Cloudy with chance of sound

I recently passed 3000 plays on SoundCloud, which seems impressive to me considering I'm just messing about with music and upload whatever experiments I produce. Actually I've had a lot more plays, but they were on some tracks I did with my old band and you lose the plays for any tracks you later remove.

I accept that many of those 'plays' could just be some playing a few seconds and moving on. I suspect that having covers of some well known songs would cause me to appear in some searches. The wonder and frustration of music is that you can only find out what it is like by actually listening, in real time.

SoundCloud has been just what I wanted from a site to show off your music. I found it when I wanted to share the band tracks. Other sites had too many restrictions. I know MySpace does some of the same things, but I never joined that. The look of many of the pages there was enough to put me off.

I don't anticipate making money from music any time soon, so will probably stick with the free account, even though I could get more stats if I paid, and I like stats :)

I've also heard a lot of cool music there from friends and other bands I knew about or have discovered.

I plan to carry on playing, recording and sharing my music. Who knows, I may actually produce some good, original music one day, and I hope that my production skills will improve.

I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I was going to write an article about the state of Linux audio as far as hardware support is concerned, but not finding the time just now. There has been some involved discussion about the state of interface support and documenting hardware support on Linux Musicians. There's lots of uncertainty about what hardware works and to what extent. I researched this a while back and found it confusing. I went for my M-Audio Delta 66 as it is very well supported and does what I need, despite being about ten years old. I've been considering my next PC build and will either have to make sure it has good support for old PCI cards (seems some chipsets do not) or look for an alternative interface. I have looked into some of the developer mailing lists to see if hardware support is improving, but they are mostly too technical for me. The main area of interest seems to be USB 2.0 as that should handle the needs of most small studios. Apparently some interfaces do conform to some standards in order to be usable with iPad, but it's not clear how well they work with Linux.

Luigi Verona has written a nice blog post on the state of software. This has stimulated a big thread on the Linux Audio Users mailing list. I don't subscribe to that, but I try to check on the archive to see what is happening.

The latest version of the FFADO Firewire driver added support for lots of devices, but it seems that Firewire is losing out these days. Their usage statistics are interesting to get some idea of the size of the userbase. There seem to be a few thousand active users. It seems like that could be viable for commercial support if some manufacturer would work with them to improve the support, but is probably still small compared to other platforms.

I still haven't managed to get KXStudio installed. When I got around to trying in the last week I found I didn't have a flash drive big enough for Ubuntu Studio. I've not ordered one and hope to try again soon, probably just before 12.10 is released. I need to get something up and running for the next Six String Bliss album project. I have a track in mind that will stretch me musically and technically.

Mapping musicians

I like maps. They used to be fairly crap on-line until Google came along and showed everyone how it should be done. Not only that, but they made it easy for people to build apps on top of the map. Years ago there was a site called Frappr that let any group of people put pins on a map to show where they all were. This is useful for any on-line community to make it easier for people to meet up in the flesh. That site is long gone.

Recently I found Musomap that does something similar, but it aimed at musicians who want to find local people to collaborate with. It's still fairly small, with just over 1000 members. That means many areas are still sparsely populated. The site features messaging and chat facilities. I used the latter to chat to the site creator 'Kahne'. He's eager to talk to people about how they want the site to develop and I have said I am happy to help where I can. I've already persuaded a few people to join, including several members of the Six String Bliss community.



A site with similar aims is Fandalism, but that doesn't do maps. That really went viral and now has around 500,000 users. I assume that people are getting something out of it, but I haven't so far. It would be great to see Musomap take off in a similar way, but I don't know what it will take and if it can cope with that many people. Scaling is tricky and can cause a flood of updates that will overwhelm people unless they can filter it.

I'm still on various other 'muso wanted' sites as well. I spoke to someone a while back about a blues band, but nothing has come of it yet. I'm keeping my options open. My little pub acoustic jam session has started up again after a summer break. There were four of us there this week, including a bassist. I also have another Six String Bliss album project to work on. I need to start planning that.

Oh, and just last night I did a quick recording of a cool Paul Gilbert guitar lesson. It's a very rough recording, but it captures what I was doing. I didn't quite get the riff right, but that makes it my own thing!

A Collaborative DAW?

In these days of high speed internet many tasks that previously needed people to get together in one place can be done on-line. That saves time and money, but also makes possible collaborations that would have been impossible before. Since I joined the Six String Bliss guitar community I've participated in a couple of collaborative songs where participants were distributed all over the world and had mostly never actually met each other. These were done by sharing backing tracks using Dropbox that we would load into our local DAW and then send back an export of our own tracks for a nominated producer to mix.

I did the vocals on this with 8 or 9 others doing various tracks.


I was thinking that the tools could make this a smoother process. I'd be surprised if something similar to what I'm thinking of doesn't already exist. I'm thinking that the 'producer' would do the backing tracks as before, but could select an option to share a mix with other participants. That would then automatically appear in their DAW project as a track without manual export and import. They would send their tracks back by the same method. It would be something like a shared Dropbox folder where you all get any files placed there, but would need some tweaks so you just get the final version when it is ready. The files involved will be fairly large, but shouldn't take more than minutes to transfer in general.

A further level would be the ability for others to monitor the tracking as it happened so they can offer suggestions. Actually playing together 'live' over the internet has issues due to the inherent latency (see below), but we're all merrily doing near real-time audio these days via Skype and other services in very reasonable quality.

Ohm Studio offers most of these features, but is not available on Linux. It looks like they anticipated my thoughts. The MIDI should work well as the files are pretty small. It looks like a smooth experience.

It would be cool to see this sort of thing implemented within Ardour.

Another type of collaboration is the jam session. As mentioned above it's hard to get low latency due to the nature of the internet and the limits of the speed of light. Ninjam has been around for years and gets around this by using looped backing and not sharing a player's audio until the loop ends. I've tried it briefly by running Reaper on Wine, but didn't fully get the hang of it.

The standalone Ninjam client hasn't  been updated in a few years, but I just found a project called Wahjam that has taken the code and seems to be in active development.

I also came across ejamming that seems to have found ways around the latency issue. It's also not on Linux,but looks like clever stuff.

Prepare to jump to lightspeed

Disclaimer: I know nothing at all about how to program audio interfaces, but I seem to have been reading a bit about this topic in the last couple of days.

It started with this interesting piece on how development of Firewire drivers is going. I've not used any of these, but I did consider it as an option when I was buying an interface. I've heard that it matters what Firewire chipset you have. I just have what is on the motherboard and I only know that it works with my DV camera. This article has been discussed on the Linux Audio Users mailing list. I don't subscribe due to lack of time, but I check the archives now and again to see what is going on. Dave Phillips said it was on the list after I mentioned the article on Linux Musicians. It features people from the Ffado project who have tried to implement drivers for lots of interfaces, but have not had much help from some of the manufacturers. We have to accept that Linux audio is a very small market and they won't pay developers to work on it.

I also saw this piece on USB3. It's not Linux specific, but it seems there can be issues plugging USB2 devices into USB3 ports. I don't even have anything for USB3 yet. I'm not sure it's really needed for most audio work as USB2 seems to have ample bandwidth to handle many channels. Firewire was big on Apple machines, but even they are dropping it. Someone in the article actually says 'Firewire is dead'.

I also found this blog by a Canonical audio developer. It gives some insight into the sort of things they work on. I mainly work on Oracle database applications, which seem simple in comparison. When you are dealing with audio even the slightest timing glitch will be noticeable. I'd perhaps like to learn a bit about how DSP programming works some time.

On the home front, my next target is to install Ubuntu Studio plus KXStudio. I'll be dual booting with the existing Kubuntu installation as the family all use that. I want to try the newer audio applications, including those to store JACK configurations so I can easily start it up with the applications I want to use and just start recording. I especially want to try Guitarix. I keep hearing about the cool amplifier simulators on other platforms and want some of that action. I hope to get something set up over the next week or so.

Influences

I've been pondering the music I've listened to over the years that may have influenced me, although I'm still not sure what music I want to make. Anyway, here's a rundown of the 'tracks of my years' (or something like that).

I didn't really get into music until my mid teens. Before that I heard whatever was on the radio (generally Radio 2 at home) plus some assorted records that my parents owned. So I got a fair bit of exposure to a lot of 'easy listening' music. I watched Top of the Pops, so I knew what was out there.

At some point I got into ELO. I had their Time album, but also listened a lot to Out of the Blue. I still love that stuff. I think I liked the big orchestral sound. I then picked up on Queen and later Genesis and Pink Floyd. Queen were the first major band I saw live (Works tour at the NEC). I made a lot of use of the record library (and the local blank cassette dealer!).

Although I had a guitar when I was about 10 I was only playing classical for the first few years. At university (well, Coventry Poly) I bought a cheap Strat copy and a little amp. I seemed to play a lot of blues then as I was listening to lots of Clapton from his whole career. I was also getting lots of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and ZZ Top. I wasn't so much into the more 'metal' acts like Iron Maiden, but I listened to whatever I could get my hands on, including the old Friday Rock Show with Tommy Vance.

I discovered Steve Vai via his work on the David Lee Roth albums and he blew my mind. He still does, but I've not kept up with his more recent albums. That led to Joe Satriani, who I do like, but don't find as much fun as Vai. I'd read about all sorts of guitarists in the magazines, but you wouldn't generally hear them on the radio and we didn't have Youtube back then, so I didn't always get to hear them.

More recently I've got into a range of music. I have a real thing for Björk. She doesn't use guitars generally, but her music and her voice really move me. I've seen her live twice and both gigs were amazing. I also got into bands like Eels, Queens of the Stone Age, Radiohead, Muse and King Crimson.

Lesser known artists I've also got into include Camille, Porcupine Tree and Frost*. I listen to a fair bit of classical music, but don't consider myself an expert on it. Composers I really enjoy include JS Bach, Stravinsky and Phillip Glass.

In the last few years the internet has become my main way of finding new music. Whilst looking for bass guitar tutorials I discovered there was such a thing as solo bass music by  Steve Lawson and Jeff Schmidt. Steve is exploring various interesting ways of marketing his music, including giving it away. I've been to a few of his gigs, which were magical, and met some interesting people there. A guitarist works in similar ways is Matt Stevens. I really want to get to one of his gigs some time.

I've been to lots of gigs over the years from tiny pubs to Wembley Stadium. Both ends of the spectrum can be good, but I'm preferring the smaller scale events these days. A great instance of that was the gig I went to last week featuring Static Plan, Dorje and The Drills at the Purple Turtle in Camden. It's a tiny club that was packed with guitarist as Rob Chapman of Dorje runs a guitar forum and Phil X of The Drills is a legend due to his videos for Fretted Americana. The Drills were the real stars and played a storming set. One of the best sets I've seen. You can get a flavour from this video shot there:

I came away with a couple of great, but very short albums

Why use Linux?

Some may wonder why I even bother using Linux when it's probably less easy than the alternatives. Part of the reason is cost. I can try out lots of different free software for nothing, but still contribute something to the projects I really like. There's also the other dimension of free (that may get lost in English as we use the same word for different concepts). This is free as in speech. After my Amiga days I used Windows 98 and 2000, but got frustrated by their limitations. I don't want the operating system to be stopping me from doing things and that's the way Microsoft and Apple were going. The developers behind Linux are not restricted by what they can get away with selling and can concentrate on solving the issues that frustrate them. I know some people in the media industry don't like that sort of anarchy, but they need to concentrate on finding other ways to make money from their so-called 'product'. I'm reading Cory Doctorow's Content at the moment and he has a lot to say on this.

Personally, I am not into getting everything for free as I can afford to buy the music and films I want. I'll try to do this in ways that get the most money to the artist, e.g. via Bandcamp.

I also like the interesting stuff that people are doing with Linux, such as the JACK Audio Connection Kit. I'm sure there are similar concepts on other platforms, but I've not used them.

What I would like to do is to install Ubuntu Studio on a spare partition and then add the KXStudio add-ons that include all sorts of cool stuff. As the guys on the Penguin Producer podcast said, FalkTX, the guy behind KXStudio, is some sort of programming machine and I want to be able to play with those tools. I'm not sure I can optimise my main Kubuntu system for audio and still have it usable by the rest of the family, so I will have to dual-boot for recording. I'd rather not as that adds an extra barrier, but it seems the best way, given that I'm not buying another PC just now.

I haven't done much recording since the Six String Bliss project. That has had some nice reviews and some very interesting comparisons to other artists who I don't really consider to be influences. I think it's just what I sound like and I'd rather sound like me than someone else. I think my next couple of projects will be some cover versions to practice my recording skills. I really need to look more at the available effects.