That iconic theme from Midsomer Murders

Mitchie loves the series – “Inspector Barnaby” like it is called here in Germany. And we all love the music. See and hear it being played on the Theremin by Celia Sheen:

Celia Sheen plays Midsomer Murders on Theremin

Like always, thanks for watching, and for listening.

No “AI” needed…

This:

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Flageolet, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023

… is the same as my blog header photo, but heavily blurred with The Gimp‘s “Lens Blur”, using a radius of 200.

I took inspiration from the wonderful wallpapers (especially the “Sage” one) of the Google Pixel 6a mobile phone, which let you really concentrate on your foreground instead of the underlying background. See here as an example:

my desktop as of now

See how much the browser window and also the Conky system monitor stand out if the background just isn’t that sharp and detailed? What a simple but effective idea from Google’s artist crew; bravi! See 9to5google, and especially this image which would also be big enough to cover my desktop…

Like always, thanks for reading.

In German / auf Deutsch: Arbeiten mit Linux

Wer Deutsch kann und mit Linux und freier (und meist kostenloser) Software Musik machen möchte sollte sich den Artikel Arbeiten mit Linux von Michael im Musiker-Board durchlesen:

Abeiten mit Linux, von Michael im Musiker-Board

In English: if you can read and understand German, and if you’re interested in making music with Linux and free (mostly also cost-free) software, then you should read Michael’s article “Arbeiten mit Linux” in the German-speaking Musiker-Board.

Recommended reading. Thanks for your interest.

Started to play again

Today, for the first time since quite a while, I stood and sat down with both my upright and also my fretless basses, playing to some template/song from Wikiloops again. And it’s fun. And although I’m not after perfection anymore – the journey is the reward – I’ll have to put in some time again. Can’t wait…

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Fretless bass at the computer desk, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023

Like always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.

A good decision & “Nerve Net”

Yesterday I encoded a snippet of video out of a much longer (almost 3 hour long) one – and saw that when transcoding it with Handbrake, all 8 cores and 16 threads of my CPU were used as they should – looks like this if you have conky on your desktop:

Handbrake transcoding parts of “Stunksitzung”

Average framerate was over 140fps, so more than 4.5 times faster than the realtime video. Cool; for jobs like these we’ve bought the right machines, or rather CPUs (I build all our desktops myself).

When making music, these machines are quite overkill for what I’m doing with them. Here’s a screenshot from the new Ardour 7.3 with codename “Nerve Net” (funny, “nerv ned” could be Cologne dialect or so):

Ardour 7.3 “Nerve Net” on Debian 11 “Bullseye” (with a 6.x kernel from backports)

1% CPU usage, and even with a few tracks more it’s still pretty bored. I don’t use many MIDI tracks and instrument plugins, mostly – or rather, almost always – audio tracks only.

So that’s nice to know. And like always, thanks for reading.

P.S.: I quite like the Ardour install script on Linux – it asks if you want to keep 7.2 (I said “no”) and 6.9 (I said “yes”) installed, and it runs the uninstall scripts for those you don’t want to keep, and cleans up. Very nice.

Saying hello to and thanks for the “Blonde Bop”

Glen MacArthur aka GMaq, farmer, musician, and inventor/creator of AVLinux and the AVL drum kits has decided to give us all a new gift, his “Blonde Bop” drum kit. Here’s kind of a “making of” and explanation:

New Free Drumkit! AVL Drumkits Blonde Bop Kits and LV2 Plugin!

So if your DAW can take sfz or sf2 samples or even better, LV2 plugins, go and have a look – and as you can see, you can – at least in Ardour – even spread out Robin Gareus’ nice plugin over separate channels just like a drummer would do in the studio.

Seen/found in Linux Musicians and the Ardour Discourse, and thank you very much Glen – again!

Jim Stinnett (RIP) & Charles Berthoud

Someone opened a thread in the German-speaking bass players’ forum bassic.de, asking peoples opinions about Charles Berthoud who is well known because of his Youtube channel. I answered that I first saw and heard Charles together with his teacher, Mr. Jim Stinnett (RIP), and that I liked both of them, alone and also together. Here are the videos I embedded in that answer:

Both are/were incredibly good players, too bad that we lost Jim a while ago. Thanks for everything, sir!