Back to school

Since I finished my degree back in nineteen eighty something I've had a few bursts of further education. I did a few community college evening courses in French, piano, guitar and jazz improvisation. Some of these were great fun and very good value compared with private one to one coaching. Unfortunately they don't seem to offer so many music courses since then. When I decided I wanted to do more singing I had a few private lessons that helped me discover what I'm capable of. I've considered more guitar lessons, but it's tricky when I don't have a specific aim. I had a trial lesson with a teacher a few years back, but he didn't seem to know what to do with me as I already had a lot of technical skills. I've also done a few courses for work on things like Oracle database programming.

My latest course is something a little different. I heard that Berklee College of Music was offering some free courses via Coursera. I initially decided I'd like to try the one on improvisation with Gary Burton. That looked like a challenge as it's something I would like to improve in my playing. That starts in April.

There is also a course in music production. A few of my on-line buddies were taking it, so I decided to join in as I could do with learning more about how to record and produce music. I have all the tools, but am only scratching the surface of what they can do.

The course consists of lots of short video lessons and quizzes on what was presented. Those are fairly simple if you take notes on the lessons. It's largely a matter of understanding the terminology used. The trickier parts are weekly assignments where you have to teach one of a selection of topics. That can be in written form or a video or audio presentation. I tried doing a video. I used GTK+ UVC Viewer to record from my webcam whilst I sat there using my Zoom H4 as a microphone and interface. I was talking about recording spoken word, so it was also a demonstration. I then tried to do a little editing using Kdenlive, but I couldn't seem to get it to trim the segments as I wanted. I have used this a long time back to edit some DV footage and it worked well then. Perhaps it didn't like the video format.

I tried doing the video in a single take, but found that hard. I was going to re-do it, but then had issues getting a decent recording without weird sync issues. I decided that audio would be easier. I recorded in Audacity and did lots of editing to clean it up. That was very quick and easy. The result was not too bad, but I did rush my delivery a bit.

Anyway, that has been submitted now and should be being assessed by other students. There are over 50,000! I've assessed my share and they were generally well done.

The lecturer, Loudon Stearns, has been encouraging people to discuss the course on the Coursera forums and various social sites. I was on a G+ Hangout with him and others at the weekend. It's almost like being on campus.

I'm finding the course fun and am learning lots. The first week was mostly audio theory, but this week is about DAW editing features. I need to explore these more in Ardour. V3.0 was just released, but I've been using some of the release candidates. It should do all I need. A screencast would seem a natural for the next assignment, but I need to figure out how to do that.

Driving around

The time has come around again for the release of another Six String Bliss album called Driven To Bliss. This is the tenth collaborative album produced by this community and the fifth on which I have participated. There should be a download of the actual album soon.

My contribution was a version of Open Car by Porcupine Tree, one of my favourite bands. I wanted to try something a bit heavier than usual, but this also has some acoustic segments. There's a mix of time signatures in there. I based my recording around a MIDI file I found so that could cover the drums and keyboards that I would not have time to sequence. I wanted to concentrate on the guitars and vocals.

Recording was in my usual set-up based around KXStudio on Ubuntu Studio. The DAW was Ardour 3. This is still awaiting final release, but proved to be pretty stable. The main advantage for me over V2 is the inclusion of MIDI so that I didn't need to run a separate application for that. I ran the output to QSynth/Fluidsynth using a free soundfont from the Ubuntu repositories (more on that later). Having everything in one application makes life easier when you want to mute specific tracks and I was doing that a lot with the MIDI tracks I was using to guide what I played.

Guitars were my Gordon Smith GS2 via my Roland Cube 80x (R-Fier model), Dean Performer E electro-acoustic (recorded acoustically) and Peavey bass (direct). Vocals and acoustic guitar were via my Zoom H4 recorder with line out to my M-Audio Delta interface.

I did consider using software amp models in Guitarix, but didn't have time to experiment enough with that. The Cube did a fairly good job, but I could possibly have got a bit closer to the original tone. It took me a while to get the main riff down, but then I had to play the same on bass! This was a challenge.

I like doing double-tracked vocals. I tried singing some in a different register, but not totally happy with the results. Need to work more on my harmonies.

I also intended to do more playing around with things like EQ and compression to improve the general mix, but that didn't happen due to the deadline and some other things going on. I may still try those on the track to see if I can improve it and learn more about these tools.

The album was produced and mastered by long-term Blissner JMan. He noticed something strange about the waveform of my track that caused some issues with the mastering.

I had noticed it looked odd, but had been preoccupied with just getting it sent off. I noticed that the acoustic sections were offset from the zero line. This was narrowed down to one of the keyboard sounds. To fix it I quickly found another soundfont. I could possibly have used a different patch on the existing one, but I've not quite figured out how to do this.

So, here it is. This is the pre-mastering version. All comments and (constructive) criticism welcome. I'm still in the early days of learning about this recording thing and anything that adds to my knowledge is welcome.

Stuck in the MIDI

I've now been using KXStudio in earnest for a couple of projects. A couple of those were just recording a few audio tracks in Ardour 3, but the latest has been a little more complex. I'm doing a song for the next Six String Bliss album. It's a cover and to make things easier I found a MIDI file of the song to use as a basis. I was able to load this into Ardour as a set of MIDI tracks and then link those to Qsynth using a free soundfont. I've been replacing those tracks I can play on guitar, bass and with vocals, but will keep the drums and some keyboards. Ardour has been very stable. I think it has only crashed a couple of times and I didn't lose much.

I still need to work out how to preserve session data so that I don't have to hook up the MIDI channels each time. I'm sure it's possible.

Once I have everything records I want to apply a few effects to make it all sound better. This is still a new area for me, so I'll be doing a bit of reading and experimenting. The album will be out early next year and I'll put my track up after the release.

In other news, I have joined a band! I was contacted earlier this year via Forming Bands by a bass player who wanted to put a blues band together. For various reasons we didn't actually get together until last month. We've now had 3 sessions and worked on about a dozen songs. I'm doing rhythm guitar and most of the singing. The hope is that we will be ready to gig in a few months and get out there and play to some people. This will be a new experience for me. I was with a band before, but we never got past rehearsals. I'm a little nervous, but I at least have some experience of performing in front of people from the pub sessions.

I'm using my Gordon Smith GS2 guitar and Roland Cube 80x amplifier. I'm considering getting some effects to give me more sound options. The Zoom G3X is very appealing with a low price and lots of sounds. I like the 'stompbox' layout that lets you tweak each effect easily. It may also be useful for recording. I have a few analogue pedals (Boss distortion, DOD compressor and a boost), but I think I need more options. The Cube has basic chorus, phaser etc that I have used when playing at home, but lack control for live use. The G3X also has a nice looper that can synchronise to the built-in drum machine. I ought to try one out some time. Part of me would like a nice set of pedals, but that could get expensive and it might take some time to establish what I need. A multi-effects unit may not sound quite the same, but it will let me experiment and I may later decide to add discrete pedals to the set-up as I see some others have done.

KXStudio

I've been aware of KXStudio for some time. The main (only?) developer, falktx, hangs out on the Linux Musicians forum and is always quick to respond to queries. He's put together the latest audio applications in a form than can be installed on top of various Linux distributions, including Arch and Ubuntu. He's also developed various applications that help to tie it all together and make life easier.

I actually installed KXStudio some time ago when it was released as a stand-alone distribution based on Ubuntu. I played with this for a while, but it didn't seem quite ready back then. I was hearing about lots of new developments recently and wanted to give it another try.

One route was to install Ubuntu Studio first I tried this multiple times, but eventually realised that my old PC just cannot boot from a USB drive of over 2GB, and the ISO was just over that. So I used the 'Net-Boot ISO' method that starts with a tiny image and installs the rest over the internet. That worked fine. I'm installing it as a secondary boot on my only PC as I need to keep the existing system working for use by the rest of the family. This is a slight inconvenience as I have to re-boot to do recording, which takes away some of the spontaneity.

I'm using the XFCE version as a change from my usual KDE and also hope this will improve performance. I'm also using the default theme, which is a little dark for my tastes. I may change that as I find it hard to see some window controls.

One difference from most distributions is that KXStudio generally runs JACK all the time and routes normal system audio through it. Cadence is used rather than QjackCtl to configure JACK, but the options are similar. I still have to find optimal settings, but I was getting low latency and just the occasional xrun.

The main application I've played with so far is Guitarix. This emulates various types of guitar amplifiers and effects. The options are a bit bewildering. There are lots of valve/tube types to select from. I can't say how close it gets to real amplifiers, but it sounds very good to me. There's some good effects too. I particularly like the reverb. I can see me using this a lot for future projects. There's Rakarrak too, but Guitarix looks like it might be better to get a basic guitar tone.

I've also had a play with Ardour version 3. This has lots of new features to explore. The input/output connection matrix is neat and I like the overall view of the track that helps to see where you are. I have a project that needs some MIDI, so I need to check out that aspect.

Anyway, here's the first this I recorded on KXStudio, using Guitarix. I'll report more when I've had more chance to play.



Update: Good write-up of how some of this stuff works from the Linux Musicians forum.

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!