Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Another set of ten useful quick tips from Warren Huart:
Of course you don’t really need all of his plugins, or his Mac and ProTools setup – Ardour and some free tools will do as nicely. Like he says, use these tools wisely and sparingly (a dB or two can make a big difference) – and create your own signature sound.
Recommended viewing for music/video and other content producers.
This is me jamming with some French friends on Wikiloops. Loved their little piece, so I laid a bit of bass under it:
Musicians:
Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed it.
Almost a year ago, I reported about the keynote speech of the Linux Audio Conference 2017 at the Université Jean-Monnet, Saint-Etienne (UJM). That one was given by Paul Davis of Jack and Ardour fame, and very interesting not only for Linux Audio users. It’s still online if you want to see it.
Ardour, and some of the Calf Plugins (which are available on Linux only), running on my computer, to work on vocals of a great singer who’s on Wikiloops)
Now, as I found via the Ardour site (and via the Linuxaudio Planet first to be correct), there’s an interview (from January 2018) with him again, by Darwin Grosse of Cycling 74, at the Art + Music + Technology site.
Find the 1 hour podcast and interview with Paul there.
It’s always interesting to listen to people like Paul, and this time you’ll learn a bit more about his personal history, how he got into music making with computers and Linux, and also about the close relationship between Ardour and its commercial sibling, Harrison Mixbus. Another thing I didn’t know so far was that the founder of Ableton was also heavily involved in Ardour at some point.
Paul also talks about the differences of linear workflow tools like Ardour, ProTools, and Cubase (just to name a few), and newer products for a more groove oriented workflow, like Ableton Live, Bitwig, or Fruity Loops (again, to name only a few).
Especially interesting for beginners, or for people who might play with the idea of switching over from Macs and Windows-based machines to Linux Audio are his two advices, like:
1. if you have already a workflow, and that is based off of plugins which might exist for Windows and/or Macs only, best forget about it, and
2. if you’re still interested and just don’t know where to start, try AVLinux.
(to which I might add that yes, AVLinux has the best of all available documentations about it all that I personally know of, but there are others which do more or less the same, like KXStudio, or even Ubuntu Studio (Zuleikha is using the latter on an older laptop, and all of them can be downloaded as Live images to put them onto a bootable USB Stick). The repositories of KXStudio are probably the way to go if you happen to run Debian Linux already, like I do.)
So in case you’re interested, go and have a listen. I always learn a lot from just listening to guys like Paul. And we owe them a lot.
So this is recommended listening for musicians, and even for video producers, or film music composers.
As always, thanks for reading.
You probably don’t know who Warren Huart is, but he has recorded and produced some top acts already, so gear-wise the man should know what he’s talking about.
Warren has this Youtube channel, and I was following him a while, especially during my beginnings with computer audio (and also video) recording. A time when I thought about which interface to buy, which software to use, how to place the microphones (well not really, since I have learned this in real world studios in my youth) 😉
So maybe the following short advice from Warren might be useful for you:
He’s right on all points, and he has very nice stuff (you see that big mixing console and lots of speakers and some 19″ rack beside and behind him). But now that I play with lots of musicians on Wikiloops who all use their own home studio setups I *know* that it’s not that important, and in some regards – cost-wise – I think I even do better than Warren, using the absolutely free (as in rights *and* in cost) Linux operating system and Ardour as my DAW of choice.
But like I said, it all doesn’t matter that much. Some people on the loops record with Audacity (free for all systems), some even with an iPad or some other tablet, and some surely have nice big Apple machines or something like ProTools.
Anyway, Warren’s list of what you need is still helpful. I have everything except a good pair of (nearfield) studio monitors, because even for them I wouldn’t currently have the space. So for me my nice Sennheiser headphones have to do, even if they’re open ones (have to be very careful when recording using my microphone which will pick up *anything* you might usually not even hear).
So, additionally to the very good tips in the Wikiloops forae I thought I’d (re-)introduce some of you to a pro, and let you hear his words about it all.
Hoping that this would be useful, as Warren (from Great Britain) would say, have a marvelous day recording and mixing your music!
On March 19th of this year, StJray from Canada uploaded these harmonic notes from his guitar, and asked people to join and play around with them:
And now, some 5 weeks and a few days later, this has:
I included it as the last track on my “Collaborations” album, and others made so many great things with it. Just listen to Ray’s video to get an idea where this went already:
I bet that after not even 6 weeks, this isn’t the end but just the beginning of it. How cool…
Thanks for reading, viewing, and listening.
Ged Brockie from Guitar Music Institute interviewed Richard Kaiser, founder of Wikiloops.com, and put that interview into a 1 hour podcast on their page, together with some info videos about Wikiloops.
Recommended for musicians at all levels.
If you’re using – or planning to use – Ubuntu 18.04 (Mitchie has just upgraded to that), here’s a list of 22 things to do after the upgrade / install.
Of course you won’t have to do all of this, and most people using Linux will have some of that knowledge already. There are however useful hints and programs even for oldtimers like me. Didn’t know that “Gummi” editor for instance…
And even a link on how to configure Conky – my favourite system monitor – is included. Cool.
Recommended reading, maybe also for users of other distributions.
I asked Shi if she would mind me doing a little remix of her voice. Nothing much, just a little eq and exciter to give her sibilants that small extra sparkle which her voice deserves, without overdoing it of course. Hope you all like it as I do. Thanks Shi for your wonderful contribution to this. And thanks again to Tom (Cody Tripp) for the great template – it’s a work of perfection in itself.
Thanks for listening!
In late November of 2016, Tom (Username Cody Tripp) put a really nice reggae template onto Wikiloops. And later he added another version, where he took out the bass, so others could play one.
And this is what I did today. I tried different things first, but in the end I played more or less exactly what Cody (Tom) had played himself. So my bass on his template sounds like this:
So why did I go and upload what he had done before? First, because even if we try to play like someone else, we still sound differently. And second, listen to what Moonchild (Devin) had made out of his version already:
I already told her 2 days ago that this is by far the most positive song I’ve heard on the loops until now.
So maybe the reason for me to play something very close to Tom’s original bass line was that I wanted to find out if I could be a session musician for Moonchild? Well maybe 😉
Anyway – I love her song and its positive attitude.
Thanks for reading and for listening.
Update, from the next morning:
A guitar player who names himself “BuzzBomber” made a remix of my track already, jamming along with his guitar over Tom’s sunny little theme. Here it is:
Thanks again for reading and for listening.
And another update, from Sunday evening (German summer time):
Shi has sung on the same track where I (re)played Tom’s bass:
So now it’s this constellation of musicians:
Love this. Thanks again to everyone!
This is so cool. Glen McArthur, maker of AVLinux and some other great stuff like the AVL Drumkits lately recorded some friends using Ardour, the free and open source DAW of my choice as well.
These friends form a band, and they call themselves ‘The Incontinentals’. Have a look, and listen:
Enjoy…