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.

The new track is a bit of a downbeat, ambient-ish thing, with some lo-fi sounds mixed in with some glitchy elements. I definitely put Ardour’s MIDI features to the test: there are MIDI tracks running out to my Blofeld and to Hydrogen, along with LV2 synths (Calf Monosynth and Linuxsampler), along with automation of CC parameters on the Blofeld and automation of plugin paramaters on Calf Monosynth. I’ve done quite a bit of effects automation as well, particularly with the bitcrushing Decimator plugin.

There’s even a VST plugin in there now; I had been beta-testing Loomer Cumulus, using it as a standalone synth, but with Ardour’s new VST support I now have it running within Ardour directly. Cumulus is somewhere between a synth and an effect: it lets you load a sample, and then trigger its playback using granular synthesis with varying paramaters, altering the starting point, pitch, and playback rate, among other things. You can define up to eight sets of those parameters, and then trigger those via MIDI keys. It can turn all sorts of sounds in to eerie textures, but it can just as easily take a drum loop and turn it in to a wonderfully glitchy mess, which is exactly what I used it for.

I’m pretty sure the track is done, but I don’t want to release it just yet. I plan to sit on it for a few days at least, while I read more of my copy of Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio, but I like the idea of putting together at least an EP with a couple of other tracks and releasing them all at once. That might not be practical if it takes me four months to finish each track, though, so I may post the individual tracks here when they’re ready, and then do an official Bandcamp release once they’re all done.

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!

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.

This was whipped up on Sunday night mostly in Qtractor, with Hydrogen for the drums, and my Blofeld for all the other sounds. I’d normally record everything in to Ardour and mix it there, but I stayed in Qtractor for this one, and it did a fine job; I had no trouble replicating my usual trick of running the drums on to separate tracks so that I can apply individual effects to each, for instance. The result is a bit trite, but it’s fun, it loops pretty smoothly, and I think it suits the game well.

My first instinct was to load up Hydrogen, sequenced from Qtractor, with one of the few big Hydrogen kits around. The Big Mono kit from Analogue Drums sat nicely with the feel of the track, but they’re recorded in mono (as the name suggests), and they have a lot of room sound, too. They also push Hydrogen hard — with 210MB of samples loaded, it needs 400-500MB of RAM to run. If I wanted to go with even better sounds, Hydrogen wasn’t going to work.

The answer, then, was LinuxSampler, which laughs heartily at gigabyte-sized sound sets. I took the plunge and spent a whole $25 on another Analogue Drums kit, called RockStock — it has more drums than Big Mono, and they’re all recorded in stereo, with separate close mic and room mic recordings of each. Thanks to some third-party SFZ mappings, it works beautifully in LinuxSampler, and despite having 870MB of samples, it uses just 200-300MB.

One question in using LinuxSampler that I haven’t quite answered yet is how I’m going to mix it, since there’s no way to get separate per-drum JACK outputs from it. You can load the same sound set in to LinuxSampler multiple times, though, with little additional overhead, so there’s nothing stopping me from loading RockStock five or six times for each of the different drums I want to use. Those separate instances can then be routed to separate JACK outputs. I just need to make sure that I split my MIDI drum tracks up in the same way.

I have some basic drum parts written, using just two groups of drums (kick/snare/toms, and hats/cymbals) routed to two instances of RockStock in LinuxSampler, and it’s sounding pretty good — not quite there, but hopefully not too far off. With more attention to detail in the programming (it feels like I’m slowly learning the drums, just without the drums!), and some appropriate treatment in the mixdown (EQ, compression, etc.), I think I’ll be able to produce some solid, convincing drum parts.

There’s a highly reverberant stairwell at work, and with no option to bring in specialised equipment to record it, I figured I’d take a stab at it with that I did have at hand. I took my Android phone to the stairs, set TapeMachine recording, and used a clap of my hands as my impulse. The result is surprising — it’s very “coloured”, due to limited frequency coverage of both my mic and my impulse sound, but it’s definitely a reverb, and it might even be one that comes in handy for certain applications. For my testing, I set it up on a bus in Ardour using the excellent Jconvolver and then piped in some drums, setting up sends as I thought appropriate.

The sketch below has three versions of the same drum sequence: the first is dry, the second uses the CALF Reverb plugin, and the third uses my convolution reverb. It’s not subtle (nor should it be, given how strongly reverberant the space I recorded the impulse in was), but I like the sound on the snare — with some work, I think that could sit nicely in the mix on the right track.

• Advanced pattern triggering techniques: queuing and snapshots
• Basic note editing: copying/pasting notes and changing velocities
• MIDI CC automation
• Background patterns
• MIDI note entry (step-sequencing) and MIDI recording

It’s a little longer than I’d have liked, but there’s a lot in there! If you’d prefer smaller, shorter tutorials in future, feel free to leave a comment and let me know.

For downloaders, there’s also a 720p WebM version available (107MB).

There’s an unspoken “step zero” here — get yourself a working copy of seq24. I’m not sure about other distributions, but on Ubuntu, especially 64-bit, the packaged version seems very unstable. The best thing to do is to grab the 0.9.1 version from the seq24 Launchpad and install that — this new release includes a bunch of bug-fixes, and a few new features, too.

The original plan was for a straight screencast, like my earlier synth tutorials, but I was so impressed by Kdenlive that I decided to have a bit of fun with it — hopefully the fun I had comes through in the finished product.

For downloaders, there’s also a 720p WebM version available.

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.