new track: phase transition

Posted on July 26, 2010 by lsd

It’s been about six weeks since I posted my little SooperLooper jam, and here it is in its final form, or at least what became of it. This was a difficult one to pull together — I initially just polished my sketch version of it, but that didn’t give me the results I was after, so I ended up ditching that effort and re-arranging it from scratch, finally getting an inspiration for the central progression and ending last week. Once I had that idea, it didn’t take long on the weekend to flesh it out.

This is another Seq24/Hydrogen/Ardour recording, with Blofeld synths, though I also created my own drum sounds (mostly on the Blofeld again) for this one. I also used PHASEX as the synth for the lead arpeggio — it’s a simple patch, but I really liked how it sounded, so it stayed in the final version.

EDIT: Turns out that the download links were broken! I’ve fixed them now, so if you had trouble downloading, please try again now.


mp3 | ogg | flac | 5 minutes 4 seconds

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roasting bacon

Posted on July 17, 2010 by lsd

I don’t often listen to the TLLTS podcast, but I caught a recent episode (number 361) featuring Jono Bacon, and I was not impressed. I wish Bacon would stop commenting about the state of Linux audio, because it’s clear to me — but probably not clear to the larger community — that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

He explained on the show that he doesn’t use Linux for his music production, and I should say up-front that I don’t have a problem with this. Linux certainly isn’t ideal for everyone, and if Bacon has a solid, working Windows-based setup, there’s nothing wrong with him sticking with that and focusing on making music.

However, it’s very clear to me that he has no idea about the current state of Linux audio production, spreading the usual outdated nonsense about JACK being overly complex to set up, ignoring the existence of quite usable MIDI sequencers like Qtractor and Rosegarden, and giving very short shrift to Hydrogen’s abilities as a drum synth. These tools, with a suitable velocity-layered drumkit, might not give the same results as quickly as Bacon’s proprietary setup can, but they’d certainly do the job, especially once you run each drum in to Ardour for separate processing.

Why do I have such a problem with this? Well, it’s because Bacon is widely known and respected as an open-source evangelist, and also as a musician, so his words carry weight. I and my fellow Linux musicians know he’s mistaken, but a casual listener would assume that he knows what he’s talking about, given his background, and would probably write off Linux as a music production platform because of it.

Again, to be clear, I’m not saying Bacon should use Linux. I’m not even saying that he should spend the time to learn about making music on Linux. I just wish he’d stop talking about it as if he does know what he’s talking about.

Posted in Linux, Music, Rants | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

sketchbook: psindustralizer drums

Posted on July 6, 2010 by lsd

I’ve been playing with percussion lately, and wanted some metallic sounds, and I remembered a little app that I played with a while ago called Power Station Industralizer, a physically modeled percussion synth. It’s a little unwieldy — it’s non-realtime, so you have to “render” the sound after tweaking parameters before you can play it, and it has some annoying issues — but it can certainly make some nice clangy, smashy, metallic drum sounds. I came up with a few and threw them in to Hydrogen; the results are below.

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Posted in Music, Sketchbook | Tagged , | 1 Comment

super mario galaxy 2

Posted on July 4, 2010 by lsd

If you’re like me, the experience of playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 can be summed up by the words you’ll find yourself involuntarily muttering again and again:

“Haha, what? No way! That’s awesome!”

Following up Super Mario Galaxy was always going to be a hard task; it turned 20 years of platforming tradition on its head — sometimes literally — with its mind-bending, gravity-defying spherical worlds. Rather than trying to reinvent the genre once again, Nintendo has simply taken the shell of the original game and stuffed it to bursting point with an incredible wealth of crazy, inventive, and unique ideas.

It’s hard to understate just how imaginative this game is. Just about every time you enter one of the game’s dozens of levels, it throws some new gameplay mechanic or concept at you, and as soon as you’ve mastered that, you’re thrown off to the next level and the next crazy idea. Incredibly, with just a couple of exceptions — Spring Mario, which makes a (thankfully brief) return from the original, and some motion-controlled gliding levels — all of those ideas are not just brilliant, but brilliantly executed as well.

The result is, simply put, one of the finest, most enjoyable games I’ve ever played. If you’ve ever been a fan of platformers, you need to play this game.

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new blog URL!

Posted on July 1, 2010 by lsd

After a couple of years of running at blag.linuxgamers.net, I’ve decided to move my blog to a new, dedicated URL. If you’re not already there, you’ll now find my blog at:

http://wootangent.net/

Why the change? Well, the old URL made it seem like a blog attached to the old linuxgamers.net site, which it definitely wasn’t — the only reason I put it there to begin with was because I already had that domain set up. I thought about just ditching the “blag.”, but this blog has very little to do with Linux gaming, so running it at linuxgamers.net wouldn’t make sense.

It may take me a day or two to sort out all of the links, so if you find anything broken, or anything that still links back to the old domain, please let me know!

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ascap vs creative commons? seriously?

Posted on June 27, 2010 by lsd

It seems like that last post of mine detailing my selfish reasons for making my music available for free couldn’t have been better timed. ASCAP has launched an attack on Creative Commons, the EFF, and Public Knowledge, asking its members to donate to a fund that will be used to campaign against copyleft licencing in the US Congress. The letter it sent to its members reads like the kind of FUD you’d expect from 90s Microsoft:

“They say they are advocates of consumer rights, but the truth is these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music. Their mission is to spread the word that our music should be free.”

This could not be further from the truth — Creative Commons gives artists tools to control what they wish to allow other people to do with their own work. It’s not aimed at tearing down traditional copyright, and it’s certainly not aimed at providing free access to existing copyrighted works. I’ve talked about the fact that I use CC because it’s in my best interest, but I wouldn’t claim that it’s the best option for all artists.

I can only think that ASCAP is targeting Creative Commons because it’s becoming a credible alternative to the old performance royalty model. If a cafe owner wants some background music for their customers, they can play any appropriately-licenced CC music; that is, any work not using the “Non-Commercial” clause. As more music becomes available under these licences, and awareness of its existence grows, it will be increasingly practical to work with CC music rather than pay ASCAP fees.

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my selfish reasons for making free music with free software

Posted on June 25, 2010 by lsd

People sometimes ask me why use free and open-source tools for my music production, when there’s such an incredible wealth of commercial options out there. More often, the subject of selling music comes up, and people ask why I give mine away for free. I’d like to say that it’s a selfless promotion of free culture, but the reality is far more pragmatic, and perhaps a little selfish. Using free tools and releasing my music for free is simply what works best for me.

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Posted in Music | Tagged , | 3 Comments

sketchbook: a sooperlooper jam

Posted on June 19, 2010 by lsd

SooperLooper is proving to be a lot of fun! Last weekend I fired it up and did some impromptu jamming, following this basic formula:

  • Slap together a basic four-bar drum pattern in Hydrogen
  • Export that pattern as a loop and import it in to SooperLooper as loop 1
  • Play a bunch of random crap over the top, and if it sounds okay, grab a loop of it
  • Lather, rinse, repeat

I saved those sessions, and had a quick stab at turning one of them in to a proper track, which I call “sl3″, by importing the loops in to Ardour and moving/coping them in to an arrangement. I also threw in some effects for good measure: EQ, a couple of delays (can’t help myself with those!), and an insert out to Rakarrack to add some guts to my fairly limp bass loop. I’m sure I could make it more interesting by re-recording a few parts — replacing the drum loop with a properly programmed part with a bit of variety, for instance — but hey, for an hour-and-a-half’s work, I think it sounds okay!


mp3 | vorbis | 2:27

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hayabusa returns!

Posted on June 14, 2010 by lsd

Hayabusa, the little spacecraft that could, defied the odds last night when its sample return container safely parachute-landed in Woomera. Launched by the Japanese space agency, JAXA, back in 2003, Hayabusa spent two years travelling to an asteroid named Itokawa, where it attempted to collect samples from the asteroid’s surface to return to Earth. The Hayabusa mission has been plagued with problems — pre-launch delays, failures during the Itokawa encounter, and engine and communication failures on the return trip — but after five years, it finally managed to limp home.

It’s been really interesting to see how Japanese people celebrated the return of Hayabusa — cuteness was out in full force:


There was even a Hayabusa cosplayer at JAXA’s public viewing area! JAXA is doing some very cool stuff at the moment — its recently-launched IKAROS spacecraft will hopefully prove the potential for solar sails for space travel — so I can’t wait to see what they, and the Japanese public, come up with in the future.

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congratulations to spacex, but sad pandas for humanity

Posted on June 6, 2010 by lsd

Saturday morning marked a significant milestone in spaceflight: the successful maiden launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. For years, spaceflight has been ruled by governments and the military, but SpaceX is shaking things up by developing rockets on a purely commercial basis, and at a fraction of the price of competing offerings. SpaceX has had success in the past with its smaller Falcon 1 rocket, but the Falcon 9 is a much bigger machine: with around 20 times the payload capacity, it’s more than capable of launching crew and cargo to the ISS.

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