Author Archives: lsd

rpm 2012 update: day 5

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It’s the end of day 5 of the RPM Challenge, and I think I’m making good progress! I may have to pick up the pace a little to finish by the deadline, but I’m still fairly confident that I’ll manage it. The strategy that’s been working for me is to brainstorm and come up with demo ideas of a weeknight after work, and then flesh out those ideas on the weekend when I have more time to work with.

So far, I have one finished track (an ambient experimental piece), one half-finished track (a lo-fi downtempo track a la Texel), and two short demos (a chiptune and a solo piano piece). I’ll try to finish the track I have in progress tomorrow, so with any luck by this time next week I’ll have three or four finished tracks, and four or five demos ready to be expanded upon.

Some random things I’ve learned so far:

  • Plugin soft-synths are super, super handy when you’re in a hurry — just drop them in a MIDI track, load up a preset, and you’re good to go, without worrying about routing signals or configuring external software or hardware.
  • Speaking of soft-synths, the TAL-NoiseMaker native VST synth is my new go-to synth. It’s a standard analog-style synth, but it sounds great and has a straightforward UI and a solid feature set.
  • Ardour 3 is still a bit crashy while working with MIDI, but it’s made some nice improvements recently, like being able to double-click to enter or leave note edit mode, and the addition of a drop-down list of synth plugins in the “new track” dialog, so you can start composing more quickly. I could switch back to Qtractor, but even with the crashes I think I’m more productive in Ardour, just because I’m more familiar with it.
  • Sound design is fun! It’s hard not to have a good time when I fire up the Blofeld and start twiddling knobs. I should do it more often!
  • In fact, I should do this whole music thing more often. I might not come up with something interesting every time I sit in front of the keyboard, but definitely won’t come up with anything if I don’t try.

rpm challenge 2012

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I’ve long been a fan of the RPM Challenge, a NaNoWriMo-style challenge for musicians to record an album in February, and this year, I’ll be attempting the challenge myself! The rules are fairly simple: record at least 10 tracks or at least 35 minutes of original music by March 1st. I’ll be writing everything from scratch in February, too, but pre-written tracks are okay as long as you haven’t previously recorded or released them.

I actually attempted it back in 2008, but that was before I’d really started making music again, and it was a bit of a disaster — I didn’t manage to record anything. I fully expect to have more done by the end of my first day than I managed in that attempt.

What are my goals? I’d like to try a few different tracks — some downtempo stuff, some more melodic chiptune-ish stuff, and likely some droney ambient stuff — and while I expect it all to be quite rough, I hope there are some ideas in there that I can polish in to complete tracks after the challenge.

More importantly, though, I’d like to learn to be more spontaneous and to get my ideas recorded more quickly. I spend a lot of time working on each track, and if I can learn ways to reduce that workload, and hence increase my output, I’ll be very happy.

I’ll try to post some updates here throughout the month, but if you want to track my progress more closely, I’ll be posting to Twitter, too. Wish me luck!

sooperlooper rhodes remix

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If you enjoyed yesterday’s sketch, you really should check out this great remix by ioflow. He took my original loops and rearranged them in Renoise, mixing things up to great effect with some micro-edits (the little reversed bits sound awesome) and some low-key, distorted beats. Unfortunately I forgot to save the final set of loops, so he had to make do without the melody part, but it definitely hasn’t hurt things.

I very nearly neglected to post yesterday’s sketch, since the timing was rough and the whole thing was musically very simple. Needless to say, I’m glad I did post it now — chalk this up as a win for online collaboration and Creative Commons!

sketchbook: sooperlooping the rhodes

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I’m starting the new year the right way this year — with a sketch! It’s just a rough, simple, improvised jam, captured using SooperLooper, but I love the mood that the sound of the Rhodes imparts, especially as more note sustain over the top of each other and intermingle. I put the Rhodes sound through a rotary speaker emulation (Calf’s, in this case), and the melody part went my VM1 delay pedal, but it’s otherwise free of processing. It doesn’t really need much, anyway — those high notes sustaining that are left at the end are just magic.

SooperLooper is great for capturing new track ideas, especially for the kind of music I make, which is often driven by repeating patterns. In the past I’ve started with a drum beat and recorded loops on top of that, but this time I went freestyle. The nanoKONTROL is great for controlling it — I was able to add a bunch of empty loops, and map a separate fader and record button to each of them, making it easy to both record your loops and control their playback afterward. Once I had some appropriate loops I just played them all at the same time, using the faders to control their relative volumes while recording the output straight in to JACK Timemachine.

I don’t know if this sketch will go any further than this, but with some glitchy drums, some additional synth parts, and a bit more complexity (like, more than two chords), I think it could work as a track.


mp3 | vorbis | 2:51

the (musical) year ahead

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Looking back on 2011, I can’t help but feel a little slack — in 2010 I released four new original tracks, but 2011 saw just two — but I think I’d be doing myself a disservice to judge my productivity based solely on numbers. Both of those tracks, move along and Texel, took a lot of work, and I’m very proud of how they both turned out. I also spent a lot of time working with pre-release and often quite buggy software, filing bugs as I ran in to problems, and while that slowed me down I’m glad I was able to do it.

So far this year, I definitely have been slack; I spent half of December in the US on a working holiday, and combined with the usual holiday season shenanigans on my return, I’ve been spending more of my downtime gaming (Jamestown and Gratuitous Space Battles have been particular favourites) rather than making music (or blogging, for that matter!). Now that things are calmer, I’m looking forward to getting some music happening.

The plan is still to work on some more tracks in the same lo-fi downtempo vein as Texel and push out an EP of tracks that’ll hopefully sound like they belong together. Realistically, that might take all year, but if the tools continue to improve at their current rate, there’s a good chance I’ll be done sooner. Either way, I plan to stick with it!

a great article on using multiple audio devices with JACK

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I’ve been meaning to write a tutorial describing how to use multiple audio devices with JACK, using the “alsa_in” and “alsa_out” tools, but as it turns out, I don’t have to now! Linux Home Recording is a new-ish blog that already has a number of great articles about various Linux recording topics, and the most recent post there is all about using alsa_in and alsa_out.

It pays special attention to one of the most common cases — using a USB microphone — so it’s well worth a read.

this is my minecraft: kerbal space program

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It seems like half the people I know have put hours in to Minecraft, but I’ve been spending my time with another indie sandbox game: Kerbal Space Program, a rocket-building spaceflight simulation. KSP gives you a bunch of rocket parts, an editor to build those parts in to complete rockets, and a mini solar system to fly your rockets around. Even though there are no explicit challenges to complete — or at least, not yet — if you’re a rocket nerd like me, it’s still an absolute blast.

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melted crayon art: a music video for “texel”

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The internet says that you can do awesome things with crayons, glue, a canvas, and a heat gun, and my wife did exactly that on the weekend, with very colourful results. I figured the dripping wax might look cool on film (or on an SD card, rather), so I grabbed the camera, and as it turned out, it looked awesome:

The music is my most recent track, Texel, which seemed like a good match for the video. It was all shot with a hand-held Canon 550D and a 50mm f/1.8 lens, hence the shakiness — it took some time to go through all of the video and find the usable bits, where the camera was both steady and in focus.

I used Kdenlive to edit it all together, and I’m glad to say that it was much more solid than it was during my last video editing project. In particular, it automatically cropped the extra lines out of the 550D’s 1920×1088 files, so I didn’t need to transcode anything. I didn’t apply much processing this time, which may have helped — there’s just a few simple transitions and some colour correction work.

Kdenlive’s ability to use proxy clips — small, low-resolution copies of your original high-res clips that are used during editing — helped keep the preview playback smooth while editing. The original clips are used while rendering the video, though, so the proxy clips don’t affect the final output quality.

on Unity2D and llvmpipe, and the differing approaches of fedora and ubuntu

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Ubuntu’s Unity desktop invites comparisons to GNOME 3 for a bunch of reasons, but one important similarity is their reliance on hardware OpenGL support to power their visual animations and effects. In their first releases, both desktops used “fallback” modes to handle systems without OpenGL support, but in Ubuntu 11.10, Unity is available for those systems using a new project called Unity2D.

I think Unity2D is not just a terrible idea, but also another example of the new direction that Ubuntu is taking that makes me wonder if it’ll be my distribution of choice for much longer.

Not so unified

Unity2D removes the reliance on OpenGL by avoiding it entirely: it’s a rewrite of Unity from the ground up, based on the Qt toolkit and using the Metacity window manager instead of Compiz. While it looks and feels much like standard Unity, it’s an entirely separate codebase, and keeping the two in sync as features are added will require a substantial amount of extra work. Perhaps the Ubuntu developers have the resources needed to keep up, but it seems like a very shortsighted approach to me.

GNOME 3′s current fallback desktop is definitely a hack, too — it cobbles together a UI that looks a bit like GNOME Shell using the panel and related components that have been ported from GNOME 2. It has neither the flexibility of GNOME 2 nor the elegance of GNOME 3, so it’s not a particularly compelling experience, but the Fedora developers plan to make the full GNOME Shell experience available for nearly everyone in Fedora 17, using some very cool technology.

Software OpenGL with llvmpipe

OpenGL isn’t inherently limited to systems with hardware acceleration; Xorg actually provides a software implementation of OpenGL by default whenever hardware support is unavailable, but its performance is far low to handle desktop effects. However, a new software renderer, called llvmpipe, aims to change that. By using LLVM, a generic virtual machine that produces optimised x86 or AMD64 code on-the-fly, and utilising multiple CPU cores, llvmpipe performs far better than the standard Xorg renderer.

The gains are impressive: running Quake III Arena at 800×600 on my dual-core laptop, Xorg’s renderer managed 3.9 FPS, while llvmpipe managed a fairly playable 34.9 FPS. While that only makes llvmpipe about as fast as my old Matrox G400, that’s okay — it just has to be fast enough, and for GNOME Shell, and even the odd game, it definitely seems to be. llvmpipe has actually been used as the default software render in Fedora since Fedora 15, but it’s only in Fedora 17 that it supports all of the OpenGL features required to run a compositing window manager.

GNOME Shell on llvmpipe

GNOME Shell running without hardware acceleration on Fedora 17, using llvmpipe

I tested the Fedora 17 development packages (aka “Rawhide”) in a KVM virtual machine, and it worked fairly well; logging in revealed a complete GNOME Shell desktop, and while it was a little choppy, it was definitely usable. I’d definitely expect it to be faster on an actual PC, especially with a mutli-core CPU. The Fedora developers have plans to improve performance, too, by optimising llvmpipe and disabling some minor effects.

So, on the one hand, we have Fedora working on key infrastructure that will improve the Linux desktop experience for all users without hardware OpenGL acceleration, and on the other, we have Ubuntu developers throwing effort away on a developmental dead end. Ubuntu has copped flak before for not contributing to Linux development, but I don’t generally buy in to that argument — “contribution” isn’t something you can measure just by analysing commit logs or counting lines of code. Canonical can pay its developers to do whatever it wants them to do, but increasingly, it seems that the effort they’re expending is pushing Ubuntu in a direction I’m not sure I want to follow.

It’s hard to elaborate on exactly why I feel that way — I think it’s really down to little things, like insisting on forging its own path with Unity, the increasing number of built-in monetised services, and their sleazy dealings with Banshee (be sure to read the comments on that one!). Maybe the result is a great OS for a lot of users, but for me, Ubuntu is slowly drifting away from being the OS I want it to be.

new track: texel

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After a few last-minute tweaks, I’m finally ready to release my new track. The plan is for this to be the first track of an EP that will be available for download from Bandcamp, but I’m sure that won’t happen for several months, so I wanted to post the track here early to give everyone a chance to hear it. It’s a downbeat, ambient techno-kinda thing I call “Texel”:


mp3 | ogg | flac | 3 minutes 16 seconds

I talked a little about the production in an earlier post, but I have included some further details after the jump.
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