I’ve been slack in updating ye olde blog, but I have an excuse — I got a new phone! It’s a HTC Desire, running Android of course, and I’ve been having great fun trying different apps and discovering what I can do with it. I started a lengthy post covering my thoughts on both the Desire and Android, but in lieu of finishing that, I present you instead with an introduction to FingerPlay MIDI, a very cool MIDI controller app for Android.
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After a bit of a wait, what’s perhaps the ultimate free piano sample library, the Salamander Grand Piano (that’s a direct download link, so don’t click it unless you mean it!) is available! One of the guys on the linux-audio-user spent I’d-hate-to-think-how-long recording every note on a Yamaha C5 grand at 16 different volume levels with a pair of stereo mics, and the result — all 1.9GB of it — sounds lovely.
Getting it running, however, is a bit fiddly right now. Due partly to its heft, it’s distributed in SFZ format, instead of the more common GigaSample “.GIG” format. Linuxsampler supports SFZ in CVS, but it’s buggy, and the instrument needs to be set up just right to load without crashing Linuxsampler. Once you’ve installed Linuxsampler from CVS — a bit of effort, but fairly straightforward, especially since it comes with Debian package scripts — follow these steps, in order, to get the Salamander up and running:
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Another long one! In part 6, I jump from Xsynth to Specimen, a simple sampler, which is ideal for when you want to take a simple sound and quickly transform it in to a playable instrument. Specimen does much more than just playing samples, though — it can sculpt and shape them with envelopes, filters, and LFOs, just like you’d find in Xsynth.
Hi-res Ogg Theora version is here, or watch the Youtube version after the jump!
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In part 5 of my Linux soft synth tutorial, I look at the concept of modulation — changing synth parameters over time. We saw an example of this in part 4, where we used an envelope to control the volume of a sound over time; modulation extends this to other parameters, such as the pitch of the oscillators and the filter cutoff. Modulation can use envelopes to change parameters over the length of the sound — in fact, there’s a second envelope in Xsynth-DSSI just for modulation — or the low frequency oscillator, or LFO, to perform repeating rhythmic changes.
Modulation can produce effects ranging from subtle vibrato through to sweeping soundscapes and alien sound effects. Either way, it’s a powerful way to breathe life and movement in to what might otherwise be a dull sound.
High-res Ogg Theora version is here, or watch the Youtube version after the jump!
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In part 4 of my Linux soft synth tutorial, I look at Xsynth-DSSI’s amplifier section, and particularly the “envelope”, which defines how the volume of your sound changes over time. By tweaking the envelope, you can make your sounds fade in and out softly, hit hard and then slowly fade like a piano, or come on strong and then disappear just as quickly, like a xylophone.
High-res Ogg Theora version is here, or watch the Youtube version after the jump!
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In part 3 of my Linux soft synth tutorial, I look at the next major component of the traditional analogue synth — the filter. The filter… uhh… filters the sound from the oscillators, typically cutting away at the high frequencies; the effects range from the subtle to the drastic, especially once you start tweaking that “resonance” parameter. In fact, analog synthesis is sometimes called “subtractive synthesis”, due to the way the filter cuts away parts of the sound.
High-res Ogg Theora version is here, or watch the Youtube version after the jump!
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In part 2 of my Linux soft synth tutorial, I look at the oscillators in Xsynth-DSSI, the different kinds of sounds they can produce, and some of the ways they can be combined to create more interesting sounds. The oscillators create the raw synth sound, before it’s shaped by the filter and amplifier, so it’s more responsible than any other part of the synth for the general timbre of your sound.
Again, if you’re on Chrome or Firefox, or you just want to download it for later viewing, you can grab a high-res Ogg Theora version here, or watch the Youtube version after the jump!
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I often talk to people in the open-source music community that want to learn more about sound synthesis, and this is my answer: a series of screen-cast tutorials on that very topic! In this first part, I look at the basic components of a traditional analogue synth, using Xsynth-DSSI as the example.
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