Linux beginner; musician wanting to know where to start.

[leokin]

I'm new to Linux, running Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric. It's a whole new world here, and I love the idea of getting away from Windows!

I'm a jazz musician. I've downloaded and installed Ardour, Audacity, Jack,....etc. It has occurred to me I need some help. Like the basics of setting up hardware, interfaces between my guitar, mic, cd player, etc. might be a good start. Then I can focus on obtaining and learning to use the proper software.

I would like to set loops to practice with, and know how to record a session w/myself, and/or with other musicians. I've got several guitars and amps, a Boss RC-2 loop pedal, an RP80 Digitech multi effects pedal (until I figure out wht sounds I want, at which time I'll get dedicated pedals), a cheap $80 mic, good earphones, and a few other odds and ends.

Any help would be much appreciated.

~Leo

[Capoeira]

read the wiki
first thing you wanna learn is to use jack (qjackctl)....that's the heart of linux audio and where you make the connections

[slowpick]

youtube is also a good option, there are videos some starting with basic configurations,
others are longer and cover common usage. Go here, and follow the sidebar videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5BzyN95NfQ

[autostatic]

Hello Leo,

Welcome! So at the moment you don't have a sound card other than the one in your PC? If so, do you have any wishes for a sound card, like number of IO, USB/PCIe/FireWire, input(s) for instruments etc.? And what kind of mic do you have now? And as a guitarist myself, what kinds of guitars and amps do you have?
If you'd like to set loops to practice with there are several possibilities so that shouldn't be an issue. Same goes for recording. But like you said, you first need to have your hardware set up properly. We can help with that here!

Best,

Jeremy

[studio32]

Might be good to start with an optimized distro for audio, like Tango Studio (Ubuntu based) or AVLinux

http://wiki.linuxmusicians.com/doku.php?id=newbies

[leokin]

Thank you all for your suggestions. I didn't realize you great people even replied until just now!!

I might invest some time in finding a program which notifies me that one (or more) of my email accounts, Linux organizations....etc., have messages waiting for me!!

In the meantime, my life has been full...I moved from California to New Mexico with my sweetie; I came down with painful shingles (week 4 now...healing up); I've got 2 computers running Ubuntu and Lubuntu, gobs of studio related programs and many hours of a learning curve. This is great stuff!!! I can now operate Ardour, Jack, Patchage, Audacity, etc etc,,,,,

My old Dell PC is now at 1MB memory instead of 256 (ha ha) and runs many times faster than (yechh) Windows. The Dell is a Pentium 4 and my Gateway, which is a Pentium 3, with some spare parts I installed even runs better than Windows. Hooray!!!

I use the Dell for my recording more often it has a SB Live 5.1 card, and I run an old 4 track Korg CR-4 mixer. I'm thinking (saving money) ofd going with an M Audio---or similar sound card.....still researching. Probably an updated machine too.

Regards and gratitude for your help, Leo

[leokin]

1 Gig, not 1MB

[leokin]

Oh yeah....my axes and amps....

Amps:

Fender FM212R (My favorite) ---perfect for jazz gigs

Crate MX65R ( one 12")-----clean sound

A no name small 15 watt practice amp.

***********************************************
Guitars:

Takamine acoustic (nice sound and volume)

Samich acoustic, Gregg Bennett Design, with internal pickup and equalizer and tuner on the side

Ibanez solid body, Humbucker p/u's....nice tone and action

Epiphone semi hollow with Humbuckers...nice action and tone...using flat wounds E on number 12 string....George Benson style strings.

*********************************************
And a few effects pedals, but I focus on lots of practice with clean sounds; effects later.

[slowpick]

A Fender Mustang 1 usb amp might love your guitars, (I would )12 Fender amp models,
a row of fx, and 24 presets on the main dial (Fender twin without effects/cab-sim works for clean)
with a linux editor available for deep editing, called Plug. The amp is the best $100 ever spent on linux.
Its usb shows up by name in qjackctl. The headphone/line-out is also very nice, and
sometimes preferable to perform with, or record to a line-in.

I use an maudio pci card for output. Another easy device to
configure in qjackctl.

[slowpick]

Try the new Cobalt strings, next time you're shopping. Great sound!

[wolftune]

I've been here a couple months, still overall a newbie. My vote right now goes strongly to KXStudio. You might want to even start fresh with the updated KXStudio coming out any day now. KXStudio can be installed over your current system, it isn't really a distro itself. It automatically installs the best selection of software, plugins etc. and includes a whole set of programs to manage your studio. It's just superb! I wouldn't recommend anyone start GNU/Linux audio without it.

Anyway, the main other thing I would clue you in on right now: enter "alsamixer" in terminal. It actually runs graphically in terminal, and you can use its help menu to learn the controls. Once you are running JACK for your audio, it kinda takes over from the main system, and alsamixer is the most flexible and reliable way to manage your basic signals.

JACK takes only one interface at a time, so it's best to use a single audio interface, but you can combine them using some sort of code related to alsa_in and alsa_out (with some extra specifications I still don't exactly understand).

[Pablo]

alsa_in and alsa_out (with some extra specifications I still don't exactly understand).

man command to the rescue:

man alsa_out

alsa device has the form: hw:cardnumber,devicenumber or hw:cardname,devicenumber

cat /proc/asound/cards lists the audio cards' number, short name (between square brackets) and long name.
arecord -l lists the capture devices of all the audio cards available.
aplay -l lists the playback devices.
Some devices are duplex (they appear in both lists)

hw:cardnumber or hw:cardname is the first device (zero based counting) of the given card. So it is equivalent to hw:cardnumber,0 or hw:cardname,0. Ideally, a card has a unique and duplex device, but many commercial cards have more than one which can be capture only, playback only or duplex. But you can't guess. It depends on the card and the driver. The above commands tell you about it.

Alas, card numbers can change between reboots (although you can try to avoid it by editing a configuration file). That's why using card short name instead of number, in jack configuration frontends (e.g., qjackctl) or jackd command line and in alsa_in/alsa_out, is recommended.

Cheers, Pablo

[wolftune]

Thanks, Pablo!

So what does the "man" part do?

I recall once getting alsa_in to work by copying and pasting some example command and inserting some bits I thought applied to my card. I later, I think, got it to work by just typing "alsa_in hw:1" and nothing else. None of the instructions I've seen on how to set the various parameters (because there's a bunch of optional settings for this command) or which commands to use were clear enough that it really made sense to me. Though the aplay / arecord and other get-info stuff is clear enough.

Incidentally, anyone know a good really clear introduction to creating scripts and config files in GNU/Linux in general?

[Pablo]

So what does the "man" part do?

man is short for "manual" and it works on lots of commands, although some manuals can be outdated. For example, you know the "ls" command. You use it to list your files and directories. Now try:

man ls

See how many options for this apparently simple command? Of course, you and me usually just do "ls" to check if some files are where they are supposed to be. I mean, you have to keep it simple, not only because it is too overwhelming but also because the defaults usually work well.

Another example. "man mplayer" is astonishing. But when you just want to play a video and don't feel like opening a gui frontend "mplayer videofile.avi" will do the trick.

For alsa_in/out, the only compulsory option is the alsa device. That's why I elaborated a bit. Because *that* is the tricky part. It is rare that you want another sample rate or period than jack's, for example.

[Pablo]

anyone know a good really clear introduction to creating scripts and config files in GNU/Linux in general?

You normally don't create config files but you can edit them if needed. Normally you don't need it even if your system is full of them.

As for user scripts. There are several scripting languages that work out of the box in a modern desktop distro. bash is one of them. This is a good intro, imo:

http://digitaldub.wordpress.com/2009/12 ... scripting/