“A free return trajectory is one of a very small sub-class of trajectories in which the trajectory of a satellite traveling away from a primary body (for example, the Earth) is modified by the presence of a secondary body (for example, the Moon) causing the satellite to return to the primary body.”

This is perhaps my favourite track on the album, partly because it’s the closest to the direction I want to head in, with chilled-out but downbeat vibe. It was also the first track I worked on, on day 1. It started as a live SooperLooper jam, using a Rhodes sound to play some chords and melodies over some Blofeld drums.

On day 5 I picked up that jam and imported it in to Ardour, though I ended up replacing those recorded loops with MIDI versions almost immediately. I kept the chord progression from the initial jam, but replaced the Rhodes with a pad sound from the Blofeld that uses an LFO synced to the MIDI clock to pulsate up and down in time with the music (in theory, at least). The Rhodes is still there, though, but just for the lead part, using the MDA ePiano plugin.

By day 6 the arrangement was mostly in place, and I added the bass and the synth lead parts, both using TAL NoiseMaker, and several extra drum parts, using the Blofeld. I also used my Behringer VM1 delay pedal on the Rhodes sound, to give it some lo-fi feel. The “snare” in the chorus is from TAL NoiseMaker, too; I was never entirely happy with that sound, but it was the best I could do at the time. I posted it to Soundcloud on day 6, but I ended up tweaking it a bit more after that on day 7.

Even though I really liked this track, I could make a list of all of the things that are wrong with it. In fact, let’s do that:

• The lead sound is a bit too clean and proggy, and its levels are a bit up-and-down
• The rise and fall of the pad sound doesn’t always fall in line with the beat
• The kick drum all-but-disappears sometimes, due to a cancellation problem in the patch that I’m yet to sort out
• While I initially liked the sound of MDA ePiano, I found myself liking it a lot less by the end of the recording process — some of its limitations had started to shine through
• That “snare” sound in the chorus needs a rethink, or at least a lot of work

With some work, though, I think this could be a really good track — the basics are definitely there, and none of the above is unfix-able by any means.

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.

FingerPlay gives you a selection of controllers — sliders, X/Y controllers, and drum pads — all of which send MIDI messages via Wi-Fi to a tiny Java-based server app on a PC. There, you can connect the MIDI output to whatever app you like, just as you would with any other MIDI controller gear. The controls are set up in separate “pages”; a scroll bar on the right switches between the pages.

I did some quick testing, using the drum pads to trigger drum pads in Hydrogen, and using the sliders and pads to control the gain and muting of individual loops within SooperLooper, and it did a great job, responding quickly and smoothly to my input.

FingerPlay MIDI's pad page

FingerPlay MIDI's slider page

Here are the steps I followed to get it up and running:

1. Install the FingerPlay MIDI app on your device, and download and extract the server app from the FingerPlay MIDI site
2. Load the ALSA “virmidi” driver:
   sudo modprobe snd-virmidi
3. Launch the server app:
   java -jar FingerPlayServer.jar
4. Connect the “Virtual Raw MIDI 1-0″ ALSA MIDI device up to whatever app you want to control.
5. On the phone, launch FingerPlay MIDI, and hit the icon in the top right corner to open the settings screen. Set the “Server Address” to your PC’s IP address (or hostname), and click the “Connect to Server” button.
6. Scroll further down on the settings page and open the “MIDI Out Device” option. In the list, select the top “VirMIDI” option — in my case, it’s “[hw:1,0,0]“.
7. Exit the settings and start hitting some controls!

You can use the usual tools of choice to see what MIDI messages are actually coming out for each control — I tend to use QMidiRoute, since it also lets you remap or process the messages if you need to. As you’d expect, the sliders and X/Y controls send MIDI CCs, while the pads send notes. With Hydrogen, I had to transpose the pads up an octave to match what Hydrogen was expecting, but when I did, tapping out drum lines seemed quite responsive.

One thing to watch out for with tools that have MIDI learn features, like SooperLooper, is that the sliders and X/Y controls send “trigger” CCs when they’re touched in any way, as well as the CCs you’d expect. I had better luck with SooperLooper when I set up the bindings manually instead. My bindings file is available here.

• 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!

The classic solution to this problem is a looper, which lets you capture chunks of your audio as you play and have them played back in a loop, so you can move on to playing something else over the top. For Linux, there are two popular loopers – SooperLooper and Freewheeling – and it was actually SooperLooper that I tried first, but it has a steep learning curve, and I just couldn’t get the hang of it.

Fast-forwarding to last week, I watched the tutorial videos for Freewheeling and decided to try it. It’s not nearly as flexible as SooperLooper, but it’s set up out-of-the-box as a performance tool, and it looked like it would suit me perfectly. Unfortunately, when I tried it myself, I was unable to run it for more than a minute or two before it crashed spectacularly. I’m not sure if it was because I was on a 64-bit system or not, but with activity on it seemingly stopped for now, it was clear that those crashes weren’t going to go away.

Perhaps it was just from watching a looper in action, but when I then tried SooperLooper again, it suddenly made a lot more sense, and I was able to record in some loops in realtime and have them all remain in sync. Taking inspiration from Freewheeling’s default setup, I then used QMidiRoute to split off the bottom octave of my keyboard, and fed these events to SooperLooper to switch between loops and trigger loop recording and overdubbing. I also assigned my keyboard’s knob controls to manage panning and gain on my loops.

The great thing with this setup is that it’s infinitely expandable. An obvious next step would be some kind of foot controller to trigger loop recording, so I can do that hands-free. Beyond that, the sky’s the limit! SooperLooper has individual JACK outputs for each track, so you could easily mix them in, say, Ardour, setting up a bunch of effects and then using a knob or grid controller to control your effects send levels in real-time.