Hi all from a sound geek in Eastern Washington

[Riddemtronic]

Hi all, new here and I am going to have to bite the bullet and dig into the computer music thingy... Normally, I am a drum circle percussionist and sudo guitar/bass guitar/synth kinda guy. But, I am new to this area in a very quiet and remote town and hardly know anyone. Ones I do know, when asked about musicians around here, say there really is none.
I started jammin in drum circles and am so not into being a solo musician, African poly rhythms just do not work when alone. So, I have to get inspired to work with music software and my instruments together.
I have dabbled with Hydrogen, HarmonySEQ, and some old Windows (ugg) music demos: Virtual Modular Moog, Orion, Reactor, Reason, and a bunch of other VSTs. I have not got too far as I like real solid hardware. No luck yet in figuring out LMMS, but have had a bit of success with Jack, Ladish, Hydrogen, HarmonySEQ... I need to learn how to put it all together and how to make things work. Looks like this is the place to be. Also, musicians like Klaus Schulz are inspiring in what just one person can do...
I hope to get somewhere in the throbby, zoney. tribal rock, deep riddem jammin...

Rock on everybody...

[apathity]

It's really all about putting all these little pieces together until you've built a system that works for you.

There's a lot you can get out of Hydrogen I think. I was talking to a drummer lately about Hydrogen and he found that it was way too simple and computer-ish. But he didn't really spend a lot of time with it.

[Riddemtronic]

Hi apathity. Thus far I have had a little success with Hydrogen. I am a fairly well seasoned percussionist with hand drums and other ethnicy percussion. I have many hours in many throbbing drum circles and play for hours on end. I also have drummed with ones who are very Afro centric and have drummed for an African dance group.
I installed the African kit in Hydrogen and have a few nice little blocks with Doundoumba kit and bells. Only a few measures so far, but, sounds very authentic and definitely gets the backbone moving. Now I must learn how to make the rhythm go somewhere. What is super easy with a real drum, is rather tough using a mouse and such. So therein lies my dillema.
Also, I am a very hardcore fan of old Tangerine Dream and some of the new Berlin school crowd like Redshift, Arc and a few others.
My goal is to try to integrate time old instruments and rhythmic styles, with that hard core electronic sound and add a hefty dose of rock. Hmmm an intrigueing challenge.
I have dabbled with Orion and VSTs a bit, but have yet to figure much out in LMMS or other linux sound production programs.
I have a ton of old computer gear and am now downloading both Tango Studio and KXStudio. KXStudio seems to be a bit more mature, but, I am not a fan of KDE4xx, way too much bloat. So I may put them both on a single hard drive and run KXStudio in XFCE and rip out the KDE.
What is the linux musicians' distro of choice?
The best I have done thus far with linux music is: I found a cool and pretty much unknown distro: Wolfer, and I had built it for sound production, I had compiled all the programs form source and it was awesome. But, the distro never took off and development stopped as well as updates. I think I wiped it off for another music linux distro but have never had such good performance as I had in wolfer. Wish I had kept it on that HD...
I had some cool little nuggets running well with HarmonySEQ.
Thanks for the tips and I definitely want to try to get somehwere with music/sound in linux. Also, I have noted that music apps sound far superior in linux than anything I've used in Winblows.

[apathity]

Sounds exciting. I'm mostly a rhythm-centric guy myself. I almost treat my guitar like a percussion instrument sometimes. And I do like techno music a lot, although I mostly write metal music. Since I play metal music as a one-man band I'll need to humanize the drums I've made with Hydrogen. It's funny in a way because most metal drummers today edit their drum recordings in Pro-Tools to make them sound more un-human...

About linux distros I have no idea, I just reinstall Ubuntu once per year and I use gnome3 as my desktop. Not exactly audio-friendly but so far I actually haven't run into any major problems yet. On Windows I'm fairly confident using FLStudio, but I just realize I haven't booted into Windows since ages!

[Riddemtronic]

Hi apitithy, nice to meet another riddem guy in here. Cool that you are trying to get your drums more organic sounding. So much metal is so distorted and raspy that one cannot make out anything of coherence. Like: If they have a message they want to get across, at least sing to where the words are both upfront and understandable, like duh, duh, duh... LOL...
Here are examples of what I enjoy in metal:

Arteria (Artery) Russian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09Y12GomZ1Q

From Italy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_VS2B48c24

Back on here later, much to do outside in planting fall crops, I'll be back on this evening...

Rock on!!!!!

[glowrak guy]

I have had a little success with Hydrogen.
I installed the African kit in Hydrogen and have a few nice little blocks with Doundoumba kit and bells.

I have dabbled with Orion and VSTs a bit,

KDE4xx, way too much bloat.

What is the linux musicians' distro of choice?

It's easy to bulid custom Hydrogen kits, load one, open the kit on the right of the gui,
and use the menus to replace each sample one by one.
When finished, rename, and export the new kit. If you loaded a kit with 32 sounds, and replace only 20,
you may or may not want to delete the 'extras'. An inexpensive soundfont library like E-mu's Planet Earth
has tons of world percussion pieces, easy to re-sample by recording them in Timemachine,
edit it's .w64 24 bit file using audacity, start at the last recorded beat, edit and export it,
delete it from the audacity track, and repeat with the next one, etc till you have a group you like
to build a personal kit.

KDE doesn't seem to be a cpu hog, but you can still choose other system GUI's to boot from,
that may use less ram. kde konqueror and k3b are must-haves for me.
I've used Enlightenment for years, on top of the kde and gnome under the hood.

Reaper in wine, is an excellent way to use windows vsts in linux. The $60 semi-pro license,
and some great free vsts, will enable worlds of sound. Almost all vsts that lack dongles,
or complex copy-protection, will work.

You have the skills for compiling a barebones debian setup, and add only the parts you need,
to make a great personal setup, for maximum performance.
Cheers

[Riddemtronic]

[quote="glowrak guy"
You have the skills for compiling a barebones debian setup, and add only the parts you need,
to make a great personal setup, for maximum performance.
Cheers[/quote]

Hi, it is certainly a way to make a nice running system, but, oh does it take time. That Wolfer linux setup was pretty awesome, due to the distro dying out, I thought I would upgrade to another distro. I've never got anything to run quite as good since.
With my pile of old hardware I may try the build up from a small light distro again and compile all the music programs from source code, but, I'll just slam onto a HD both Tango Studio and KXStudio and work around a bit with them in the interim.
As for sound samples, being a drum and didgeridoo maker for twenty years and now a luthier with my first electric bass guitar, I have a few instruments to get samples from: A super sweet djembe, a full size doundoumba kit with tuned bells, four didgeridoos, one so so synth, full drum kit with natural goat skins, a classical guitar and misc. bangers, shakers, etc.
I just basically want the computer music thingy to get some groove tracks and work on a bit of that "Berlin school" sound and mix it up with the djembes and such...

I saw Tangerine Dream live in Portland, Oregon; circa 1986. I was not any kind of musician then, never played anything, nor knew anything about sequencers. I was blown away when Frose and Haslinger walked away from their wall of synth/sequencers and picked up guitars and ripped. I think of those sequences as: "The railroad tracks." So what I am after is to make those train tracks to ride on, while jamming out with real instruments in real time. I have zero desire to be a rock star, I just like jammin'...

Rock on mate...

[glowrak guy]

You should do up a blog in your 'spare' time. You have lot's of interesting projects.

http://puppylinuxstuff.meownplanet.net/10wt3ch/isos/

This is a free Puppy Linux based audio apps distro, with the apps compiled, and an rt kernel.
It's nice for older hardware. Boot the live dvd, it runs in ram, most things are set up and apparent.
Wine among them. If you make changes, it asks if you want a save file on hard disk (squashfs) at first shutdown.
Next dvd boot, it finds the savefile, and you're off.

There is also a newer commercial version, at

www.getstudio1337.com

[Riddemtronic]

To glowrak guy

Hi, downloading that puppy thing now. Do a blog huh? Another thing that would sit on that back burner. I am and have been way busy. I have almost an acre to get in shape, tons overgrown shrubbery, neglected fruit trees, organic food garden to work on constantly, built a 340 sq. ft. greenhouse... No blog at this time...
I did forget to mention, I do have a very sweet Chinese distro, Deepin, that I have mostly set up for sound: Hydrogen, ladish, jack, ams, zynaddfx, amsynth and more. Just have not had much time lately and been using a different box for a while. Going to try diving back into it, got a cool few loops in Hydrogen, Afro throb... And like the oh so freaky ams. I have tried and tried, but, for some reason, in all distros and setups, can never get Hydrogen to work in jack... Can get a few things up and running, but Hydro, no luck... Keep chipping at it.
Found a sweet mixer/amp on craigslist, getting it today. Seven channel, two amps. I can do things with that to replace jack, just run two or three computer sound outs to it, then can port back and record in mp3/ogg or. I like hands on real hardware, had a Moog Prodigy for a few years, needed cash bad and had to sell it. CRY, CRY, big time.

[glowrak guy]

Hydrogen in Puppy Studio should work at boot, icon on the taskbar,
load a demo song, and test things. Choose jackd in the hydro audio prefs.

Gardens are great fun, (an acre is a farm ) and hard work. Concrete blocks, the rectangular ones
with two holes, if you see them on sale, or free used ones, you can make a 'stairway' of them,
back row 4 high, next row 3 high etc alternating tall and short plants in the holes, squash, melons,
cukes on the lower stairs, tomatoes, peppers, herbs on the higher ones. The holes provide a channel for
watering the roots. perfect for drip systems, and weeds have little opportunity, The blocks absorb heat,
adding to both ends of the growing season. Some shade in the hottest days may be helpful.
Cheers