a separate recording) into track 2.

Custom preset in GuitarTone

I could have replicated the exact recording into tracks 1 and 2, but I wanted to capture the many discrepancies in my playing into both tracks. I helped this by playing track 1 into the left speaker only and track 2 into the right speaker only.

I wanted to have more than the two tracks of guitar though so I bounced the current song into two tracks (saved as a new song). I now had two empty tracks to record new guitar parts onto.

Default preset in GuitarTone

I'll be honest and say that as this is the first time I've attempted to mix tracks, it's pretty bad. If you listen carefully though, you may be able to make out the four tracks and the intentional use of the left and right speakers. You can see how the tracks finished up in FourTrack below.

FourTrack with 4 tracks playing

Tracks 1 and 2 contain the initial drum and guitar tracks bounced into stereo tracks while tracks 3 and 4 contain the additional two guitar tracks that kick in after the first two guitar tracks have played their parts twice.

It was a great bit of fun for the afternoon and relatively easy to do as well. I'm fairly happy with the results and believe with practice it can only get better. By the way, I'm really looking forward to receiving the GuitarJack I purchased today for two reasons.

1. Potentially improved sound quality
2. Plugging in with GuitarJack opens up 12 new amps and 12 new pedals in GuitarTone.

Awesome!

Oh, if you're curious what my afternoon's efforts sound like, feel free to listen to my first SoundCloud submission below.

Headspace by Scarebear