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
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
One thing that’s always a challenge as a solo music-maker is being able to just goof around and try new ideas quickly. With just one keyboard and a single pair of hands, I can’t play a bunch of parts at the same time like the members of a band could. I’ve wondered if software could come to my rescue, and indeed I have used seq24 quite a bit now, but it’s really designed more for live arrangement of pre-written patterns rather than true live improvisation and performance. I think I’ve found a solution now, but I took quite a round-about path to find it.
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The computer has revolutionised the way we make music, but it also begs a question: how much work do you do “in the box”, using software sequencers, effects, and instruments, and how much do you do with hardware and traditional instruments? When I started making music again last year, having a powerful hardware synth was a huge enabler for me — I really do believe that it, as much as anything, is the reason I’m still making music with Linux now after so many abortive attempts over the years. Now that I have a few tracks under my belt, though, I’m as surprised as anyone to realise that I seem to be working “in the box” more and more.
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Ubuntu 10.04, aka Lucid Lynx, is just a couple of days away, so I’ve been testing it on my laptop to see just how it’s coming along. I rely too much on both my laptop and my desktop to mess with new OSs before they’ve been released (or even just after they’ve been released), but I do keep a little 4GB partition spare on my laptop, so that I can install and test new releases without messing up my primary install.
So far, it’s looking really good. The new visual theme is great to look at, and while it still insists on moving the close/minimise/maximise widgets in window title bars, it at least puts the close button in most accessible place, in the far left. It also has “teh snappy” — Firefox 3.6 on 10.04 snaps tabs around just as quickly as Chrome did on 9.10. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I suspect it’s an Intel video driver update at play.
In terms of music-making, 10.04 gets two big improvements: JACK is now in the “main” repository, which means that a bunch of apps that didn’t ship with JACK support in earlier versions now can (and do), and LV2 support is much more widespread, with major apps like Ardour supporting LV2 out-of-the-box, and more LV2 plug-ins (such as the Invada pack) available as standard packages. The JACK package now automatically sets itself up to get realtime priority access, removing a manual configuration step that’s often a stumbling block for users new to Linux audio.
Two tracks in as many months? Madness! This is another ambient track, but without the drone — it has more of an early Aphex Twin vibe, but with some glitchy drums. I sequenced this in seq24, a pattern-based sequencer designed for live use, and in fact this was originally a “live” take, which I’ve edited and added to. Apart from that, it’s the usual suspects — Blofeld on the synth sounds and some drums, Hydrogen on the rest of the drums, recorded/mixed in Ardour.
mp3 / vorbis / flac: 4 minutes 26 seconds
Around this time last year I said (not on my blog, but on my LJ, for those that are reading this there) that I wanted to do a bit more with myself in 2009, rather than just wasting time online. I can’t say that I spent a lot of time reading or writing (probably a lot less time writing, in fact), and I didn’t spend a whole lot of time outside with my telescope, but I did play a good few games, watched some new TV, and spent a lot of time cooking lunches for work.
Most importantly, though, I actually did something productive musically. Until 2009, the best I’d managed since high school was a couple of minutes of generic techno, but in 2009 I produced two complete tracks, both of which I’m still pretty happy with. My dalliances with music in the past have usually ended in frustration, but this year, through a combination of new hardware, much-improved software (mad props to the Ardour guys), and perseverance, I got over the hump. I now feel like I have the tools I need to make whatever I decide to make, and perhaps most importantly, my desire to make music is just as strong as it was a year ago.
I’m usually not one to set hard goals, but if there’s something I’d like to make this year, it’s a proper song — lyrics, singing, and all of that good stuff.
I spend a lot of time talking to Americans on the Internet, and they’re always reminding me that, due to the timezone difference, I live in the future compared to them. Today, though, I had a moment that reminded me that all of us really are living in the future.
It was simple enough, really — I was sitting on IRC, and someone pasted a URL in to channel, but instead of linking to some lewd image from 4chan, it was a live stream of the recording session he had in progress in his home studio. Streaming audio isn’t exactly a new thing — Internet radio and live online concerts date back to the days of RealPlayer and dialup — but there was just something fascinating about being able to listen in on someone else’s bedroom studio as they put a track together, with everyone on channel listening and giving feedback, and even recording and emailing across their own snippets of audio.
The best part of it all is that the technology isn’t that hard to get running. I installed Icecast on my virtual server, and DarkIce on my desktop at home, and before too long I had a live stream of my Ardour session up-and-running. DarkIce runs as a JACK client, so it can take its input from anywhere in your JACK signal path, and it can encode to Ogg Vorbis, which is supported natively in Firefox 3.5.