On Sunday 25 November 2007, RoLo wrote: > 1. Can somebody explain in simple words how do you do your musical > process overflow on Ubuntu studio??
I can think of two representative examples from recent memory. One involved notation, while the other did not. First, Zynfidel started life when I was playing with ZynAddSubFX one day. I had started ZynAddSubFX, and routed its JACK audio outputs to alsa_pcm in order to hear it, using the Connect button and Audio tab in QJackCtl. I had my keyboard's MIDI output routed to ZynAddSubFX by way of the Connect button and MIDI tab also in QJackCtl, which an indispensable application for managing JACK audio and ALSA MIDI connections, as well as starting the JACK server itself, and monitoring its status. I found one particular patch that sounded really cool when I played one note, let it ring a bit, and then played another one. It was a seed of inspiration. So I fired up Rosegarden, routed Rosegarden's first MIDI output device to ZynAddSubFX via its Manage MIDI Devices button, and recorded this little two note motif. I looped it. Then I went back to ZynAddSubFX, configured it to receive input on more than one MIDI channel, found a drum patch that also sounded cool, set that up to play on channel 2, and went back to Rosegarden to do something with the drums, which I also looped. I wound up using five different patches in ZynAddSubFX, along with a live recording of me playing two arpeggiated chords on acoustic guitar. This all formed the endlessly repeating and unchanging backbone of a long and rambling "ambiance" piece. It went on for something like 8-9 minutes before I finally came in with a long off the cuff acoustic guitar solo noodling around on top of the tapestry of other sounds, including some random "whacking on something" noises I also produced with ZynAddSubFX. The whole thing wound up being all Zyn and live guitar, with nothing else included, which I thought was rather cool of Zyn to be functional enough to be pushed to what I thought was an impressive limit. Then I probably used Time Machine to record a mixdown of all the tracks into one file, probably by routing alsa_pcm directly to Time Machine. These days I've taken to recording the mix directly inside Rosegarden, so I don't have to load a gigantic file into an editor to cut off the first two minutes. As I said, that example didn't include any notation. For another recent project, I went back to a MIDI file I composed with Cakewalk in 1996 or so as a pure MIDI piece, imported it into Rosegarden, and then I worked on a "live instrument remix" version from there. I ditched the lame MIDI acoustic guitar, and replaced it with a live recording. To do this, I turned my external speakers off, and listened to my Sound Canvas on headphones, so I wouldn't record the MIDI parts along with my acoustic guitar. (This didn't completely work, and I can still hear the synth instruments in the guitar recording a little, but it's close enough for my low standards anyway.) After I had replaced the worst part, I decided to use Hydrogen's superior drum sounds to replace the lame drum kit on my aging Sound Canvas. I started Hydrogen, found an appropriate kit, then went to the drum track in Rosegarden, and assigned it to a MIDI playback instrument that was part of the device connected to Hydrogen. Then I had to use various Rosegarden features to remap the part to find the correct drums in Hydrogen, which has different and all non-standard mappings for each one of its kits. After all of that was said and done, I went ahead and recorded the drum track into an audio segment. Once I had that going, I replaced the MIDI pipe organ part with Aeolus, and recorded that into an audio segment too. Then I moved into the melody lines. One of them was written for "pan flute" and the other for "trombone." I took each of these parts to convert for live brass. I started with the "pan flute" part, transposed its playback -2 and opened the segment in a notation view. I double clicked the key signature and re-inserted the same key, directing Rosegarden to transpose relative to the segment level transpose, which moved the notation +2 automatically, and wrote the right key for me. Then I cleaned up the notation a little, smoothed out some weird rests, moved pitches around to avoid anything too high or too low for my own trumpet chops on a real instrument, and printed it via LilyPond. I repeated the process for the "trombone" segment, moving it around to fit my "Alto horn in Eb," and printing that as well. As it happened, my alto horn chops are not good enough, and I was under a time crunch to get this track onto a CD for an old friend, so I wound up using a lame fake MIDI instrument on that part, but it does include a live trumpet. Then I had considerable trouble mixing this one down. I was recording several live tracks from my Sound Canvas mixed with several canned audio tracks. I had to fiddle with the MIDI and the Audio mixers in Rosegarden, and my real external mixer endlessly to get the right levels, and still wound up not quite happy with the mix. I should do another mixdown one day, of a future version that includes a live horn part, but this will suffice for today. This last example really shows why I like Rosegarden so much for my own way of working, because I can do everything in one place for compositions like these. It is less satisfactory for trying to arrange big pieces of music for a wide array of real instruments, but I will probably never do that. I usually only need to make a small number of the parts playable on real instruments for people who read music (flutes and brass, in other words, because I don't read music for guitar anyway, and play all my guitar parts (as well as most of my flute parts, actually) out of my head.) The rest can be ugly in the notation view, and it still sounds fine. I'm going to avoid getting into the rest of your questions, and hope somebody else has something to say. -- D. Michael McIntyre -- Ubuntu-Studio-users mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-users
