This is from Sunday, in collaboration with Philip who wrote and sang his awesome polyrhythmic template – so I tried to stay polyrhythmic myself as well:
Thanks to Filo974 for the fun, thanks to you for listening.
Ardour 6.0 is released
Great news for all fans of free and open source software: Ardour 6.0 is out. In fact I was waiting for the announcement since last week or so, when Harrison Consoles announced their new version 6.0 of Mixbus and Mixbus 32c, both of which are based upon Ardour.
So this is how the original looks like:
You can read the announcement and get some links from Paul Davis, who is the founder and main developer of Ardour (and Jack and other great programs), here.
And after using it for free for over two years already, I decided to finally subscribe to it, making this the first and only software subscription for me (with the exception of Wikiloops, glad to support that platform as well).
I’ve not seen or tried version 6 yet since on Linux I’ll get it more or less automatically via the KXStudio repositories, but now I can also download the Windows and/or Mac versions of it if I like to – and sure, never tried it on Windows, so why not? I know that some plugins like the ones from Calf Studio Gear are available for Linux only, but so what – I can still try and compare it to others, right? Will be fun I guess 🙂
So thanks to Paul, Robin, and the countless other developers who make something that great even possible. Hats off to you guys and girls.
You can download precompiled versions of Ardour starting at 1US$ here.
Thanks for reading.
May 22a / One of these days
Yesterday I threw away all of my preset templates which I had made in Ardour – I had way too many, now I have one. And that is based upon the GxSVT amp simulation; I once had an Ampeg SVT amplifier and 2 cabinets, and I think that one would fit pretty well to a P (“Precision”) bass like the one I have.
So I took two tracks and played on them with that new sound setup. Here they are:
As always, clicking on the track IDs will lead you to the song within Wikiloops.
Thanks to Mark and Frankie for their awesome templates, and thanks to you for listening.
Roll away
Here’s another fine take on John’s (Fanne’s) wonderful Celtic song – it’s almost like a reply onto the one from Brian, wonderfully composed and performed by Shi:
I’ve had so much fun with this one, thank you very much my dear friends – and thanks to you for listening to it 🙂
Wild eyed Irish girls
Great template from fanne, cool lyrics and vocals from gwailoah:
Thanks for listening.
News from Lizy
This is from yesterday after work (between about 1700 to 1900 CEST), and what I wrote in Wikiloops about the song is this:
“Fell in love with this beautiful piece from Phil and from SilverOne at first hearing, so I decided to add a bit of a bottom end with my fretless to it. Also doubled the main melody. Thanks for this cool jam my friends, that was fun! 
Hope you like it…”
So thanks to Filo974 and to SilverOne for the incredible music, and thanks to you for listening. Hope you liked it as much as I did when playing onto it.
As always, thanks for reading, and for listening. Come and join us at Wikiloops to make some more nice music.
A little something that we need…
I was just congratulating another fellow Wikiloops musician for another one of his nice template tracks when I saw this little box beside his track:
And when clicking that blue hyperlink in it, it took me to the Wikiloops Knowledge base where this is explained in a bit more detailed way:
So yes, besides really contributing to the project as a whole (and as such, to us all), this what’s asked here is cost-free and still means a lot to some of us – so please if you like something, give the musicians kind of a nod, and a thumbs up. Kindness doesn’t cost you anything else than that 🙂
And if you can, then please support Wikiloops. It’s all which some of us have in these times of being locked to our homes…
Thank you 🙂
è©© – (ShÄ«) Vol. 1 & 2
Yesterday I published two new albums on Wikiloops:
And while a click on these images will lead you to Flickr where the images are hosted, you can find links to the albums in my widgets as always.
Each of these two albums contain 13 songs sung by Shi, and the last 5 on the second album weren’t published on other ones before, so these are new.
Thanks to Shi and to all the musicians, and thanks to Wikiloops as well. Hope you like these.
The Gimp has some incredible fonts
I was looking for some free kanji-like vector graphics to make an album cover with just using one Chinese character, namely è©©.
Copied one out of a Youtube video, but then I stopped and thought “hmmm, cannot do this, at least not without asking…” – so I asked.
To just have something to do I decided to make a template for Wikiloops album cover images (size 465×456) in The Gimp, and once inside that program I looked into the fonts, and bingo! – there was everything (and more) which I wanted and needed for my next project. Have a look:
Awesome, isn’t it? Who knew that I had all the vector graphics I needed! So I wrote another email to the friendly calligrapher on Youtube and told him/them that he/they could ignore my last message, but feel free to be invited to Wikiloops in case they also make music like we do… oh, and their character was in simplified Chinese, while this one here is traditional.
I’m happy. Best things in life are free…
And as always, thanks for reading.
What to do in times of a pandemia
Well I can hardly give any tips of what best to do in a “lockdown” kind of situation, when you can’t or at least shouldn’t really leave the house. I can only tell you what we’re doing:
- we went shopping of Friday after my work already, so we were through with that early on. It also helps if you enter the supermarkets as a single person, not with a whole family. Better for the distances we should keep…
- reading is always good – my current favourite fiction author is Haruki Murakami as you might know if you’re reading this blog once in a while
- listening to music and/or watching TV is what I’ll guess what most people would do, and of course we’re also doing that. Long running series like “Doctor Who” are good tips if you like that
- If you’re a computer geek, get involved into some free and open source project – write some code or documentation, or share some tips via an own blog or Youtube or whatever
- We’re the lucky ones, at least Zuleikha and me – we play instruments. Plus we are both members of Wikiloops where you can play with other musicians from all around the globe for free if you like. All you need is some way to get your instrument or voice into a computer, which is usually done with some kind of audio interface – see here for some examples. And Wikiloops just lifted its time restrictions, so even as a new user you can now start down- and uploading at once, without having to wait (or to pay).
- If you are creative in another field – I consider myself a portrait photographer for instance – then do this at home as well. Take photos of your family, or in case you’re alone, take self portraits. There’s always something new to learn, and if it’s only about lighting.
Other than that I haven’t done much this weekend, in fact I wasn’t even out of the house except to feed the birds:
As I’ve read, the rate of new infections with SARS-CV2 aka the Corona virus is slowing down here in Germany. So maybe (and hopefully) it helps if everyone is staying at home or at least keeping a safe distance. And while it’s still way too early to speak of or to hope for a trend, we can still carry on and wait this out, shall we?
Be safe. Stay healthy. And thank you for reading.