Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Wikiloops member and fellow musician sister navota Krull has made a nice video documentation about her 2017 trip to the Wikiloops members’ meeting in Steinfeld.
I’ve met her and some of the musicians you’ll see here in 2018, and I sure hope to see her and lots of other Wikiloops friends again there this year – so much looking forward to this.
Thanks for that nice documentation to our NAF (Native American Flute) playing sister!
My friend and Wikiloops member OliVBee pointed me to a track yesterday which I fell in love with right away. So I couldn’t resist to add some low notes to it – and here it is:
The list of musicians on this one is:
Thanks for listening. And thanks to my friends there for a killer track.
Edit: here’s a new mix of this, made by OliVBee:
Thanks again to Oliv for another one of his fabulous mix jobs! 🙂
… Manjaro Linux, and also Pianoteq.
In the LinuxMusicians forum there was a thread about Manjaro lately, so I thought why not try it? Manjaro, for those who don’t know it, is based on Arch Linux and as such has a “rolling release” strategy instead of publishing more or less fixed versions and updates. This means that your software will always be fresh and up to date, a bit like if you would use the Debian unstable repository aka “Sid”.
Manjaro also uses XFCE as their default desktop environment, so I wanted to see its status as well – and as I’ve learnt from the forum post mentioned above it also comes with packages for almost everything including trial versions of Pianoteq, Reaper, and Bitwig. I have tried Reaper on Windows already (and really, it looks very similar on Linux), not so much interested in Bitwig (tho I did have a short look), but Pianoteq was of interest to me, and after trying their standard version first, I also had a look at the lesser (and with 99$/€ cheaper) “Stage” variant of the software. Looks like this on a standard Manjaro (in a VirtualBox VM):
Of course I could only dream of having realtime, being in a VM, but for a first look it was good enough – and those piano models really sound wonderful. I’d really like to hear some of Zuleikha’s tracks with these sounds, so I could compare them with the (also commercial) Addictive Keys xln audio “Studio Grand”, and with the free “Salamander Grand” which is a nicely sampled Yamaha C5. Maybe I’ll come back to that at a later point, let’s see.
As for Manjaro, yes it looks and performs good, so for anyone who wants to try something new and fresh, go and give it a try. I don’t really need it because Debian already provides everything I need (ok, together with the KXStudio repositories for music-related stuff), but in case you’re interested, why not? From what I saw I liked it.
As always, thanks for reading.
Lately I have discovered another good bass teacher on Youtube, and from his first lesson on I thought wow, that’s a nice sound from his bass there…
… and on his web page, he writes about what gear he’s got. And yes, that’s a nice bass, and wow, even a hybrid one can sound good! Still it’s costly, and I was amused about his remark of that:
That night I made super secret marital arrangements with my wife to the effect that we would find the money to buy the bass, and I would be her slave for life. Our deal worked out pretty well for both of us, I think.
Chris Fitzgerald, about his 6,500$ hybrid double bass
Yes, double basses – a totally different price category than your usual electric “axe”, and no wonder, they’re not that easy to build. The cheapest Chinese models which are made of laminated woods (don’t know about the quality) start at around 600$ in the big shops, but a nice custom built by master luthier massive bass made out of wood which was stored for quite some years can easily be around 20-30,000 Dollars. Or Euros.
Here in Frankfurt, we have a shop which offers “Christopher” basses (also from China, but of decent quality). Their DB100 and DB200 models are fully laminated, the DB300 is a hybrid (laminated with solid top), and everything above is massive. Their hybrid model is listed at under 2.000 Euros, so I wanted to know a bit more, and searched Talkbass.com about them. And in this topic I found a very nice sounding recording of such a hybrid Christopher:
Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? And yes, that instrument was played by someone who knew how to play a bass 🙂
Would be more than enough for me, if I had the money, the space, and the time to really practice it…
Just a small example here:
I had integrated the XLN Audio Addictive Keys (windows version) “Studio Grand” piano into Ardour on Linux – but Windows VSTs (virtual instruments) on Linux need something like Wine, and are more resource-hungry than they’d need to be. Meaning that yes, I can play nice sounds from that awesome Steinberg D grand piano somewhere in Sweden, but the cost is that I’ll get lots of xruns (basically buffer overflows) in my software if I need more than one of these tracks.
The solution? Free samples of course – and yes, they exist like free software does exist. So I just set up my latest key presses (on my 49-key MIDI keyboard) to use the free “Salamander” grand piano which is a nicely sampled Yamaha C5.
And there’s an article on LibreMusicProduction on how to do just that, using Ardour, LinuxSampler, QSampler plus whichever soundfonts you’d need.
Maybe I’ll still buy PianoTeq for Zuleikha one day – first, the basic stuff isn’t that expensive, second, it’s a modeled piano, not a resource-hungry sampled one, and third, it even comes in a version for Linux. And this alone should be honoured. It also should sound much better than Zuleikha’s Yamaha Arius piano which she uses to record stuff (that one has a MIDI out of course).
So – let’s make some music… 🙂
Thanks for reading.
This morning I published my 5th Wikiloops album of collaborations with friends from all over the world, some of whom I’ve never even met in real life until now. And because I published this on the 2nd day of Christmas, it got the title like in the headline. Looks like this:
You can listen to it and/or download it from Wikiloops as usual.
Thanks to all participants, and to Richard without whom Wikiloops wouldn’t even exist.
Thanks to you for reading, and for listening, downloading and/or even supporting us there.
Merry Christmas 2019.
I remixed mpointon’s drum add to this lovely track. No video this time, so enjoy the music:
The list of musicians until now (I asked the next one to remix onto mpointon instead of my “mixer” add):
Thanks for listening.
Edit:
Shortly after uploading this, Tof came up with an own remix and an add of his lovely guitar and guitar synth work – so I remixed that again as well. Here it is:
That makes 6 musicians if you count the mixer’s job, like here:
So again, if someone wants to add something then he/she should add his or her work to Tof’s remix (even if they took my mix for it).
And again, thanks for your interest, and for listening.
And now have a nice Christmas Evening in case you celebrate that.
I made a video of my last remix of this track, just to show music production in Ardour on Linux:
Thanks for watching.
Shi uploaded her version of Arnosolo’s lovely tune, and I instantly tried, and yes my bass from yesterday fits as well – so here’s the combination of us:
That makes the list of musicians on this track:
I’ve had two other remixes on my track, and a remix of one of those remixes as well – so in case you want to hear those, just go to my track (click here to go there), and have a listen.
Maybe (and hopefully) more will follow…
Thanks for listening.
An awesome track again from Arnosolo, and a very nice and intelligent lesson in composition. So I couldn’t resist to add some low notes (and some 10s for colour) to it:
Musicians so far:
Thanks for listening.