… mixing and mastering.
I found some midi files in the internet with which I play around, using them to just have some input for the tools I’m trying to learn, like Ardour.
Problem is: I forgot who actually made this, and where I’ve downloaded it from. In this case, it’s the famous 1959 piece from Paul Desmond, Take Five. So I have no idea if the midi file I downloaded was licensed under some free license, like GPL or CC – or if it only was freely available on some download site. So in case the author of that file reads this and has anything against me working on it and showing and making audible the result here, let me know if you can still prove that you made it.
The score looked a bit strange in Musescore:
Hm, guitar? And two bass lines?
After listening to it for a while, I decided to mark the lowest line as “percussion”, since with a normal instrument sound it was quite disharmonic. And the pattern looked much more like additional drums and/or percussions.
I also threw out the guitar which made the piece quite busy. And finally I decided to even leave out the main instrument: the saxophone. Better make some kind of accompanying piece for a real musician (or even for myself) than something which doesn’t sound that well with the (virtual) instruments I have at my disposal.
So in the end I just used 3 tracks: piano, bass & drums.
The piano is the Salamander GrandPiano by “rytmenpinne” Alexander Holm, which you can download here (you need a computer with some RAM because this sample alone is almost 2GB uncompressed).
Bass & Drums are both from the Calf Fluidsynth with a GM compatible soundfont. I changed the patch from a fingered to an acoustic bass which sounded nicer and deeper in my opinion.
So in the end, after exporting it from Ardour, it looked like this on my screen:
You see the main Ardour window in the background, while an analysis of the final output is in the front. I set the loudness according to the EBU recommendation R 128 to -23 LUFS (known as “LUKS” in the US), with true peaks at -5.2 dB. So this should have the same average loudness as your average radio or TV program:
Enjoy. And as always, thanks for reading.