Category: music

Posted on

Alerta, alerta, antifascista!

Yesterday I’ve read an article (in German) by Elias Raatz titled “Der Sound der Rebellion“, and it was about a band from Heidelberg called Irie Révoltés. That band existed until 2017, and it was lead by two brothers with French roots who sang in German and in French, the music being somewhere between Dub, Ska, Reggae, Punk, Rock, and Rap. On their homepage (and in the article) it was announced that they’ll come together again this year for a final concert tour, so in case you’d want some tickets, you’d have to be fast – some places are sold out already. The article closes with the German lyrics of their song “Antifaschist“, which can be translated like:

“I was born like this, and I’ll stay that way until I’ll die, I was born like this, anti fascist forever forever…”

If I remember it correctly, I had heard it not too long ago while visiting an old friend of mine. And that song would make a cool summer hit in difficult times like this; it’s scary how history seems to repeat, isn’t it? The only hope is that people will not forget about that Italian headline of the resistance of over 100 years ago, and that they will still sing and dance to songs like these…

That reminds me of an interview with Eric Idle, who said about today’s America: “I really think they’re serious about wanting to get rid of liberals and lefties. They’re very crazy”. He also said: “I’ve had a green card for about 28 years. I’d be proud to be thrown out because I’d be in very select company. The last English comedian to be thrown out of America for political reasons was Charlie Chaplin.” – definitely an anti fascist as well, if you think about his “The Great Dictator” masterpiece…

So maybe it’s time for us all to be a bit more anti fascistic, and being proud about it, isn’t it?

Anyway, and like always, thanks for reading.

Posted on

Musicians’ distros

Yesterday I’ve had a brief look at two Linux distributions which come more or less tailor-made and preconfigured for musicians and other creatives, like people who like to make videos, or who render, paint, photograph, and so on.

Both UbuntuStudio and AVLinux are fantastic tools for the job.

AVLinux 23.2 running the Ardour DAW, and within it, a virtual Ampeg SVT amplifier as a pre-installed plugin

UbuntuStudio is now using the KDE Plasma desktop, heavily customised, so it doesn’t look like Windows anymore. I would recommend that one for machines with at least 4GB of main memory, and with a 4 core CPU.

AVLinux is made by Glen McArthur (a farmer if I remember correctly) and is even more quirky, using MX Linux as its base, and on top of that an Enlightenment desktop (see my screenshot above). This one is much more frugal, and the one you see running above was installed on a virtual machine with only 2GB of RAM, and with a dual core CPU. Means that it would run on my wife’s notebook from ca. 2010 🙂

Both come really nicely preconfigured, and as you can see, a bass player like me could start right away plugging his Precision Bass into a virtual Ampeg SVT amplifier, and go and play. Both also come as live images which you can run from an USB stick to see if you like them before installing them onto your hard drives and/or SSDs. Both MXLinux and Ubuntu are based upon Debian of course, which is the granddaddy of many good Linux distributions.

I also looked at the librazik website, which is another distribution meant for musicians, this time from France. But librazik is still based upon Buster, which is Debian oldstable, so I haven’t looked at it.

For Windows users: I recommend having a look at Ventoy, which can hold more than one Linux .iso file, so you can try them all from the same USB stick. And now go and have a look, and start making some music using free and open source tools.

And like always, thanks for reading.

Posted on

How to install Arch Linux using the Archinstall script

This is a short howto video I’ve made for my friends over at wikiloops.com, and who might be considering switching from Windows 10 (or even older versions) over to some free Linux setup to make and record music with. Sorry about the bad sound quality; I should have used my studio mic instead of the webcam’s built-in microphone…

Like always, thanks for watching and reading.

Posted on

I made a mix

Yesterday I found a really old track in my DAW. Some of the plugins I had used on that prepared song were outdated, so I had to reinstall those. Then I leveled it to the usual -16 LUFS and -2dBTP (true peak), exported it, and then uploaded it to the ‘loops. I didn’t play anything on this one (yet), just the bare output of my DAW with the settings as they were (I had separated the voice from Shi’s former mix because at that time she didn’t upload a HD file with her vocals stems only):

This track is embedded with the friendly permission by the creatives on wikiloops.com.

Thanks to TN1000 and to Shi for the wonderful music – and thanks to you for listening 🙂 <3

Posted on

Happy 14th to Wikiloops!

Today, 14 years ago, Wikiloops founder Richard opened the gates, and now at more than 250,000 uploads and tracks later, we can all only thank him for it. Read what he wrote, and/or do this:

Go to my profile, and in it, select the tab “Playlists”. Scroll down a bit past my albums, and select the playlist called “Even more hit singles”. Enjoy, and then submit a few dollars or Euros to keep the thing running, so that we all can provide more like this to you. Thanks!

And thanks to Richard and his family, and to everyone who contributed until now – it’s greatly appreciated!

And: still remember this one? It’s also in that playlist, the music was made by some fellow ‘loopers:

Posted on

What a concert…

One of the best is gone – RIP maestro! Here’s his concert from Paris in 2019:

Thank you for your music, Quincy. And to my readers, like always, thanks for watching.

Posted on

The official Wikiloops “Member meeting 2024 report” is out

Richard, founder of Wikiloops and host of the 2024 members’ meeting just wrote his official report about the meeting which took place last month, and to which I also attended. Read, see, and hear all about it on Wikiloops. You can also watch the videos on Youtube, and/or see the photos in Diana’s gallery. Here are two of these photos:

Some of the attendees who were either late or had left the day before already had to be “‘shopped”, as they say, into the picture – you probably see it because of the very different lighting on some of the faces.

The videos have very different maximum resolutions sadly, from 480p to 1080p, and for my taste I’m a bit over-represented in the first one, the second one shows me playing a tune from a lead sheet which I hadn’t seen ever before, so excuse my uncertainty at some times (for instance on when the outro was about to start, couldn’t exactly read this). Oh, and before you ask: no; playing from lead sheet or from notation isn’t what’s representative of the “normal” jamming – but I’m always glad if people put up the chords to their songs anyway. And I love playing OliVBee‘s songs. And the ones from Moonchild of course 🙂

Anyway, enjoy, and like always, thanks for viewing and for reading.

Posted on

The Barnadise, from up the hill

Took this short before sunset on Saturday. It’s the village where the 2024 Wikiloops members’ meeting took place, and Richard’s “Barnadise” is pretty much in the middle of the photo:

Taken with my Pixel 6a phone on my way back from the last walk over the hill with the “Hubertuskapelle”.

As always, thanks for viewing.