A great remix from Al-Fadista onto the Samba track I’ve played on myself recently:
Merci Alex for all the fun, and thanks to you for listening.
‘zit funky yet?
Another remix on the funky track, this time from kimbo. Great man, cheers!
Thanks for listening.
Funky Monday, and about making music on Windows
Just got a nice remix on one of my latest tracks from Charli56, and he called/renamed it into “Funky Monday”:
Thanks so much Charli, love it! 🙂
I was thinking of writing something about how I made my add-on on Windows for that track, using the new Ardour 6 on Windows. This is the start window after installation:
It says everything there is to say – Ardour is originally developed on Linux, and that’s where it probably runs best, at least I’m using it without many problems since years. On Windows there’s not much developer staff, so no real support for that (sorry). And yes, it *did* crash on me on Windows already (after deinstalling some Cakewalk DAW from Bandlab which had many pointers grabbed and put onto itself, very bad behaviour), and yes, I know my way around gdb (on Linux) or WinDbg (on Windows), but my time and love for that environment is also a bit restricted so to say…
Anyway, I’ve received some more freebie plugins via the makers of my audio interface which is Focusrite – and this time they partnered with PositiveGrid who then provided some cost-free stuff to download as plugins for Windows and Mac. So I downloaded their Windows VST version, and integrated and used it here for this track. Looks like this:
That is their ’69 Blue Line V2 amp simulation, modeled after an Ampeg SVT again (have another free one from the Guitarix project on Linux). And there’s also a compressor in the signal chain as you see, so for a basic ‘driven’ bass sound this is about all you’d need. I added an Effects send channel with some additional Chorus, Delay, and Reverb plugins from the same maker, but didn’t switch that on in the track you see here which is the one from ‘Funky Monday’ above.
Sounds nice, tho I doubt that I’ll come back to Windows just for this very often – it’s more likely that I’ll do that if I need that nice XLN Audio “Addictive Keys” Studio Grand piano for Zuleikha again.
Steinberg open-sourced their VST specifications, so with more and more VST3 plugins coming out I’m hoping that some day they’ll be platform-agnostic so that we can use them everywhere without things like Wine or WineASIO. Until then, I’ll sometimes maybe return to Windows, let’s see.
As always, thanks for listening, and also for reading.
pure joy
Got an awesome remix from Peter (Pewi) onto a simple template of mine where I played a one-handed keyboard for chords, and then a simple bass line on top of it. Peter turned it into something magical. Listen:
Thanks so much Peter, it’s an honour if you pick up something as simple as that and make something so beautiful out of it. Thanks to everyone else for listening.
S’more Funky in Em
Another fine template from Mark, and I couldn’t resist. This one I took over into Ardour 6 on Windows where I also had some new freebies like pedals, amp sims and such – and which by default sounded much more aggressive than what I normally use on Linux. But I thought that might fit here, so here you go:
Thanks for the fun to Mark again, and thanks to you for listening.
S’more Samba in Bb
Awesome drum template from Mark again, so I took my bass and added a little progression in Bb onto it:
Thanks to Mark for all the fun, and thanks to you for listening.
Espíritus
Played around with Guitarix plugins today, on an awesome track from Mark, Julio, and Xavi. This is the result – and play it loud:
This is what the setup of Guitarix effects looked like on my screen:
And some of these plugins and effects surely have funny names:
Thanks to my friends for all the fun, and thanks to you for listening. :W
AdmiralBumbleBee: 20 features from Ardour/Mixbus 6 that I wish every DAW had
I found a very interesting article about Harrison Mixbus and Ardour on Robert Randolph’s page “AdmiralBumbleBee.com”. Some of the features he describes even work in my current version of Ardour on Linux which is still 5.12 (I’ll wait for version 6 until it’s properly packaged which will be in the KXStudio repositories soon I guess).
A very cool list, thanks a lot Robert!
Dodo maloya
This is from Sunday, in collaboration with Philip who wrote and sang his awesome polyrhythmic template – so I tried to stay polyrhythmic myself as well:
Thanks to Filo974 for the fun, thanks to you for listening.
Ardour 6.0 is released
Great news for all fans of free and open source software: Ardour 6.0 is out. In fact I was waiting for the announcement since last week or so, when Harrison Consoles announced their new version 6.0 of Mixbus and Mixbus 32c, both of which are based upon Ardour.
So this is how the original looks like:
You can read the announcement and get some links from Paul Davis, who is the founder and main developer of Ardour (and Jack and other great programs), here.
And after using it for free for over two years already, I decided to finally subscribe to it, making this the first and only software subscription for me (with the exception of Wikiloops, glad to support that platform as well).
I’ve not seen or tried version 6 yet since on Linux I’ll get it more or less automatically via the KXStudio repositories, but now I can also download the Windows and/or Mac versions of it if I like to – and sure, never tried it on Windows, so why not? I know that some plugins like the ones from Calf Studio Gear are available for Linux only, but so what – I can still try and compare it to others, right? Will be fun I guess 🙂
So thanks to Paul, Robin, and the countless other developers who make something that great even possible. Hats off to you guys and girls.
You can download precompiled versions of Ardour starting at 1US$ here.
Thanks for reading.