Not that long ago people were predicting the death of hardware synths, and with good reason — software synths promised far greater convenience and flexibility at a lower price. There’s something uniquely compelling and immediate about working with hardware, though, so I’m glad to see that hardware synths live on. In fact, I’d say they’re thriving, if the new breed of cheap, quirky synths is any indication. These devices deliver unique sounds, hands-on control, and highly hackable designs, all for less than the cost of many soft-synths. Continue reading →
Despite a whole bunch of idiosyncrasies, I love seq24, and even though I tend to think of Qtractor as my MIDI sequencer of choice under Linux, it’s actually seq24 that I’ve used the most in producing my tracks. I’m planning on making some video tutorials for it, since it’s such a strange beast to deal with at first, but before doing that, I want to demonstrate the kind of things you can do with it.
Here, then, is a “performance” of my track tiny droplets — the various MIDI loops used are all pre-sequenced, but I’m triggering them all in realtime using my QWERTY keyboard. In this case, seq24 is driving Hydrogen and my Blofeld, and I’m using Ardour as a live mixer to process and mix the audio from those synths in to a stereo stream.
UPDATE: If you’d prefer to download the video rather than streaming it on YouTube, I’ve uploaded a WebM version of it. WebM is still quite new, but current versions of VLC and MPlayer support it.
On a brief side note, I have to give a shout-out to my good friend AutoStatic for describing his new video capture process using Xephyr and FFmpeg — I used it here, and the results look great. The audio was captured with JACK TimeMachine, and in another first for me, I edited it all together using the brilliant Kdenlive.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s one for the Depeche Mode fans — a cover of Enjoy the Silence, which is fairly faithful to the original. Since buying my fancy-pants mic last year I hadn’t actually sung anything (even though I have done a crapload of podcast recording), so this is me correcting that, and also having some fun with synths and sequencing. I did a lot of this on the laptop, so there are more Linux soft synths in there, but I still pulled out the Blofeld for the bass and the “beeeeow” sound in the chorus. Let me know what you think of the results!
Here’s that new track I was working on — it’s another synthy thing which turned out, not-entirely-deliberately, like something from an old-school arcade game soundtrack. Lots of Blofeld, and a bit of distortion. It came together more quickly than my last track, and I’m pretty happy with the results, especially since I didn’t feel the need to spend hours and hours tweaking EQs and compressor curves to get it to sound alright to my ears. Enjoy!
I’ve never learned to play guitar, but I wondered the other day if I could synthesise something similar to the sound of a distorted electric guitar, and I don’t think this sketch is too far off. The raw sound is from the Blofeld, and is very vaguely guitarish, but running it through a guitar amp/cabinet sim on the PC adds that distorted character to it.
I’ve been playing around with some more distorted sounds on the Blofeld, so here’s a couple of them, with some 909 drums courtesy of Hydrogen. The pad sound is running through a chorus with fairly extreme settings — they’re not far from the chrous plugin’s defaults, and while it wasn’t at all what I was going for, it sounded cool, so I stuck with it.