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.

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.

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

This is one of my shortest tracks, and that was a deliberate departure for me — in the past I feel like I’ve often stretched things out to get to a certain length, and let them get a bit too repetitive in the process, so I deliberately avoided that here. In hindsight, there’s a lot going on in there, so perhaps it could’ve done with being a bit longer, but it definitely shouldn’t be boring at the very least!

In terms of sounds, the pads and bass are from the Blofeld, but everything else is software — Calf Monosynth for the sixteenth-note bleeps in the background, Linuxsampler for the Rhodes, and Hydrogen for the drums. The Rhodes is the excellent jRhodes3 soundfont, which I converted to SFZ format using sfZed, and the kick and snare come from the Microhammer Gnomehammer collection of wintry sounds.

The vocal sounds were a bit of fun. I recorded myself singing a note in to my mic, chopped out a small section that had a nice, stable pitch, and then time-stretched that to produce a longer vocal sound that sounds a little strange and ethereal. Each of the little vocal flourishes was created from that by pitch-shifting it to create the different pitches, and then performing a bunch of micro-edits for the glitchy, stuttery bits.

Effects-wise, I’ve already discussed Loomer Cumulus — it’s responsible for the messed-up drum break in the middle, and a few drum hits in the latter half of the track. I’ve also used the Decimator plugin a bit: the Cumulus drums, vocal sounds, and sixteenth-note bleeps all have automated Decimator plugins. The warbly, lo-fi delay on the Rhodes is courtesy of my Behringer VM1 analog delay pedal.

Of course, Ardour 3 works just as well with external JACK synths, and with hardware synths, so you can still use old favourites like Hydrogen or Yoshimi, but using plugins certainly makes things easier when saving and loading projects.

NOTE: Some of these synths rely on a library called lv2-c++-tools. Versions of this library before 1.0.4 include a bug that prevents Ardour from loading any synth plugins built against it, so if some of the synths listed here fail to load for you, make sure you check your lv2-c++-tools version.

Calf plugins: Monosynth, Organ, and Fluidsynth

The Calf plugins are some of my favourites — the Flanger, Phaser, MultiChorus, and Vintage Delay are all great — and it comes with a couple of synths, too. Calf Monosynth is a classic analogue-style monophonic synth; it handles legato just like an old monosynth, which is something that a lot of soft-synths mess up, so it’s great for both electro basses and proggy leads. The git version adds LFOs and a modulation matrix.

Calf Monosynth handles classic lead and bass sounds

Calf Organ is based on a drawbar organ; rather than emulating a specific organ it takes the basic idea and expands on it. You can adjust the harmonic and the waveform of each drawbar, and independently pan and detune them, too. It also has a pair of resonant filters, and three envelopes for modulation, which make it capable of all sorts of synth sounds beyond what you’d expect from an organ.

Calf Organ is half-organ, half-synth

Calf Fluidsynth does what you’d expect it to do — it lets you load SF2 soundfont files, using the Fluidsynth engine. It’s only available in the git version of Calf, and it’s marked as experimental, so you have to enable it explicitly when configuring the build. Despite all that it does seem to work, though I haven’t had a good chance to really put it through its paces yet.

The experimental Calf Fluidsynth plugin loads SF2 soundfont files

foo-yc20 organ

If you do want a classic organ, foo-yc20 may fit the bill — it emulates a Yamaha YC-20 combo organ, down to the tacky red background in the UI. It does a great job of emulating those cheesy 70s organ sounds, and it works really nicely through a chorus or rotary speaker plugin.

foo-yc20 emulates a deliciously-cheesy combo organ

MDA EPiano

The MDA plugin set, which contains a variety of synth and effects plugins, has long been popular on Windows, and since going open-source a couple of Linux LV2 ports have appeared. Dave Robillard has ported the effects plugins, but he hasn’t yet started on the synths. The lv2-mdaEPiano project has ported one of the synths, though — the electric piano. It’s a very nice little synth, with a great sound and low resource usage.

lv2-mdaEPiano has its own GUI, but it’s a bit plain — I actually prefer Ardour’s standard plugin GUI controls. Thankfully, you can bring up a standard Ardour GUI for it (or any other plugin, for that matter) by right-clicking on it in the plugin list and selecting “Edit”. lv2-mdaEPiano uses lv2-c++-tools, so make sure you’ve upgraded that to 1.0.4 or later before installing it.

lv2-mdaEPiano is a port of the MDA EPiano VST plugin

So-synth plugins: SO-404, SO-666, and SO-KL5

These three plugins started as stand-alone JACK synths, but they were ported to LV2 by Jeremy Salwen:

• SO-404: a single-oscillator monosynth; it’s similar to a 303, and while it’s not a strict emulation it certainly capable of the same kinds of sounds.
• SO-KL5: a “piano” synth — it uses Karplus-Strong string synthesis, and while it doesn’t sound a lot like an actual piano, it sounds really nice in its own way, but a bit of an electric piano-ish vibe to it.
• SO-666: a feedback drone synth, capable of some crazy, dissonant drones; the original website has the best description of how to use it

The So-synth LV2 synths, with standard Ardour GUIs

LinuxSampler

I wasn’t sure about using LinuxSampler as a plugin initially, but it actually seems to work quite well! When you add the LV2 plugin within Ardour, you don’t get a GUI — it just launches an instance of LinuxSampler in the background and defines a MIDI input and audio output. Then, you can fire up LinuxSampler’s Fantasia GUI to load the instrument you wish to use. It’s a little clunky, but the settings are all saved as part of the session and restored when you reload it, just as you’d expect with a plugin.

LinuxSampler's LV2 plugin uses an external GUI to load sounds

The Newtonator

I’m not sure how to describe this one, though words like “bizarre”, and perhaps “insane” certainly come to mind. The Newtonator uses some unique forms of synthesis, which are extensively, and entertainingly, in its manual. Its sound starts off as a simple sine wave, but after a few quick adjustments of some of its modulation parameters you find yourself knee-deep in some rich, distorted sonic mayhem.

The Newtonator creates sounds that are harsh, distorted, crazy, and very cool

Qin

Like SO-KL5, Qin is a little string-based synth; it simulates plucked strings using a pair of oscillators and a pair of filters. Being monophonic limits its usefulness, but it can make some nice sounds.

Qin is a monophonic plucked string synth

ll-plugins: Rudolf-556 and Sineshaper

The ll-plugins plugin set contains two quite unique synths: Sineshaper, a monophonic synth based (unsurprisingly) on sine waveshapers, and Rudolf 556, an analogue drum machine emulation that creates bass, snare, and hat sounds. Even with the updated version of lv2-c++-tools, Sineshaper doesn’t work in Ardour for me, but Rudolf 556 does.

Rudolf 556 creates drum sounds similar to those on analogue drum machines

Composite Sampler

Composite Sampler is the plugin component of the Composite project, which aims to create a realtime sampler and sequencer based upon Hydrogen. The sequencer itself isn’t usable yet, but this plugin, which plays Hydrogen drum kits, works just fine (as of version 0.006.1). With no GUI to speak of it’s a bit fiddly to use, but the release announcement includes basic instructions.

Others

There are some others that I either haven’t tried or couldn’t get working, or which simply aren’t finished yet. If anyone else can elaborate on these, let me know in the comments so that I can improve this article in the future:

• Minicomputer-LV2: this is a work-in-progress LV2 port of Minicomputer. i don’t think it’s in a usable state yet, but it’ll be awesome when it gets there.
• Calf has another “experimental” synth, called Wavetable, which I assume will be modulatable wavetable synth, like those from Waldorf. It doesn’t actually work yet, though, so we’ll just have to wait and see how it develops.
• lv2_guitar: another string synth; thanks to Jeremy’s comments below I was able to build it, but it won’t load in to Ardour.
• Zyn: this project aims to port the various synth engines from the almighty ZynAddSubFX to LV2. I haven’t had any luck getting Ardour 3 to load it, though, and I’m not sure if it’s actively maintained.

Have you had better luck with some of these? Have you found any that I haven’t listed? If so, let me know in the comments!

I think it’ll still be a while before I’ll be recommending Ardour 3 for MIDI-intensive work (it may not reach that point until after the 3.0 release, even), but it’s developing well, and I figure that actually using it and reporting any problems I find is the best way I can help make it the brilliant all-round DAW I think we’re all hope it will become.

An Ardour project with only MIDI tracks? Madness!

I’m using a combination of synths — my Blofeld and Hydrogen, using a2jmidid to bridge Ardour’s JACK MIDI to ALSA MIDI, and some LV2 synth plugins within Ardour — and they’ve all worked well so far. The reliance on LV2 for synth plugins is an issue I’ve mentioned before, and there are still only a handful of LV2 synths, but I’ve had good fun with Calf Monosynth (the git version adds LFOs and a new UI), and with Jeremy Salwen’s ports of the “SO” synths. The SO-KL5 “piano” synth sounds really nice in a way that’s not entirely dissimilar to an electric piano.

Calf Monosynth, with some smooth filter cutoff automation

Automation, especially on MIDI CC messages, is quite sketchy at the moment (it should be addressed in alpha 9), but I did get it working for plugin parameters; in this case, the filter cutoff of a Calf Monosynth instance. This worked really well, giving me some lovely, smooth filter sweeps. If alpha 9 lets me automate parameters on my Blofeld just as easily, I’ll be a very happy man.

Qtractor is adding automation in its next release, too, so one way or another, it looks like we’ll definitely have some solid synth automation features under Linux this year.

You can download or stream it below, or at Bandcamp. Some production notes are under the cut.

It may not be electronic in sound, but it’s still electronic in production; the piano (Pianoteq), drums (LinuxSampler, with the Analogue Drums RockStock kit), and bass (a Soundfont I found online) were sequenced in Qtractor and then recorded in to Ardour 3, alongside the vocals. Mixing in Ardour used a lot of Calf plugins (the Compressor, Filter, and the new multi-band EQ), along with IR for reverb, using a nice Bricasti M7 IR file, and a Rakarrack insert on the bass part to apply an Ampeg SVT 810 cabinet impulse from Red Wire.

I also dabbled with the Zita-AT1 auto-tuner. I don’t have a problem with pitch correction in general, but I don’t tend to like the overly-perfect results that people often get from it, so I was very careful to avoid that. I disabled its automatic pitch detection and instead controlled its corrector with a MIDI track, drawing in corrective notes just where I thought they were absolutely needed. I don’t think it sounds auto-tuned at all as a result — it just sounds a little better than it did without the correction.

The biggest challenge (apart from the lyrics!) was to create instrument parts that sound as real as I could manage, and then get them sitting together in a natural-sounding mix. I think I’ve done a decent enough job — the piano is fine, and while the drums and bass aren’t as natural as they could be, I think the illusion as a whole works well enough.

Until now, this track was all MIDI in Qtractor, and I tried recording the vocals there, too, but I need a lot of takes to get a good vocal down, and Qtractor didn’t make that easy. I suspected that Ardour 3 might, though, so I started a new session, synced it to Qtractor using the JACK transport, and recorded the vocals there.

Stacked region view

Ardour 3 can stack overlapping regions within the one track vertically, making it much easier to work with multiple takes

Ardour has long allowed you to record multiple takes in to the same track, but switching between them in Ardour 2 was time-consuming. In Ardour 3, you can switch a track to “Stacked” mode (under Layers in the track’s right-click menu), which displays the overlapping regions within the track separately, stacked vertically on top of each other. In Stacked mode, you can see clearly what’s in each region (at least, once you’ve expanded the height of the track enough!), and you can rearrange them by clicking and dragging.

It’s also easy to select multiple stacked regions and run the same edit operation on them, such as splitting them at the playhead. It took very little time to split my takes in to individual phrases, and then rearrange and audition them to find the best takes for each part of the vocal.

Matrix-style connection manager

A more fundamental change in Ardour 3 is the new connection manager interface, which is a massive improvement on the old UI for managing connections to tracks, buses, and inserts/sends. It’s intimidating at first, but it’s really quite simple to use: it’s a matrix, with outputs running top-to-bottom on the left, and inputs running left-to-right on the bottom. For each combination of input and output, there’s a box on the grid, and clicking in those boxes creates or deletes a routing between that input and that output.

In specific parts of the UI, you’ll just see subsets of this; for instance, if you open the connections for a specific track, you’ll see the potential outputs on the left, but just the track’s inputs down the bottom. However, there’s also a master connection manager (well, two really — one for audio, and one for MIDI, both available from the Window menu), which lets you make connections to multiple tracks or buses very quickly.

The connection manager can be intimidating at first, but it's super-quick to use

After I finished recording my vocals, I decided to record audio tracks from my MIDI instruments in to Ardour so I could work with just audio for the final mix. For the drums, I used LinuxSampler (discussed a little here), with five separate copies of Analogue Drums’ RockStock kit loaded (one each for kick, snare, toms, hats, and cymbals), each routed to its own pair of JACK outputs. In Ardour 2, it would’ve taken ages to connect those LinuxSampler outputs to my track inputs, but with the master connection manager in Ardour 3, it took just 10 clicks and about as many seconds.

Aux busses (again)

Aux buses and sends make shared effects even easier to set up

I’ve mentioned it before, but the aux bussing in Ardour 3 is great. Once I’d recorded all my instruments in to Ardour, I set up a reverb bus (a convolution reverb using the excellent IR plugin), and added sends from some of my tracks. Not only are they easier to add, but you can see and adjust the send levels straight from the mixer.

While I ran in to some problems with MIDI in Ardour 3 last week, working with just audio this weekend has been rock-solid. A lot of bug fixes have gone in to Subversion since the last alpha release, so I’m hoping we’ll see a beta release soon.

The MIDI functionality takes a little getting used to, but once you’ve learned a few keyboard shortcuts you can quickly jump between working with MIDI and audio at the region level, and working with the individual notes within regions. I still think I’d be more comfortable if the piano roll was in a separate window, but once you’ve resized your MIDI track and adjusted the range of notes it displays to match your needs, it’s really quite easy to draw in notes with the mouse.

Being able to manipulate notes easily with the keyboard is great, too; once you’ve learned the appropriate shortcuts, you can move between notes and edit their pitch, duration, and velocity using the keyboard. Editing velocity in general is a bit strange, though, since there’s no velocity ruler — velocities are represented just by note colour, though hovering the mouse over a note will tell you its velocity value.

I did run in to a few problems beyond simple crashes, but I’m still pretty confident that Ardour 3 will be pretty solid by the time of its final release. I’m not sure it’ll eclipse other sequencers, like Qtractor, in that first final release, at least not in some ways (I do like having a velocity ruler, for instance). That’s just fine, though — Ardour 3 works just as well with external sequencers as Ardour 2 ever did, and its features extend far beyond simply adding MIDI.

The solution had been staring me in the face, but it almost seemed too simple to work, or too cumbersome to be practical: instead of using some kind of drum instrument, just load drum samples in to Ardour directly, and copy and paste the individual drum hits in to place. It sounds like fiddly work, but it’s really not that bad — with Ardour set up to snap regions to its grid, and with the grid set appropriately, it was really quite easy to lay down a simple kick/snare beat, and it was just as easy to copy and paste that beat out over multiple bars.

From there, glitching it up takes a bit more effort, but with such fine control over things you have a lot of scope for creative effects. I tried two main techniques — trimming down individual hits and repeating them very quickly (which required more copying and pasting), and reversing individual hits (using the “Reverse” option from the region’s right-click menu) so that they played backwards, often combined with some fast repetition.

Individual drum hits, sliced and glitched up in Ardour

For the hats, I didn’t want to lay down the individual beats in Ardour, so I created a hat loop in Hydrogen and imported that. In most bars I just let it play as-is, but in some I add some variety by splitting the loop in to beat-length chunks and then manipulating those chunks. I shuffled the chunks around a bit, reversed some of them, repeated some of them, and also shrunk some of them to half their original length (using the Stretch/Shrink Regions tool) and repeated them.

There are tools that can help with this kind of beat-slicing if you don’t want to do it by hand, including Smasher, which works offline but has a lot of different effects on offer, and Tranches, which can slice beats under live MIDI control, but I’ve had trouble fitting these in to my workflow. There’s also Sequent, a commercial plug-in and stand-alone tool, but it’s not super-cheap (though for what it does, I think the price is entirely reasonable). I’m really happy with the results I achieved entirely within Ardour, though, and now that I know how to get these sounds, I think I’ll be making them a lot more often.

I’m very happy to see Mixbus on Linux — it sounds like an excellent product. Sonically, Mixbus adds a high-pass filter, EQ, and compressor on each channel, along with four “mix busses” with tone controls, sidechaining, compression, and tape saturation. The real difference, though, is in the workflow: having those simple compressor and EQ functions, and the sends for each of the mix busses, directly at hand on each track lets you dial in adjustments quickly and intuitively, just like you would if you were sitting at a real console.

As someone who still doesn’t have a great grasp on the finer points of mixing and mastering, I could see Mixbus coming in very handy. I might not want to use it as my primary DAW, especially once Ardour 3 hits with is MIDI features, but it would be a simple matter to record all the parts in another DAW, say “it’s mixing time!”, and then dump stems in to Mixbus to make the most of the material I’ve recorded.