Music. Photography. Thoughts.
I had this beautiful track from Tom & Devin on my watchlist since quite a while. And today I could finally add a little something to it:
List of musicians, so far:
Thanks to my friends over at Wikiloops for their wonderful music. And thanks to you for listening. Join us to add something.
Richard fixed the issue with the embedding of the Wikiloops player last night, and he tested it with my post “Blues Knows No Colour” on this blog. Cool; many thanks man!
So now I can try and show/play you the last remix I’ve got plus one that I had made for some friends (with mixing only, no bass needed in that one). So here they are:
Yup; works. And here’s the one I (re-) mixed:
Works as well. Thanks for listening, and if you’re a musician, then join and play with us on Wikiloops!
Fell in love with a song with German lyrics today – and I instantly played it another time, then to Zuleikha, then I recommended it to my brother – so I can as well recommend it here.
It’s “Nase vor die Tür” from my friend and fellow Wikiloops musician Patrik aka Offfocus. I have watchlisted it because there ain’t no bass in it yet… 🙂
Enjoy.
Just heard a really nice track on Wikiloops from fellow members timp and Fishinmissio, which they called “Walkin in My Sleep“. And it reminded me of an older one which I haven’t heard since quite a while, but where even the video of it was a piece of art. And yes, I know that I can be hopelessly romantic, but here it is as a reminder of that divine chaos which we call “life”:
And as always, thanks for reading, listening, and watching…
Last night, Zuleikha uploaded her newest composition “Last Peace” to Wikiloops. I had helped her a bit with getting the Addictive Keys Studio Grand into Ardour, so she mentioned me as well on her lovely track. And over the night, she got 11 thumb ups, 5 downloads and 1 remix already as you can see here or on her track:
I also like her new avatar there which she drew herself:
And as you can see, she also received a first remix already, which were some jazzy drums & guitar played by João (nickname jjdf) from Portugal. Obrigado!
As always, thanks for reading.
Over at Wikiloops, the album of today was again one by my friend, Monsieur OliVBee from Paris, France. And in his ‘Deep Dark Blue‘, he features another great singer which is AnneCozean from the American west coast:
I listened to this today at work when I needed to blend out discussions and/or telephone calls from colleagues, and again I was blown away by the quality, the taste, and the musicality of all involved musicians. And by Anne’s voice of course. Another outstanding album from Oliv and friends.
And I will definitely listen to his other albums which are yet unknown to me, like ‘MOF on the loops‘ (featuring marmotte), or ‘Instrumentals‘.
This is world-class music, and if you don’t know and/or didn’t hear anything about Wikiloops yet, just listen to one of these to get an idea of what it’s all about. Heartily recommended, and another instant fav and download from me.
As always, thanks for reading, and for listening.
At Wikiloops, we have that concept of a ‘watchlist’, and mine got filled quite a lot recently. Each time I sit at work and listen to something where I think I could add something, I add it to this watchlist – so mine currently has over 100 gems inside:
At home, I’ll download all of these when I have the time, and start ‘working’ on them in my DAW (=’Digital Audio Workstation’). Convert MP3s to WAVs with Audacity first, then load them into Ardour. Set the tempo, check with a metronome, eventually make a clicktrack and/or a count-in. See if I can enhance the given audio, and it helps if you have single HD tracks because a drum kit or a guitar might need other treatments than a voice.
Often I also add markers where the chords change or to separate parts of the song so during recording I can see the structure.
And finally I’ll grab my bass and play.
And all of this is great fun. I’m learning so many different things. And I’m so glad that I found Wikiloops…
It’s now almost exactly 15 months since I found and joined Wikiloops, this ‘Über-cool‘ platform for jamming with other musicians from all around the globe. It’s even fun to only listen, and to discover new original music each and every day there – we have different “radios” (streams) to cover almost every taste you might have at the moment. So even for ‘consumers’ this is nice, and it’s heaven for musicians. I’m so glad that I’ve found it.
And if you don’t only listen and/or practise to the looping tracks but remix and upload some stuff yourself, you’ll receive a little appreciation from others in form of nice and helpful comments, and “thumb ups” like in other social media platforms.
And today, I received thumb up number 1000 from fblack (from Spain) on my latest contribution to the track “Story…“. Thumb number 999 was from Ms Shi from England, number 1001 from Pexe from Brasil. So my statistics (which you can see on my profile) looked like this an hour ago:
So thanks go out to my friends on that platform for being nice and commenting and giving feedback in form of these thumb ups. As Chuck Mangione would state it: Feels So Good…
Thanks again my friends, and to those whom I haven’t met in real life yet: I hope that day comes soon 🙂
Thanks to everyone who reads this, for your interest 🙂
At LinuxMusicians, we have some really good producers (like for instance user ‘singforme’ and/or ‘bluebell’). And in this thread on LM, one of them pointed me to an article written by Jason Evangelho for Forbes, here.
That article is about UbuntuStudio, which Zuleikha was using until recently (she’s now running the KXStudio stuff on a ‘normal’ Ubuntu on what used to be Mitchie’s Dell notebook, now hers). The article also covers the Jack Audio Connection Kit, and Ubuntu Studio Controls, which together bring a bit of nice automation into the game, taking out some complex steps of setting up a productive audio environment on a PC. As Jason concludes in his article:
I tried Ubuntu Studio 18.04 last year in a short-lived attempt to see if it could replace my macOS + Logic Pro workflow (my last hurdle to using Linux full time), and I honestly walked away a bit disappointed. But 19.04 is shaping up to worthy of a second chance. You’ll have my thoughts when the final version releases this Spring.
But so far this is interesting for musicians and/or creative people only (which covers some of my own family, but not many other people). So if you’re in this ‘other people’ group, stay with me just a little bit longer, because the other interesting finding in his article on Forbes were links to Jason’s own site Linux For Everyone, and to his music on Soundcloud.
And while Jason’s music might be interesting to you or not, I’ve read just one article on his site called “Ditch Dropbox: Create A Personal Home Backup Server With Raspberry Pi 3” which made me write this link collection, and recommending it to colleagues and friends (who aren’t musicians or other creatives) as well.
What Jason is describing there is simply how to set up a small and low cost home server based on Linux which everyone could use, together with some useful stuff like apps for your desktop, and your Android or iOS device to make use of it all – without having to touch a command line even once. He shows how to sync your PC and your phone with that small server automatically using NextCloud, so you have basically replaced Dropbox or any other commercial service provider (you have to read some additional stuff on how to open ports on your router, or to connect to your home from outside via DynDNS-like services if you haven’t done so, but that’s stuff for another article).
So at this point, Jason concludes:
Wait A Minute….
Did we just setup a Linux-based file server without using the command line once? Yes. Yes we did.
Thanks for reading.
I know I have some colleagues who are interested in just this. And I don’t know about you, but I am interested in something like this myself. And besides, I’ll go on reading Jason’s other stuff as well, so I have set up an RSS-bookmark to his site, so that I can see new headlines when he comes up with new articles. So, in a nutshell, I consider this recommended reading for everyone who’s an admin of their own home network. You. Me. Everyone.
P.S.: Jason’s articles on Forbes are good reads as well. I’ve short-scanned only the last 2 months or so, and found these three very interesting ones:
I Can’t Believe I’m Writing This Linux Article About Loving The Xfce Desktop Environment
Warning: Internet Explorer Just Became A Silent But Serious Threat To Every Windows User
Here’s The Shocking Reality Of Completely Blocking Google From Your Life
Like I said/wrote: interesting (tho he still is new to the Linux desktop experience, but this might apply to you as well, right?). As always, thanks for your interest, and for reading.
Played on a nice song from RobM, mpointon, jamlady, and ROBJOL (all Wikiloops usernames) yesterday, and since we’re not done with embedding the new Wikiloops player into WordPress, please consider listening to the song “Story…” at its source. This will also show you the list of musicians who participated so far, and some comments from other Wikiloopers.
Thanks for reading, and for listening.