Category: music

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Colours

I played on another branch of this track already, and after Oliv corrected my timing in one of his fabulous remixes, I decided to also put out a corrected version further up of the ladder, just to keep it open for further remixes – so here you go, with just OliVBee, Marceys & me in that new version and upload of ‘Colours‘.

Oh, and while exporting my combined bass tracks from Ardour 6.7 to use them in Harrison Mixbus, I saw that the export analysis in 6.7 has a new look – it’s cool I think:

Very nice, and very useful to see that new LUFS analysis section – I love it…

So thanks again to both Oliv and Marc for the fun, to Paul Davis & his crew for developing Ardour (and thus, Mixbus which is based upon it), and thanks to you for listening 🙂

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Ardour 6.7 is out

The latest and greatest version 6.7 of Ardour, the open source DAW for Linux, Windows, and Mac is released. See the release notes, and download a readily compiled version for an amount of your own choice (starting at 1$). As a supporter I have it already. There are also a manual and a tutorial. That latter one is some years old already, but still useful if you’re new to recording multitrack audio with a computer.

Thanks to Paul Davis and to his team.

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Colours of Marceys, Pat, & Oliv…

I was preparing to play a bit on this while being drawn into a videochat with Malaysia… anyway, I continued playing a bit on Oliv’s, Marc’s, and Pat’s cool track:

https://www.wikiloops.com/backingtrack-jam-217997.php

As always, thanks to my friends for all the fun, and thanks to you for listening 🙂

P.S.: just published a video showing some of these tools I described in my last article, and which I was using for this track:

Thanks for watching, and for listening. And thanks again to my friends both at Wikiloops, and also from the open source world of programmers. We are standing on the shoulders of giants… 🙂

Edit: got a remix from Oliv who corrected the timing of us all on this track of his:

Merci Oliv – fantastic remix 🙂

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Always experimenting with audio

I wrote about buying both Reaper and Harrison Mixbus, but at the moment I’m back to plain old Ardour for my audio mixes – and I still keep changing things, like:

  • I changed from the version 5.12 which is the current version of Ardour in both Debian stable and also in KXStudio to 6.6 which will be the second last of the 6.x versions of Ardour (with the latest version being 6.7, soon to be released). This looks a bit like Mixbus which is based on Ardour 6.x, except the bells & whistles and the built-in eqs, compressors, and such.
  • I also changed from using lots of Calf tools to alternative ones which are making use of better (programmed) DSPs – those Calf plugins look nice, and are easy to understand, but sonically there are better ones I think.
  • In my latest remix I experimented with using 96kHz sampling rate while working, and used plain old CD quality 44.1kHz (and even the mp3 format which Ardour now can also write) for exports, except my single bass stems which I still exported as .wav files. This ‘oversampling’ is done more or less automatically by some better plugins, so I’ll go on working with 48kHz which is the norm for video and also the one used by many mobile devices (like phones).

Just in case you’re interested, at the moment I’m using:

Beside these, I’m also using:

Of course, I’m also still experimenting with Harrison Mixbus, but can’t do everything at once and for all projects – I still want to make music a bit as well… 😉

So much to learn, so little time… but I still love it when/if I approach better output quality along the way. One important thing to keep in mind is for instance gain staging – make very sure to not saturate your outputs too early, and to get your signal into the next plugin already too ‘hot’ for it to handle that signal… drive it hot at the output, not while still working 😉

As always, thanks for reading 🙂 And also thanks to those who donate their precious free time into developing awesome tools like the ones mentioned above, for free. Help them with a little donation if you can, they need the nice feedback like every other musician/technician as well…

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Why don’t you call me?

I’ve made a rough mix of this one lately, but wasn’t really happy with it – so I sat down with it again, and also played a little bass on it. Hope you’ll enjoy:

https://www.wikiloops.com/backingtrack-jam-217917.php

Again, thanks to tyrece and also to Shi for all the fun, and thanks to you for listening.

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Old soldier

I had downloaded Ardour 6.6 recently, and installed it onto both my Windows as well as my Linux partitions of my machine. Here’s a first mix job together with a bit of a bowed bass on a lovely template from Don, and with an awesome story from Shi:

https://www.wikiloops.com/backingtrack-jam-216509.php

As always, thanks to my friends from Wikiloops for all the fun – and thanks to you for listening 🙂

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The full measure

A fun track with Dorothy and Frankie, but even with me it’s far from ready, just a framework for other things to come, hopefully:

https://www.wikiloops.com/backingtrack-jam-216313.php

As always, thanks to my friends at Wikiloops for all the fun, and thanks to you for listening 🙂