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Feels Real Good

Jan 162012

Here’s why I don’t read the comments on big ass, public websites where people post videos. Doesn’t matter if it’s YouTube, Vimeo, Blip, or whatever. The comments section of video websites are only one step (barely) above the comments you find on the website for your local newspaper.

Now then, I want you to watch this. Not only is this musician talented, but she’s beautiful and rocks the damn tech like no one’s business. As a guy who does a bit of computer music, fiddling with sequencers and loops and stuff, I have an idea how challenging her task is here. Not only that, she’s the only one working the tech, the instruments, and the voice.

“Feel Good Inc” – Gorillaz Live Looped Cover

Unfortunately, I’m not sure who she is. But whoever she is, she needs to start selling music fucking now.

Anyway, so what’s one of the comments on the site? Well, I quote:

“I have seen this before and it’s really good. One suggestion. Clothing..looks like my grandmothers. She would look as good as he sounds with something more current. No makeup needed.”

Who in the fuck are you? Unless you’re the wardrobe design director for Lady Gaga or Cher, shut your goddamn mouth you know-nothing fuckwit. You’re not an expert on music and you’re not an expert on clothing and you’re certainly not an expert on how to tie a wardrobe to a performer and how those things interrelate with a given song. You are a schmuck commenting on a video site just as I am a schmuck with a blog commenting on your bullshit.

For the record, I know of another woman who does something very similar and wears a similar style of “grandmothers” clothing. Her name is Imogen Heap, and she too is awesome. The wardrobe doesn’t matter. Both of these ladies could do their thing wearing a burlap sack and it’d be just as amazing.

A Week of Linux Day 02: I Never Promised You a Rosegarden

Geek, Music, Personal No Responses »

Jan 022012

TAKE. THE. PIE.

Sometimes, Linux overdoes things. That’s not bad in the same way that it’s not bad when a host sends you home with an entire pie. You politely refuse the delicious pie. You don’t need it. You’re full. The pie, while good, isn’t good for you. So you demure and they insist and you find yourself driving home with a banana cream pie occupying your passenger seat.

You even took the time to buckle it in because, hey, accidents happen and wasting pie is a sin.

Besides, you know that even though you’re not going to eat all that pie now, at least pie will be available when you do want some.

That’s kind of how Linux does music production and recording.

See, my foray into this one week experiment began with Rosegarden, a MIDI sequencer that is pretty damn awesome. I downloaded it, installed it, and fired it up, loading a MIDI into it and hitting play. Aaaaand nothing happened.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Things were moving. The MIDI file was definitely playing but there wasn’t a peep from my speakers. Seeing as how we’re talking music here, silence is usually (but not always) an undesirable result. I tried a few things, clicked that, fixed this and nothing changed. Everything looked good, but there was no sound.

So you do what any good Linux geek does when they have a problem; they ask the Internet a question. Some Googling brought me a few answers. Turns out one of my problems was that I needed some other software to go wtih Rosegarden. Indeed, what I really needed was the audio suite of programmes normally installed with Ubuntu Studio, a version of Ubuntu specifically directed towards creatives with an open source bent. Easy enough, that’s a separate package so I downloaded and installed that too.

(You will find a running theme in modern Linux distros is that, while Apple and Microsoft are just now introducing their own “App Stores,” Ubuntu has had the Ubuntu Software Centre for some time now. When you’re using Linux, there are many times where you say things like “Crap, I need an X.” Then you Google for the best kind of X, and then you hit the Ubuntu Software Centre and download X for free or for a small cost. So as I said above, I needed a package. I didn’t have to order it or buy it or have some kind of processing thing over the web, I just fired up the Ubuntu version of an App Store and got it now.)

Just the thing you need to record that acoustic folk instrumental.

I opened up the second website with the Rosegarden fix and read through it. Turns out, fixing things was easy… if you happen to like (metaphorical) pie. Turns out, music and audio production in Linux means you get the full studio experience. There is a patch bay that allows you to plug programmes into one another for recording and routing and then send all of that to the speakers (QJackCtl). There is also a synth bay that allows you to load and serve voices for MIDI and synths for any app that might need them (QSynth). All of that passes through a big ass audio mixing board (virtualized of course) and then you use that aforementioned patch panel to plug everything together and route it all to the speakers, which is what Rosegarden wasn’t doing.

This is much like someone saying “You know, I have a couple of guitar songs I’d like to record. I’ll snag a USB mic and just record it to my computer.”

Then the Kool-Aid Man explodes through the wall and says “OH YEAH! Why stop there? I’ve got an entire damn studio you can use for recording! Then you can mix in some drums, master it, produce it, publish it, and then sell it online!”

“But,” you say “all I need is a mic and my guitar and…”

And then the open source Kool-Aid man asks you if his handkerchief smells like chloroform and you find yourself waking up in a professional studio. Your simple accoustic guitar is gone and has been replaced by a Fender Telecaster. Except for the chloroform headache, you can’t complain too much. Just look at all this neat stuff you didn’t think you needed!

So after a crash course in open source music production, I was playing along with a MIDI on my keyboard and keytar and just as happy as ever. And you’d think that, after looking at all this, all it took for me to get things working, all the things I had to install and click through and read — it must’ve been an hour before I got things up and running.

Total elapsed time from Googling the problem to resolution: ~35 minutes.

Total elapsed time from Googling the problem to resolution, minus the time spent downloading the various things I needed to fix the problem, a period of time I was so idle that I went and showered and made coffee: ~15 minutes.

The Linux adventure continues.

A Week of Linux

Geek, Music, Personal 4 Responses »

Jan 012012

A few days back I wrote about how I kinda sorta switched to Linux on accident. Well, now I’m going to try a little experiment.

Chock full of awesome.

See, for Christmas, my wife bought me one of those Rock Band 3 keytar controllers – something I’d been lusting after for some time now. I couldn’t possibly care less about the game, what I’m interested in is the fact that the keytar is also a MIDI controller. I used to compose in MIDI all the time, but I kind of fell out of it and just did straight audio from my Yamaha keyboard. Well, when I saw this handheld keytar, something that’d let me get up in front of the band and play, I knew I had to have it. I researched it, watched videos on YouTube, and when I finally got it I couldn’t wait to hook it up. I snagged a MIDI cable from the local music shop and hooked it up.

It works great, even better than I expected. So I decided I wanted to do some MIDI sequencing and lay some tracks down using a MIDI sequencer app, but there’s just one teensy little problem. MIDI sequencers like Cakewalk or Reason cost money, and not just a little money. Cakewalk Sonar Studio is $200. Reason is almost twice that. Man, I don’t have that kinda money to drop on software!

PRETTY COLOURS!

So I did a little more research and learned about an app called Rosegarden. It’s a high end MIDI sequencer and it’s earned some high praise almost everywhere I looked. Best of all, I can totally afford it — because it’s free. It’s a FOSS MIDI (there’s some acronyms for you) app for Linux and I happen to have Linux installed on my laptop in a dual boot set up. More and more, I’m finding myself in Linux because I kind of like it. Now that I’ve installed all the audio stuff you’d normally get with Ubuntu Studio, I know I’m going to find myself using Linux even more for music composition and as a recording studio. Which brings me to that experiment I mentioned earlier.

I’m going to try something I’ve not done in a long time, years in fact. I’m going to try and go a full week without using Windows on my laptop computer, which is my main system. Given that I have a few files saved on the Windows side, I might have to boot to Windows to transfer them to Linux, but I want to try and use Linux for everything that I normally use Windows for. So for blogging, writing, listening to music, reading my RSS feeds, saving stuff, moving things around, creating — I want to see if I can do all of that in Ubuntu. Today is the first day of the New Year and it happens to be a Sunday, so this is going to be pretty easy to keep track of.

As this goes on, I’m going to try and post something here every day about what I’m doing and how. For instance, getting Rosegarden to work properly took a little doing, but it certainly wasn’t impossible. I grant you that it helps that I’m a computer and music geek, but I had things working in less than half an hour. All it took was some patience and Googleing. So I’ll be writing about that stuff along with the things I’m learning about how this new Ubuntu works.

Now, one caveat. I’m not using the stock Ubuntu install. I’ve used their Unity desktop for a while now and, while I don’t hate it, I certainly don’t like it all that much either. It feels kind of clumsy and sort of hamfisted. I did a quick look around and, sure enough, it’s easy to install the Gnome 3 desktop environment and so I did.

I think I might be in love.

Gnome 3 is pretty damn spiffy and I really like how things flow on it. We’ll see, today is day one and we’ll see how things go. But my first impression of Gnome 3 is that it is far better than Unity!

Okay, so one week. No Windows unless I need a file from the Windows side. At which point I’ll probably just send it up to my file server or web server to grab it in Linux. Let’s see how far we get.