tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56109491738694477472024-03-18T23:01:16.580-04:00Where's Walter?Meanderings about amateur music creation on iMac and iPad using Logic, Garageband or any number of software synths for the iPadAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.comBlogger113125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-87874336056915045622015-10-17T20:43:00.002-04:002015-10-17T20:44:58.220-04:00Passing the time In FlightSince moving my music "to the cloud" in Apple Music and running short of storage space on my iPad with all my Synth software, I find that I don't have nearly as much music to listen to on long flights. When I want to zone out or relax on cross-country flights, I like to have some ambient or low-key music to keep in the background while I'm semi-conscious. Without sufficient studio time to craft lots of harmonies and voices, its software to the rescue. I used generative music apps to create evolving melodies for each leg of the trip.<br />
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I put together a baroque repeating piece on my way to LA which came out as the following:<br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="450" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/228876399&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe>
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I used the very interesting <a href="http://alexandernaut.com/fuguemachine/">Fugue Machine</a> to put together a sequence of notes played on the <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/historic-harpsichords-ruckers/">Rucker Harpsichord app</a> in 2-3 separate voices in differing tempos. Periodically, I'd use the software to invert, mute and/or mangle each of the voices. While the result is a bit "busy", I think it came out ok. Nice when kept on repeat.<br />
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On the way home I went to some old favorites using <a href="http://intermorphic.com/noatikl/">Noatikl</a>, the <a href="http://www.korg.com/us/products/software/korg_im1_for_ipad/">Korg iM1</a> and <a href="http://www.harmonicdog.com/">MultiTrack DAW</a>. For the return, I programmed a pad voice, a bass and a lead all using separate MIDI channels in the iM1. This one did have the desired zoning effect and kept the background noise (lots of that in economy seating) at bay.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="450" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/228878576&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-75571279891181775402015-04-04T12:38:00.000-04:002015-04-04T12:41:04.840-04:00Cheaper Music Making - Part 6 Geeks only need apply<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM4p2Vzry4xZfaSSHeelBlpedGf0be1fWOjDJ2dBlIMzGQDEUwhJxBOPfiijMAgMohqJAEIoRl4bddKSpx4-EXAKn5WN2UybtwSw6IgsJ_NBHcHdUFL0vBcnb6xfYaByiwqk_Xgr9dP2Re/s1600/screenshot_img_63.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM4p2Vzry4xZfaSSHeelBlpedGf0be1fWOjDJ2dBlIMzGQDEUwhJxBOPfiijMAgMohqJAEIoRl4bddKSpx4-EXAKn5WN2UybtwSw6IgsJ_NBHcHdUFL0vBcnb6xfYaByiwqk_Xgr9dP2Re/s1600/screenshot_img_63.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
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When I last posted on the Linux music making effort, I was wrestling with Crouton, latency and several Linux based DAWs. Its been awhile and I've done quite a bit of experimenting and hacking since then. With all of this effort, I'm drawing a few conclusions that I'd like to share:</div>
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<li>While cheap in terms of hardware, making music on Linux is significantly more difficult than on a commercial platform. The setup for hardware and software solutions are overwhelming and in varying degrees of maturity - it remains a domain for tinkerers and hackers.</li>
<li>Crouton, while tremendous on the Chromebook has a "wall" when it comes to latency. Since it shares its kernel with the chroots and its kernel is not optimized for low latency (such as hooking up MIDI keyboards), there is only so far it can take you. I find it usable, but just barely.</li>
<li>It is a lot of fun hacking around getting all of this to work - which is why I kept going on this over the past month. My definition of "fun" might not fit yours though! </li>
<li>If you are really just looking for cheap hardware for your music making, you might do better to focus on second hand hardware and use cheap and/or free options. Many of the software packages for music making on Linux have cross-platform options.</li>
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With all that said, I decided to try yet another option on the chromebook hardware - a full linux distribution that dual boots along with Chrome OS. By going with a full distro, I can tweak the settings and kernel as needed to get the desired performance (in theory at least). I already replaced the SSD in the chromebook with a 128GB option, so I decided to install an independent 32GB Linux partition.</div>
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Any kind of hardware configuration in Linux requires a detailed knowledge of the touchpad, music cards, screens, etc. Instead of going through all of that work, I did take a shortcut and used pre-configured Linux installs for my Acer C720 available at <a href="https://www.distroshare.com/">Distroshare</a>. This site has many Linux options pre-made for a few Acer chromebooks - the C720 and C740 for the most part. </div>
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If you wish to go this route and create a dual-booting Linux, I cannot emphasize enough the need for backups! Chrome OS is very easy to recover, but if you have files on your local machine in your Downloads folder or you have existing crouton setups, you need to back these up before trying to partition and install a full distro. The instructions on Distroshare, sort of assume you are setting up Linux for the first time and don't make it clear that the process is destructive! It will cause your Chromebook to reset itself. Also, many installers are looking to completely replace Chrome OS. In my case I wanted to be able to boot either OS so you have to look for the instructions for Dual-boot and follow them carefully. If you make a mistake (I made several!), be prepared to do a full recovery of your Chrome OS - not that hard, but takes about 20 minutes or so each time. I've slightly altered the instructions from the site.<b> Please note that step 1 will cause the partition to be created and your chromebook will recover itself - so have your backups first!</b> </div>
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<li><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 21px;">Go into a terminal window on your Chromebook (Ctrl-Alt-T), type shell and download and run the Chrubuntu script to partition the disk: <i>curl -L -O </i></span></span><a href="http://goo.gl/s9ryd;" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(126, 159, 145) !important; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">http://goo.gl/s9ryd;</a><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;"><i> sudo bash s9ryd. </i>At this point, Chrome will reboot and repair itself. </span><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;">Format the filesystem on /dev/sda7 while you are in the ChromeOS shell, which is where Linux is going to. To do that, type </span><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;"><i>sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda7</i></span></li>
<li><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;">Reboot and boot into legacy mode (Ctl-L) with the usb stick with this distro on it.</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;">Run the installer continue on until you reach the "Installation Type" section.</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;">Choose: "Something else" or "manual install"</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;">Select /dev/sda7</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;">Select Change.</span><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;"> </span></li>
<li><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;">In the popup window, configure it so the filesystem matches what you formated it as in step #3 and the mount point is "/". Do NOT select the format checkbox. Then press ok.</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;">A new popup might show up with the title: "Write previous changes to disk and continue?" Select "Go Back" - <b>Do not write the changes to disk or you will have to recover.</b> </span></li>
<li><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;">Select "Install Now"</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;">A new pop up will show up with the title "Do you want to return to the partitioning menu?" Select "Continue"</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;">Another popup: "Do you want to return to the partitioner?" Select "Continue"</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #3f4549; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px;">Another popup: "Continue with installation? No partition table changes ..." Select "Continue"</span></li>
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Once all of that completes and you reboot (pressing Ctrl-L when the splash screen shows), you should be in a full independent Linux on your laptop. This allows you to alter any of the etc files, create custom kernels etc. I'll get into those steps later. </div>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-59280924443205449292015-03-14T14:24:00.000-04:002015-03-14T14:24:02.061-04:00Cheaper Music Making - Part 5 - interlude with Sunvox<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUtg6vwMHa6IT8naGM8yNWSJ2u26a-IoYeX3govYlzDs81B0s7D0QZk1TMcoeIKBIxrlZ6ponpVxE_KxoNTj_6EaLOtuFOSLGFl4qtPhjapcVfyFwCXeQIwT6gF_wO-4wpMn3nvhgk_wxS/s1600/sunvox.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUtg6vwMHa6IT8naGM8yNWSJ2u26a-IoYeX3govYlzDs81B0s7D0QZk1TMcoeIKBIxrlZ6ponpVxE_KxoNTj_6EaLOtuFOSLGFl4qtPhjapcVfyFwCXeQIwT6gF_wO-4wpMn3nvhgk_wxS/s1600/sunvox.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
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So far I've gone through setting up a Linux chroot on a Chromebook, setting up KxStudio and downloading hundreds of audio plugins and programs all in one go. Since then, I've been working on Linux with various DAWs, figuring out various ways to configure Jack audio and MIDI and a huge amount of trial an error. Music on Linux is still far from easy!<br />
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So while I wrestle with all of the applications, ask questions on <a href="http://linuxmusicians.com/">linuxmusicians</a> and learn, here is a quick tip on making music on Linux with no fuss whatsoever! If you've used Sunvox on any platform (and indeed it runs on most of them), you know what you're in for - a tracker interface, a self-contained studio with sampled instruments, modular synthesis and some very good effects.<br />
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It has a steep learning curve of its own, but it runs on almost anything. If you have a refrigerator with a Linux based controller, it might just run Sunvox! Without installing KxStudio, Jack or anything else, you can install the Linux 64 bit binary onto your Linux chroot and immediately get sound with Sunvox.<br />
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The downside is that I did not see a current Sunvox installable via the typical Ubuntu repositories, so you have to download the multi-platform binary file <a href="http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/">here</a>. You should copy the file to your home directory with your favorite file manager.<br />
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Double-clicking the zip file will decompress it and if you do that in your home directory, you should end up with a set of folders under sunvox. The one that matters for the Chromebooks is the linux_x86_64 folder.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4gbv9U7B4221omugQHHVjkyjXX43vTxmL-ImpDYQNlYtVCLIE5xHZqHkScVpkWHT9GNRQ9p2OZ3FXoxbYyojB6AiaAj4cgB9tqCUTPM30rKpM0H_nYphs6saAuPS-XM47oZ8P_RAAATId/s1600/sunvox2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4gbv9U7B4221omugQHHVjkyjXX43vTxmL-ImpDYQNlYtVCLIE5xHZqHkScVpkWHT9GNRQ9p2OZ3FXoxbYyojB6AiaAj4cgB9tqCUTPM30rKpM0H_nYphs6saAuPS-XM47oZ8P_RAAATId/s1600/sunvox2.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
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If you navigate into the path sunvox/sunvox/linux_x86_64, you will see the executable for Sunvox. Double-click and that's really it. You are in sunvox, the keyboard will make noise and everything is more or less ready to go. Now the learning curve for trackers kicks in! Lots of good documentation at the <a href="http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/">Sunvox</a> site and on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sunvox+tutorial">YouTube</a>.<br />
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Extra credit - if you want to create an icon and put it in your applications menu, you'll have to create a desktop file and go through some more steps. If you're interested, drop me a line and I can document that process as well.<br />
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Now, back to wrestling with Ardour and other DAWs!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-46822958021121588112015-03-09T21:57:00.004-04:002015-03-09T22:09:26.771-04:00Cheaper Music Making - Part 4 You don't know Jack<br />
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In the first parts of this series, we covered how to get Linux installed on a Chromebook and how to get the KxStudio repository configured and merged into your installation. Part 3 covered installing some of the meta-packages which by default, give you a huge number of multimedia processors, plugins and tools.<br />
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The great thing about Linux is that most tools are open source and free to use. No torrenting, pirating or anything else the least bit illegal required. One downside, perhaps is that there are tons of similar packages all doing more or less the same thing and it can be difficult to get them all sorted out.<br />
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In the part, I'll help you get a few key packages installed and configured so that you will have a reasonably capable DAW configured and ready for use with your preferred MIDI controller. In my case I will set up a <a href="http://www.keithmcmillen.com/products/qunexus/">QuNexus</a> keyboard to use with our Linux studio.<br />
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To start with, we are going to once again put in a little command that will add your userid to the hwaudio group in Linux - without going into too much detail, this will cause your audio tools to run with a much higher priority and will, in theory, keep latency low! Make sure you have started up your Linux desktop as described in the prior posts. Open up the Terminal emulator from the panel and type the following command:<br />
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<b>sudo adduser (youruserid) hwaudio </b></div>
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where (yourusername) is replaced with the linux id you created. In my case it would be<br />
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<b>sudo adduser mike hwaudio</b></div>
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In order to make the various music applications and plugins on Linux see and talk to one another, we are going to need to use a utility that is similar to InterApp Audio on iPads or the Environment window on some DAWs such as Logic. This utility will manage the routing of audio and MIDI events between applications and is called Jack (as in the kind you plug in). </div>
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Like most tools in Linux, Jack has a command line interface that can be used but we are going to use one of many GUI options for controlling Jack. I have found that the easiest one to use is QJackCtl which is available in your Applications Menu (upper left) in the <b>Multimedia|Hardware Configuration </b>section. </div>
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Running that should show you this GUI screen:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1BNTCC6bbJCOvOo6f0v3P7CuNgabVIOjxnVFJd3faZaevw0bIXS0bzc-q-JZRQ_2drBqYkQNSo1zf1upd4DwYvVOR67LuVB3eGPHR0SiZimu4PnGK1GlMEo353Pa3z9TAgf-jEdDABfUR/s1600/QJackCtl.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1BNTCC6bbJCOvOo6f0v3P7CuNgabVIOjxnVFJd3faZaevw0bIXS0bzc-q-JZRQ_2drBqYkQNSo1zf1upd4DwYvVOR67LuVB3eGPHR0SiZimu4PnGK1GlMEo353Pa3z9TAgf-jEdDABfUR/s1600/QJackCtl.png" height="80" width="320" /></a></div>
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Here we are going to press the <b>Setup</b> button and configure Jack for the Chromebook.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxNC5PXgV9VedxfqQSXWmSL_kLN0u8iUAY8-yZrsyGWlCzazas7lVUydJ0PmAfKlyEgWz72uDmzZJis2J2OJde3XJuRzTjrJ__6vuW3PmXI1nGb4vvWKRWwVn-ddSJFrGS7GMZHUjw-VtF/s1600/qj.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxNC5PXgV9VedxfqQSXWmSL_kLN0u8iUAY8-yZrsyGWlCzazas7lVUydJ0PmAfKlyEgWz72uDmzZJis2J2OJde3XJuRzTjrJ__6vuW3PmXI1nGb4vvWKRWwVn-ddSJFrGS7GMZHUjw-VtF/s1600/qj.png" height="261" width="320" /></a></div>
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We are going to set the Interface to "cras" and the Frames/Period to "512". The Frames/Period controls the latency and 512 is a conservative value that seems to work well providing roughly 23.2 msec latency. You can experiment with smaller or larger values once you get things running.</div>
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Press <b>OK</b> to accept the values and then press the <b>Start</b> button on the Jack screen. You should see something like: </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU6Ka-YLkHPkxNFjBQMElEQjC3oBy4mFhZ54E7bHYgpi_l7ZJI5Jcf4OWeyWCHo-vO9WNaWEsgMsl8Mywu91vVfmK-tXupi2DewKmZ_Ue-rmuMIvWAwhCsVBgrEual1SlfoA80vavgKDYF/s1600/QJackCtl3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU6Ka-YLkHPkxNFjBQMElEQjC3oBy4mFhZ54E7bHYgpi_l7ZJI5Jcf4OWeyWCHo-vO9WNaWEsgMsl8Mywu91vVfmK-tXupi2DewKmZ_Ue-rmuMIvWAwhCsVBgrEual1SlfoA80vavgKDYF/s1600/QJackCtl3.png" height="82" width="320" /></a></div>
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If this lights up without errors, you are in business. If there are errors, you can press the <b>Messages</b> button to troubleshoot. In the next part, we will set up our DAW to use the Jack connections and we will hook up a MIDI keyboard to the Chromebook. I did say at one point that this is not for the faint of heart! </div>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-84352237292184501782015-03-02T12:45:00.000-05:002015-03-02T12:45:44.931-05:00Cheaper Music Making - part 3 KxStudio<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So from <a href="http://whitherwalter.blogspot.com/2015/02/cheaper-music-making-part-1-hardware.html">part 1</a> and <a href="http://whitherwalter.blogspot.com/2015/02/cheaper-music-making-part-2-os.html">part 2</a>, we have a Linux environment on a chromebook that will hopefully become our music studio. In this installment, we will add a new repository to the Linux environment and install a huge amount of sound-making software.<br />
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The Linux environment we have so far is pretty generic. We have a basic GUI and not a whole lot else so far. Since we are using Chrome OS as our base kernel, we have a few constraints on what we do Linux-wise. There are a few Linux distributions that are geared towards music making including <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fubuntustudio.org%2F&ei=qdfzVKj_CM38yQT__4LACg&usg=AFQjCNFco6i6C5fjrXU13wMAuERKSIE9VA&sig2=aBbPIginJaTTm9skPtwfTQ&bvm=bv.87269000,d.aWw">Unbuntu-Studio</a> and <a href="http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net/">KxStudio</a> to mention two of them.<br />
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For our installation, we are going to use KxStudio, but we are not going to install a full Linux since we already are running Chrome OS. What we are going to do is to add the KxStudio repository to our installation and then add only the pieces of KxStudio that we need to make music.<br />
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The first step to add KxStudio applications to our already installed environment is to add the repository into our Linux chroot. For that we need to:<br />
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<ol>
<li>Press Ctrl-Alt-T to open our Crosh shell</li>
<li>Type <b>shell</b> and press enter</li>
<li>Type <b>sudo startxfce4 -n kxstudio </b>to go into our linux environment</li>
<li>Click on the Terminal icon in our Linux environment to open a shell window</li>
<li>Type <b>sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kxstudio-team/kxstudio </b>(you'll be prompted to enter your password)</li>
<li>Type <b>sudo apt-get update </b>to refresh the packages available</li>
<li>Now type <b>sudo apt-get install kxstudio-repos</b></li>
<li>and one more time <b>sudo apt-get update</b></li>
<li>and last to update any packages that kxstudio has newer versions of, we will run <b>sudo apt-get dist-upgrade</b></li>
</ol>
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After doing all of this, the package manager in our Linux installation will now have access to the tons of music programs availabe via kxstudio as well as its original installation. Package managers in Linux are there to work out dependencies so that when you install something, all the pieces needed for it to work will be installed as well and if there is a conflict, the package manager should tell you. </div>
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To make our lives easier moving forward, let's install a graphical package installation tool instead of always using "<b>apt-get" </b>from the command line.</div>
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<ol>
<li>In our terminal window, type <b>sudo apt-get install synaptic</b> to install the package management tool.</li>
<li>Once this is done, you should see in your applications menu (upper left of laptop), under the <b>System</b> menu, an option for Synaptic package manager. Clicking this will prompt you for your password and will display a graphical window that we can use to install future programs into our environment.</li>
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Now we have an easier way to filter and install our software. I suggest pressing the "Search Results" button and type "kxstudio-meta" into the quick filter box. This will show several "meta packages" which contain groups of applications that can be installed all at once.</div>
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I started by clicking the box next to kxstudio-desktop. This will install tons of software and drivers for the kxstudio environment including an office suite and a fair amount of productivity software. I like having these, but technically you might not need these for just music. In any event, selecting this and pressing apply installed some 800+ files onto the environment - it takes awhile! </div>
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The next selections you will need include:</div>
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kxstudio-meta-audio </div>
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kxstudio-meta-audio-plugins</div>
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Make note of the others, you may want to install more of the codecs (MP3 for example) and some of the other files. Please avoid anything related to the linux kernel since we are sharing the Chrome OS kernel in our environment. Once you go through installing these options, your Applications menu will have a huge multimedia set of programs for music creation. Next comes the fun task of configuring this mess to actually make noise! </div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-69965311528856980192015-02-27T20:55:00.001-05:002015-02-28T08:20:21.253-05:00Cheaper Music Making - part 2 - OS<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In the last post, I wrote up all the hardware steps needed to prepare your chromebook to be a music studio. In this post, I want to pick up and continue with setting up the operating system (Linux) that we will use to host our music software on the chromebook.<br />
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Chrome OS itself is a variant of Linux but very scaled down to just the essentials. If you are looking for just cloud-based software such as google Docs or online Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. you won't need any of this. In fact there is a pretty cool online Audio making site called Audiotool (thanks to Rok Kovač for the information) that looks pretty cool and requires no hacking at all. Of course it is limited to the instruments it includes, but still looks fun.<br />
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To run a full localized DAW and music software, however, we have to install a more robust operating system with its own file storage and software repository. Since we are going for "free", we are going open source with Linux on the chromebook. The chromebook is already optimized in many ways for Linux and it is an easy fit.<br />
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For Linux on a chromebook, there are 2 popular options. One option is to replace the bios, create a dual-boot solution and create a completely independent environment. The other option is to use the Chrome OS kernel but install a "chroot" environment to provide a separate disk image. There is an open source project called chrubuntu that addresses the first option, but I am going with the second option which is supported by a utility called <a href="https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton">crouton</a>.<br />
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Crouton allows us to create a new OS as a chroot but still keep the Chrome OS kernel. This means that we can switch back and forth between the two environments and all of the hardware resources will be fully supported. In the case of chrubuntu, it is up to you to get the drivers needed for your particular hardware. For purely music making purposes, chrubuntu might be a more stable solution once you have sorted out all the hardware issues, but for ease of installation and maintenance, I much prefer the crouton solution. As with my iPad, I don't use my chromebook "just for music". I also do software development on it with python/django so the ability to hot key back and forth is really a plus for me.<br />
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Installing crouton is fairly straight-forward - the link I provided has good instructions. However, there are many installation possibilities. I recommend installing the default ubuntu release (and older 12.04) along with the light XFCE desktop environment.<br />
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To do this, you first have to download crouton <a href="https://goo.gl/fd3zc">here</a>. This will put a script into your Downloads folder on the chrome box. I suggest that you install your Linux chroot as follows:<br />
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<ol>
<li>Press Ctrl-Alt-T to get a terminal window</li>
<li>Type <b>shell</b> and press enter</li>
<li>Type <b>sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -t chrome,keyboard,xfce -n kxstudio</b></li>
</ol>
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This will download a lot of files, take around 15-30 minutes and will eventually prompt you to create a logon name and password. Once you do that, you have a full Linux installation! Note - I recommend not installing the xiwi target which lets your linux run in a chrome tab. While this is nice, it does not allow for hardware video acceleration and will cause problems with music apps. </div>
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To enter this new installation, you will type <b>sudo startxfce4 </b>to start your graphical linux environment. This will put you into an X-Windows based Linux environment! Get acquainted, google xfce, play around. To switch back and forth between Linux and Chrome OS, type ctrl-alt-shift and right or left arrow. This will toggle back and forth. </div>
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To close your Linux shell, select logout from the menu and it will drop you back into chrome. Whenever you want to get back into Linux, type Ctrl-Alt-T, type shell and then type sudo startxfce4.<br />
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Just one more thing (sorry Steve).... There is a minor fix you need to make in the startxfce4 script in order to enable midi and the sound device in your new Linux chroot. Let's do that now.<br />
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<ol>
<li>Press Ctrl-Alt-T to get the terminal window</li>
<li>Type <b>shell</b> and press enter</li>
<li>type cd /usr/local/bin and press enter</li>
<li>type <b>sudo vi startxfce4</b> (welcome to the horror that is vi!!!)</li>
<li>Navigate in the editor down to the blank line just above the line reading "exec sh....." using either the arrow keys (wimp!) or the much cooler j,k,l and ; keys.</li>
<li>On the blank line, press <b>i </b>(this puts you in insert mode in this retro editor)</li>
<li>Type the following lines:</li>
</ol>
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# set up audio device<br />
sudo modprobe snd-seq-midi<br />
sudo chmod 777 /dev/snd/seq<br />
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Now press the <b>esc </b>key to exit insert mode.<br />
Press the "<b>:</b>" key followed by <b>wq</b> and then press enter.<br />
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Congratulations! You are a unix wizard. Now the next time you start up your Linux chroot, the sound device will be enabled, you should be able to plug in MIDI keyboards and hopefully things will work!<br />
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This might be a good time to take a backup of your new Linux environment. If you did not do the bios trick to lock developer mode OR you find it necessary to "power wash" (its a thing) your chrome book to fix a chrome issue, you will lose your data. If you have a backup, you can easily recover it.<br />
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To backup your chroot using crouton, do the following:<br />
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<ol>
<li>Type Ctrl-Alt-T and type <b>shell</b> and enter</li>
<li>Type <b>sudo edit-chroot -b kxstudio</b></li>
<li>This will run for a few minutes and will create a file in your Downloads folder named with your Linux chroot and a timestamp. Once this completes, copy this file off to a usb stick in case you wipe your computer's storage.</li>
</ol>
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Please refer to the crouton site <a href="https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton">here</a> for instructions on how to recover from a backup if you need to.</div>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-2974516520153077552015-02-26T16:03:00.000-05:002015-02-26T16:03:14.551-05:00Cheaper Music Making - Part 1, HardwareAs I indicated in my last post, I am experimenting with using a commodity chromebook as a music studio laptop and will document my findings as we go. My goal in this is to have a very cheap (under $300 total) music studio laptop to incorporate into my iMac, iPad music making flow. As I often state in this blog, I'm an amateur music maker and don't mind experimenting for experimentation's sake at times!<br />
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This is not for the faint of heart and if command lines scare you, don't try any of this! Ideally, you should have some idea of Linux but I'll try to spell things out where possible.<br />
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For this effort, I am going to use a commercial chromebook as a starting point. One thing to note about chromebooks is that they have 2 basic CPU types - Intel and ARM based. Both work reasonably well for just the Chrome OS, but for hacking purposes and what will be necessary to make music, I STRONGLY recommend sticking with an Intel based chromebook.<br />
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<a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61Z2sXctnLL._SL1070_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61Z2sXctnLL._SL1070_.jpg" height="224" width="320" /></a></div>
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There are tons of choices here. I will be working with the classic <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Acer-C720-Chromebook-11-6-Inch-2GB/dp/B00FNPD1VW/ref=sr_1_1/188-6052312-1389459?ie=UTF8&qid=1424970008&sr=8-1&keywords=acer+c720">Acer C720 chromebook</a> for its somewhat faster CPU, easy hackability and well-documented solutions to some of the challenges in running Linux side by side with Chrome OS. The model I used has a list price around $200 (or less) at the time of this writing and I will recommend a minor hardware upgrade costing an additional $55. Some of the hardware "tweaks" I recommend here are particular to the Acer model. If you use something else, do some research on how to apply the same upgrades.<br />
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For $200, the Acer C720 gives you a basic 11" laptop running a 64-bit dual core Celeron Haswell processor, 16 GB of SSD storage and 2GB (soldered! yuck) of memory. Pretty basic hardware which is more than fast enough for the normal demands of the Chrome OS, but presents a few challenges for music making. I prefer the small size for portability, but there are bigger chromebooks if screensize matters more to you.<br />
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First off, the storage! 16GB is plenty for the Chrome OS where you save almost everything into the cloud. Google gives you either 100GB or 1 terabyte of storage free for 2 years with your purchase. For music making, however, you need more local storage and I suggest that you do an upgrade yourself to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LNF1RVM/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1#">128GB</a>. It is not essential, you can fit probably one Linux distro on the 16GB, but storage will get tight.<br />
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A bigger concern is the 2GB of memory. This is fine for Chrome OS but a bit small for some Linux programs. There are some 4GB chromebooks out there and if you can find one, might be a good ideas up front! In my case, these were too scarce so I settled for the 2GB which is unfortunately soldered to the motherboard so you won't be upgrading it. There is an easy fix to make that memory go much further in both Chrome and in our music environment (which if you haven't guessed yet, will be Linux based). I have found the processor to be the least of my worries on the chromebook and with the SSD, the chromebook "feels" faster than even my desktop iMac in most respects.<br />
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In order to "hack on" our Linux based music studio, we are going to have to put the chromebook into its "developer mode" which, thankfully, is pretty easy to do. On the chromebook, press at the same time <b>esc, refresh </b>(the key 2 keys to the right of esc) and the <b>power </b>button on the far right. This will reboot the chromebook into recovery mode. When the recovery message comes up, press ctrl-D. This will put you into developer mode which is essential for using Linux on the chromebook.<br />
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Whenever you reboot the chromebook or update your Chrome OS by restarting it, a pop up screen will show with a 30 second timer and a message stating "Chrome OS verification is turned off" and a prompt to press the spacebar. <b>Under no circumstances do you want to do this unless you want to start over! </b>This will reset the chromebook and wipe out any non-chrome software that you have installed. Instead, when this message is displayed, you need to press Ctrl-D again to stay in Developer mode. You've been warned!<br />
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Since we are this far and in developer mode, let's take care of the 2GB limit on memory. Linux will let you create "swap partitions" that will swap memory onto disk and back again when more memory is needed than you have. In the case of the chromebook, you don't have a magnetic disk but you have a SSD. <b>It is normally a very bad idea to use a SSD drive as swap space.</b> The SSD would be constantly reading/writing to the same locations which would wear it out faster. The good news is that the Chrome OS uses a technique called "ZRam" on Linux. We can allocate swap space, and Chrome will "compress" the memory in place and use actual memory for the swap space, not the SSD. This can effectively double your memory.<br />
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To activate swap, all we have to do is press Ctrl + Alt + T which opens a shell called "Crosh".<br />
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We can type "swap enable", optionally with a number of MB (I suggest 2048 for 2 GB) and press enter. Swap should fit in main memory and you'll have much better performance both in Chrome OS and in our Linux installation when we get there.<br />
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At this point, we have a running chrome OS in developer mode with better memory management. Before we install any software, however, let's think about upgrading the SSD and let's fix that problem with having to press Ctrl-D or risk losing our software when someone presses the spacebar by mistake! The next steps (optional, not required) will:<br />
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<ol>
<li>Involve some minor hardware surgery on the chromebook</li>
<li>voids your warranty :) We don't need no stinking warranties! </li>
</ol>
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Before we do surgery, we should make sure that you create a recovery USB drive to allow us to recover the Chrome OS to the new SSD we want to install. Follow the instructions <a href="https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/6002417?source=genius-rts">here</a> to create the USB stick.</div>
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Now we are ready to open up the laptop and do our surgery. <a href="http://www.newchromebook.com/guide/c720-permanent-linux-laptop-turorial-1-of-3/">This site</a> shows how to open up the laptop and gives instructions on removing the bios write protect screw. We will use that as a guideline, but follow the instructions here since our setup will be slightly different.</div>
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Once you get the laptop opened, remove the screw as indicated in the pictures. We will then turn the laptop back over, plug it in (with the back still off) and we will set the bios so that developer mode will be "locked" and the reboot screen will only show for 2 seconds.</div>
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To do that, once the screw is removed:</div>
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<ol>
<li>Press Ctrl-Alt-T to get a shell prompt.</li>
<li>Type shell and press enter</li>
<li>Type sudo su and press enter (puts you on as root)</li>
<li>Type <b>cd /usr/bin </b>and press enter</li>
<li>Type <b>set_gbb_flags.sh 0x9</b> and press enter</li>
</ol>
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We are not using the setting shown in the site because we won't be dual-booting. Use the "0x9" value instead. Now you can replace the write protect screw but leave the back open, we are going to replace the SDD drive while we are here.</div>
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I mentioned above that a bigger SDD is a good idea and I recommend <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LNF1RVM/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1">this one</a>. It is essential that you pick this type of socket to be compatible with the C720 hardware. Take out the screw on the existing SDD (again refer to the picture), gently remove it and replace it with the new SDD. I found that the label on the one I bought was on the other side than the original! Once installed, replace the screw and you are set to put the back back on and screws back in.<br />
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When you next reboot, you'll get an error of course because we have a blank SDD. You will be prompted to put in your recovery USB which you should do. A few minutes later, you should have a new recovered chromebook with 128GB of storage. You log onto google once more, it will recover ALL of your settings from Chrome OS and you are back in business with better hardware!<br />
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Next post, we will install our operating system for our music studio.</div>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-15653440724985382782015-02-25T20:04:00.000-05:002015-02-25T20:04:38.736-05:00Cheaper music making? <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://static.acer.com/up/Resource/Acer/Chromebook/AGW2%20C/Images/20130805/C720-zoom-big.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://static.acer.com/up/Resource/Acer/Chromebook/AGW2%20C/Images/20130805/C720-zoom-big.png" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
I've been fairly active in my music making hobbies since 2004 primarily on my iMac or iPad. On the iMac, I started with Garageband and eventually moved on to Logic Express 9 and now Logic Pro X. Somewhere during that time, the iPad happened and I also have roughly a hundred music making apps of one kind and another on the tablet.<br />
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Anyone knowing me has seen me go through an endless stream of gadgets during my life from early PCs to handheld devices, Linux servers, netbooks etc. I'm a techie and proud of it :). I've had cheap laptops, netbooks and more recently have become enamored with chromebooks.<br />
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Cheap is the operative word in most cases excepting my Apple devices. Another thing about me is that over time, I have soured almost completely on Windows. I have to use a Windows PC professionally (though its mostly Oracle and Java stuff) and that is more than enough. As a techie, I've been the de-facto family "consultant" for cleaning, de-virusing and configuring countless PCs and it sickens me how much care and feeding Windows machines require. Yeah, if you know what you're doing, you should be fine. But my elderly aunts, in-laws and neighbors invariably have the machine slowed down to a crawl within a year. Windows is NOT consumer friendly.<br />
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Until recently, I recommended the "cheapest" Apple options to relatives - the Mac Mini or a MacBook of one kind or another. The up front few hundred dollars is worth it for the long term pain savings - and overall that is still true. Thankfully, though, there are now far cheaper alternatives that are even easier to maintain - Google Chromebooks and Chromeboxes.<br />
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If you've checked them out, you know that they are easy, fast and work well for basic internet type activities and light office work provided you are mostly connected to the internet at all times. For great aunts and moms, its a no-brainer. The only catch so far is no Skype, but Google Hangouts works just as well and at about $200 a pop, you can drop and mangle 5 of these suckers for the price of ONE Macbook Air. Even if you need the full computer for something, as a second computer, these are almost at the disposable price point.<br />
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In my personal case, I wanted to take a $200 chrome book and use it as a software development laptop and now as a music laptop. That's a bit crazy! But as I'll show, not terribly hard to pull off if you're patient (and cheap, like me).<br />
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So I hope to blog a bit about the process of converting a cheap laptop into a portable music studio and find out if its even worth doing! A short spoiler - I do have things running fairly well at this point so things look promising. I haven't stress tested anything and the open source DAWs do take some getting used to. Stay tuned!<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-86053335196648573012015-02-07T12:41:00.000-05:002015-02-07T13:09:46.881-05:00MIDI Madness on an iPad<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2013/01/midi-30.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2013/01/midi-30.jpg" height="162" width="320" /></a></div>
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As I post often, my music is mostly created with MIDI tracks from either soft synths, MIDI controllers or sequenced MIDI patterns. MIDI makes it easy for me to correct any errors or mistakes. MIDI lets me swap in and out different samples, synths or instruments without having to rerecord anything. Its the best thing going in modern music in my opinion!<br />
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On the desktop, I use Logic X and normally create many MIDI tracks that I eventually bounce down into finished songs (or long sequences of annoying noise depending on your point of view). On the iPad as I write often, I want the same easy experience I have on Logic X with MIDI and sadly, that is not yet possible.<br />
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Many DAWs on the iPad support MIDI and some also support Virtual MIDI to control other apps running at the same time but none of them do so as seamlessly as VSTs or AUs on the desktop. The "gold standard" and closest candidate for me is Cubasis.<br />
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I've posted a few times about using MIDI with Cubasis with InterApp Audio and Virtual MIDI but to be honest, doing this is very crash-prone and I've been experimenting quite a bit with simplifying the process. I recently found a pretty good workflow for working with MIDI and I'll step through one method that works pretty well for me.<br />
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Recently I posted the piece below using Cubasis, Korg Module Synthology piano and Noatikl:<br />
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This piece required getting 3 iOS apps to "play nice" together - Cubasis, Noatikl and Korg Module. I decided to minimize my variables by only using InterApp Audio when necessary and only a few sounds. This is a piano piece and I want the left and right hands to sound "real" and produce a credible piano solo. Virtual MIDI by itself is a challenge, so I defer using IAA and bouncing until I get the basic sounds working and then recorded.<br />
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The composition tool for me (as is often the case) is Noatikl. Rather than go into its details, I'll describe what I used it to accomplish (see my <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5610949173869447747#editor/target=post;postID=3575367652541247739;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=13;src=postname">tutorial</a> if you want to dig deeper into Noatikl).<br />
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I loaded up Korg Module with one of the Synthology piano samples. Unfortunately Korg Module does not let you specify what MIDI channels it listens to but it does support Virtual MIDI in Omni mode (meaning that all MIDI being fed will trigger notes). On this piece, I'll use that to my advantage.<br />
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With Korg Module loaded (and background audio enabled from its setup menus), I next load Intermorphic's Noatikl which I will use to "program" the music for this piece. I want to define 2 "voices" in Noatikl which will emit MIDI notes and events. One voice will the the "left hand" of the piano, the other will be the "right hand".<br />
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At first the main order of business is to create something that sounds good - so I picked a Lydian scale and 7/4 time (to be weird) in Noatikl and programmed a chord pattern derived from a classic 2-5-1 sequence (2nd note of scale, 5th note, a few others, then back to 1st note). By giving Noatikl an octave range and a rhythm pattern to follow, it plays those notes across a few octaves in order. Now for the "magic", I ask Noatikl to generate diatonic chords for those notes using 3rds for some chords and 4th for others. For the chords I program the voice to randomly use between 3 and 5 notes (or "fingers').<br />
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For the "right hand" I program a simple pattern of eighth notes in the scale, ask it to "auto harmonize" with the other voice, and ask it to run the patter 50% of the time and then a random sequence of quarter, eighth and half notes also harmonized the other 50% of the time. A bit of tweaking and parameter setting in Noatikl and I have a piece that sound pretty good to me. The velocities are lightly randomized, the chord timings are slightly delayed to give a human feel and voila, the sound is ready to be recorded (which is the hard part!).<br />
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The sound from Noatikl over virtual MIDI into Korg Module is good but not perfect! At times, the maximum polyphony is exceeded and I hear a distinct "plunk" sound. This is probably a short-coming of Korg Module that I've read documented elsewhere where lots of sustaining notes are playing at once (I did tweak Noatikl to use the sustain pedal and release it on each bar). This will have to be corrected after recording.<br />
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To record the piece, I want to use Cubasis. This is where things get tricky with Virtual MIDI as to who drives what. Korg Module is already "listening" to all MIDI channels coming out of Noatikl and I don't want Cubasis feeding it as well. So in Cubasis, I create 2 MIDI tracks, and set the instrument to "None". I just want the MIDI notes recorded. For the MIDI source, I select each Noatikl track number and MIDI channel. So track one is listening to MIDI track 1 in Noatikl and track 2 is listening to track 2 in Noatikl. I make sure that both tracks have MIDI output as None - remember, Korg Module is already playing the MIDI from Noatikl - don't want to feed it twice!<br />
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So in theory, we hit "record" in Cubasis, start Noatikl playing the tune and away it goes. Bad news though - when Cubasis first gets MIDI notes from Noatikl, it crashes and restarts (ah the wonder of iPads!). So as a work-around, we start Noatikl playing first, open Cubasis (crash/restart), and then press record - it will pick up with what is currently playing.<br />
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We let this go to the end of the song, press stop and we should have good MIDI notes in two tracks in Cubasis. If this worked out OK, we are done with Noatikl. To save memory, I close Noatikl, go back to the two tracks in Cubasis and set their output to "Virtual MIDI". Now Cubasis will "drive" Korg Module.<br />
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Playing it back at this point sounds good with a few "plunks" here and there. There are two culprits. One I mentioned is the Korg Module polyphony limit and a few others seem to be MIDI generation bugs either in Noatikl or Cubasis. The "bugs" in MIDI sound like "plunks" too and are visible in the MIDI notes as extremely short notes. I find these and either delete them or lengthen them in the Cubasis editor.<br />
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The second "plunks" are harder. You have to listen for them, find the measure and delete a few concurrent notes until they sound right. MIDI makes the editing so much easier than working with Audio files!<br />
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Now that it all sounds ok, it comes time to "bounce the tracks". I don't use the MIDI/Inter App Audio in Cubasis since I need to record two tracks at once and IAA only allows one instance of an instrument at a time. The easier way is to create an IAA Audio track in Cubasis, set it to listen to Korg Module, arm it to record, disarm the 2 MIDI channels and play the piece. Cubasis will route the MIDI through Korg Module and record the resulting audio into the Audio track.<br />
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Having done this, I then mute the two MIDI tracks and export the track to Soundcloud. If this sounds like more work than a desktop DAW, well, it is! But I've found this workflow to be a bit better than what I've done in past tracks requiring multiple passes. Hope this helps someone!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-68289408556740404302015-01-25T11:33:00.000-05:002015-01-25T11:33:09.268-05:00Ethical use of Korg Module and another birthday<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This month I celebrated another birthday and with a birthday in January, I often take a reflective look on my life. I combine New Year resolutions with another year on earth and see how my life is affecting the world I live in.<br />
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Loving music as I do, I also try to be ethical and cause no harm to the world other than aural abuse (I suffer for my music so its only fair that my listeners have their turn!). Very recently I downloaded <a href="http://www.korg.com/us/products/software/korg_module_for_ipad/">Korg Module</a> and the Synthology Ivory piano add-ons without really thinking of the implications. Spoiler alert - the Synthology Ivory pianos sound incredible but that is not what has me soul searching and this is not to be a review nor an endorsement - far from it my friends!<br />
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Giving it a little thought, I looked into the Synthology pianos. These are <i>virtual</i> pianos, of course with rich sampling and sounds. These can be played by external keyboards but also via <i>virtual keys</i> which are pretty small in Module. It stands to reason, that these small virtual keyboards are made of <i>virtual ivory! </i>I realize most of you probably knew that being the astute musicians that you are, but to me this was a revelation.<br />
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Taking my thought processes further, it stands to reason that <i>virtual ivory</i> must come from <i>virtual tusks</i> which in turn come from <i>virtual elephants! </i>In all my web browsing and computer usage, I don't recall seeing more than a very few <i>virtual elephants. "Why might this be?", </i>I asked myself and came to the same conclusion that you no doubt have also reached - they are nearly extinct!<br />
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In fact, now that I think of it, I have read of domain poaching related to the internet and this is probably where the <i>virtual ivory</i> comes from. I think I'm going to have to either come to terms with the ethical implications of using Module or delete it from my iPad.<br />
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In all honesty, I have been accused of <i>tree-huggery</i> in my past. I have had my shares of embarrassments. My Nauga preserve in the 1980s went nowhere. Likewise my clay pigeon preserve. Added to the list, my attempt to revive the North American Faux (they are extremely popular for their fur and for leather, a peculiar animal that makes no noise - what does the faux say?) and don't even ask about my mule-breeding experiment.<br />
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In any event, I may have to avoid Synthology despite the sound quality or compromise my personal code of ethics. Thanks for reading.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-59572503826340776112015-01-03T13:31:00.001-05:002015-01-03T13:31:59.251-05:00Twiddling the littleBits Korg<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Since my first playing around with the littleBits, I've got the arduino configured so I can use my Akai MPK mini keyboard to control the littleBits synth. Hardware synths are new to me and one challenge is tuning the oscillators! They do have some drift and interesting interactions together. The MIDI program for the arduino has built into it some nice features to mimic an LFO by modulating the pitch with CC1 events and it supports portamento as well as pitch bending. This is much better than using the provided "mini keyboard" which basically is an array of switches:<br />
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With the arduino setup, I also can use my iPad to control pitches with any of its MIDI apps which I'll be doing more of as I go on. The piece above was with just the MPK mini on 2 tracks - one bass looped and the other sort a distorted guitar. The distortion interestingly enough was all from the modules in the little bits - no post processing bit crushers or digital noise added. The synth setup for this piece, I call a "mess-20" since it is sort of the MS-20 Korg configuration. 2 analog oscillators, an envelope into the filter that is triggered by note-ons and a simple delay module. </div>
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The post processing was limited to some EQ, compression and a stereo-spread module to give the mono synth some sense of space. </div>
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So after a few more days of tweaking, I still thing this is an incredible modular setup for very little money! I did add some modules to the bass Synth kit - specifically some wires, mixers, splitters and an additional envelope and oscillator. It is important to remember that these are Korg modules and it IS a mono synth, so no polyphony or stereo in the hardware itself is supported. Likewise, these modules are not inherently velocity sensitive, so any volume adjustments are limited to playing with the volume know (or much easier) done with automation on the track post recording. </div>
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I usually record the audio into Logic and there I can add space with the stereo spreader or manipulate the recorded audio in any other ways. I'm sure this is old news to you audio gurus but for a MIDI guy like me, there is a learning curve here. It took me awhile to get the levels right for recording and as of now I am still going through the iMac mic-in port which probably is not the cleanest. </div>
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For patch preset saving I resort to the camera on my phone so I can remember the convoluted lego-like layouts of my synth modules for future use :). </div>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-73478122034619425102014-12-30T13:44:00.001-05:002014-12-30T21:37:29.581-05:00Modular Synthesizer at last!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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My earliest synth memory was seeing a film featuring Wendy (then Walter) Carlos and Bob Moog operating the modular Moog synth in the 1960s (<a href="http://whitherwalter.blogspot.com/2011/02/film-day.html">old blog post about it here</a>). For just a few decades, any idea of owning or playing my own synth remained a pipe-dream.<br />
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Years later, I got into music making and synthesis via Computer and "virtual synthesizers" and have until recently only ever used software synthesizers. I haven't bought any self-contained synths or other hardware but have collected countless software modules on my desktop (iMac) and more recently on the iPad.<br />
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My interests in modular synthesis stayed and I purchased the excellent movie - <a href="http://www.idreamofwires.org/">I Dream of Wires </a>when it came out. Modern modular equipment is a pricey proposition and requires a great deal of assembly and electronic knowledge. <a href="http://electronicmusic.wikia.com/wiki/Eurorack">Eurorack</a> systems are popular and I've always toyed with the idea of getting into them but these too are costly and laborious to configure and change. Many of my more interesting software synths emulate modular systems such as the <a href="http://www.arturia.com/products/analog-classics/modular-v">Arturia Modular V</a>, <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Fapp%2Fivcs3%2Fid665703927%3Fmt%3D8&ei=ieeiVMjhJdejyASZ_4KgAw&usg=AFQjCNF-hiePgTqRRilfFgcZDrYuE6wZvw&sig2=A68ydNRZnU6slCVpUehQkw&bvm=bv.82001339,d.aWw">iVCS3</a> and more low-level options such as <a href="http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synths/reaktor-5/">Reaktor</a> and <a href="http://audulus.com/">Adulus</a>.<br />
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One reason I tend to prefer the software options is that it is so fast to prototype, mock-up and change any music making ideas I have without having to resort to screw drivers or soldering irons. Nonetheless, the lure of analog and tinkering has remained.<br />
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This Christmas, my wonderful wife (at the advice of my older son) bought me the <a href="http://littlebits.cc/kits/synth-kit">littleBits Synth kit </a>and suddenly, I have a modular system at my fingertips that I can configure/reconfigure in seconds with its brilliant magnetic connection system and self-contained modules. Korg collaborated with littleBits and produced some excellent oscillators, sequencers, keyboards, filters and envelopes in a very simple, lego-like configuration. This kit is extremely easy to use, is cheap (compared to other modular setups) and quite powerful.<br />
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All by itself, the kit provides enough to put together a two oscillator synth with basic envelope, sequencing and filtering. The keyboard isn't going to produce too much with switches for each note, but you can put int basic notes and run through the sequencer to get some synth rhythms. I bought a few extra modules (splitter, mixer, mounting boards and another oscillator) and put together a basic piece in just a few hours of tinkering. I used the filter in its self-oscillating mode to get a sine wave to mix with the simple saw or square that the Korg oscillator provides.<br />
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One thing I have to get used to is recording analog audio! Up until now with mostly MIDI synthesizers or my iConnectMIDI2, the input comes through USB cables or via the iConnectMIDI. The analog synth goes into my somewhat noisy microphone jack on my iMac. I might need to consider an audio interface at some point.<br />
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Another work in-progress for me is connecting the modular synthesizer into my music-making via MIDI. There is a module "in the works" for MIDI control but some littleBits users have already solved this by using a littleBits Arduino module to plug into the kit. I bought the littleBits arduino and am working on the MIDI integration.<br />
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There are a few projects already outlining how to do this <a href="http://littlebits.cc/projects/arduino-midi-contoller-for-littlebits-korg-synth-kit">here</a> and <a href="http://littlebits.cc/projects/arduino-midi-synth-with-lfo-portamento-and-pitch-wheel">here</a>. The second link has a much richer MIDI sketch and is probably the one I will adapt. For my needs, I am more interested in a MIDI solution to integrate with external sequencers and MIDI controllers in my studio rather than for live performance. An added bonus is that I get to do some programming as well :).<br />
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I've put the arduino beta programming environment onto my iMac and have got the basics working so stay tuned and I'll update my progress as it goes.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-49752362496812432302014-12-27T23:32:00.000-05:002014-12-27T23:38:06.085-05:002014 reflections and the year aheadI've been reading many posts on the excellent <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/Ipadmusician/760588683995748/?notif_t=group_comment_reply">iPad Musician</a> Facebook page and year-end wrap-ups from other sites and decided that I should sum up a bit about what I've acquired this year and where I think 2015 might take me musically.<br />
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Again, the philosophy of this blog and my perspective is one of an amateur, so much of what I do reflects the "hobby" aspect of my music making (i.e. I buy way too many apps and master way too few of them), but that is for me, part of the fun!<br />
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As technology goes, I tend to be an early adopter and with iOS8, I rolled the dice and forged ahead - no regrets here. Lots of stuff doesn't work (of course), but I love challenges and finding ways to make music work despite them. There are many passionate, and angry debates about Apple's rollout of iOS8 which are probably justified to some extent. Apple's iOS environment, though, really pushes free upgrades for life and more or less is a one-way trip. Once you do upgrade, there is little going back. So, if parts of my music arsenal break in the process, I simply move on to other tools that work and wait for the rest to catch up. Wasting time on blaming who broke what is, for me, a useless endeavor.<br />
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This year, some of that has pushed me to abandon some tools I used to rely on and to rediscover mixing my music making with the iPad and Logic X on the desktop. The best DAW I have is still on my iMac no matter what Cubasis or Auria manage to accomplish! One major purchase that I made this year and use more and more is the iConnectMIDI2. This has allowed me to merge my iPad into my music making as a MIDI device. I can pass audio and MIDI in either direction and use the best tool for each job.<br />
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For me, I don't do anything with audio. I don't sing. I don't play guitar. I don't record live sounds so MIDI is my medium. I don't own a "classic" MIDI synth. I don't have a single traditional MIDI cable. I use USB MIDI exclusively. So 2 of the ports on my iConnectMIDI2 go unused (those large ugly circa 1985 MIDI ports). My one and only iPad is connected to the USB port via the iPad 30 pin cable and an ugly 30-pin to lightning adapter. My iPad, for the record, is an iPad Air (1st gen).<br />
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So some of the major apps that I used in this setup are MIDI sequencers. I've been using Noatikl on the desktop for years and continue to use it on the iPad. On the iPad, it crashes - a lot! Might be Apple, might be iOS8, might be the developer....but I still use it because, frankly, there isn't a single app out there that comes close in functionality for generative music that still gives me control over the composing and rules. Believe me I've looked! Despite the iOS stability issues, I use this app more than anything when trying to control other sound sources. The interface is weird. The pattern language is very unfriendly to enter on an iPad keyboard but, again, there is nothing close to this in pure power - nada! No ping-pong or "game of life" randomizers are in the same league. So if you can put up with the learning curve, this app is a must-have.<br />
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For more simple MIDI needs, however, there are many very good apps I added to my iPad this year around MIDI sequencing. Xynthesizr is one such app that lets me sequence multiple MIDI channels and make a few of them random, a few less random and then build on what it creates. I've also added StepPolyArp and ChordPolyPad to help with chording and step sequencing. Both on the iPad alone and with Logic X, these sequencers have added quite a bit to my music making. Other additions this year for sequencing include Thesys, Gestrument and Arpeggionome Pro.<br />
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With my increasing investment in MIDI sequencers, I also needed to have some better sound targets for the MIDI events. This year, I expanded some of my sampled sounds by adding the <a href="http://crudebyte.com/mobile/cmp_grand_piano/">CMP Grand Piano</a> and iSymphonic modules along with the excellent Ruckers 1628 harpsichord and many SampleTank expansions (Miroslav, Moog, etc). These apps, while pricey, sound fantastic on the iPad and at times take the place of my desktop samples when creating music on the go.<br />
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In the percussion arena, I discovered <a href="http://www.drumperfect.nl/">DrumPerfect</a> which really is the closest I've come to a "live feel" for my drums on the iPad. The left/right hand samples, humanize functionality and other features make this the best "real drum" sounding app I have and rivals what I can do on my desktop as well.<br />
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Other sampling I am less impressed with include the <a href="http://ifretless.com/">iFretless</a> collection. I can only assume that guitar players love being able to play mediocre saxes and crappy-sounding brass with a guitar based interface. I do like their bass samples and some of the guitars, but the other sounds, well.....I go back to the desktop for those. I only ever use iFretless with MIDI sequencers or Noatikl. I absolutely HATE figuring out guitar fingerings for non-guitar instruments! There are no good saxes or brass on the iPad as of yet. I enjoy using my Akai EWI to play sax or trumpet parts on the desktop and have over $600 invested in SampleModeling instruments. On the iPad, the samples aren't that good and breath control is still a major PITA.<br />
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Like almost everyone, I did get Korg Gadget this year but unlike most, I've only used it sparingly so far. I find the environment a bit lacking in effects. The synths are great but the mixing is a bit limited. I will probably make more use of this in the coming year. I've passed so far on the Module expansion they offer - we'll see how long that lasts!<br />
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Another thing that happened this year - my 64GB iPad filled up. I had to jettison some of my non-music apps such as large games that I rarely play and more stressful for me, I had to get rid of some music making apps that I rarely use. This will continue into the new year I think. Music Studio bit the dust for me - its large, sample based and in my opinion, not up to snuff with other sample libraries anymore. I still have NanoStudio out of sheer nostalgia but rarely use it and Beatmaker 2 is hanging in there for no good reason whatsoever. I don't use it, hate its interface (more phone based than iPad based) and will probably lose it in the new year. One huge space taker is my back issues of computer music magazine and the "special edition" version that was discontinued. Sadly, if I delete the "discontinued" issues from the special edition versions, I can't get them back. In some ways, virtual magazines still suck!<br />
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As for my iPad, I tend to follow a rule of skipping generations. I had an original iPad, skipped the 2, bought the retina, skipped the 4, bought the Air, skipped the Air 2.<br />
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This year, for the first time ever, I acquired some analog gear - specifically the littleBits Korg synthesizer kit. Already I'm buying up modules and playing with an albeit simple modular system. I look to add this into my music this year via MIDI (probably the Arduino module). Since I'm getting more and more into modular hardware, I think I'll probably start using Adulus this year along with Tera. On the desktop, I may finally put Reaktor to good use.<br />
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I have tons of other synths I acquired such as iProphet, Laplace, the excellent iVCS3 and others but I have yet to really put them through their paces. Maybe in the coming year! On the desktop, I've really slowed down and rarely buy plugins. I do continue to make use of the great Computer Magazine freebies nonetheless. I'm sure 2015 will be an interesting year.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-26631301142778815332014-12-20T15:23:00.004-05:002014-12-20T15:27:50.536-05:00Hybrid iPad Music<iframe frameborder="no" height="450" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/182429226&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe>
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Making music on the iPad usually requires just a bit of patience with inter-app audio or audio sharing, communicating and crashing. That is just the "state of the art" at the moment with iPad music creation. I make a great deal of music on my tablet but to do so requires unique workflows, frequent saving and a bit of luck!<br />
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Recently while experimenting with the excellent MIDI instrument, <a href="http://www.gestrument.com/">Gestrument</a>, I rapidly found my iPad misbehaving in various ways and decided a compromise was in order. Using my iConnect MIDI 2, I can send and receive either audio or MIDI to and from my iPad. I decided that I wanted to create a piece using the Gestrument instrument but with desktop samples (which are STILL head and shoulders above any sampled instruments on the iPad).<br />
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Gestrument is very expressive and with multi-touch gestures will send MIDI notes, velocities and varied pitches, etc. It can control multiple MIDI channels all at once and is capable of making some very unique sounds.<br />
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I wanted to make a jazz piece and use some Native Instruments <a href="http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/samplers/kontakt-5/">Kontakt</a> samples. I chose the MM Bass and the MKII electric piano for the background of the piece (both part of the Komplete bundle from Native Instruments). I wanted to use gestrument to send chords which is not something it does easily. Rather than wrestle with multiple voices on Gestrument, I sent one instrument into a "Track Stack" in Logic X and then sent the notes to the Bass on one track, a MIDI chorded piano on a second and a syncopated arpeggiated piano on the 3rd track. This set up the basic bass and piano rhythms in the piece very nicely. By playing the notes and articulations on the iPad, I recorded the resulting MIDI into the track stack which played back on the 3 sub-tracks in Logic.<br />
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For jazz drums, I find the drum tracks a bit lacking in Logic, so I resorted to some excellent Jazz looped drums.<br />
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Once this was all done, I set up a few saxophone tracks and played various rhythms in the same key (Eb minor blues) as the rhythm and then mixed, tweaked and mastered on Logic from there on out.<br />
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Say what you will about Cubasis or Auris, Logic X is still worlds easier to work with multiple MIDI channels with or without the iPad.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-22976565390843253902014-11-29T12:24:00.002-05:002014-11-29T12:24:53.226-05:00Black Friday update<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So I was doing pretty well with iPad Black Friday sales until I caved and bought another sample library - <a href="http://crudebyte.com/isymphonic-orchestra/">iSymphonic Orchestra</a>. I was looking hard at <a href="http://www.korg.com/us/products/software/korg_module_for_ipad/">Korg Module</a> but ran into another issue - my 64 GB iPad Air was full! This leads to a pet peeve of mine which is how music apps store their files on the iPad. At some point, almost every app stores large uncompressed WAV files.</div>
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On my desktop, my DAW of choice is Logic X and I do almost all of my work with MIDI files - tiny encoded numbers, rather than raw WAV or AIFF files. Since I don't record my voice, nor plug in a guitar, nor use older "gear", everything in my song files is usually simple MIDI files that are played by the plug-ins. Occasionally I resort to jazz loops for drums but otherwise, I almost never need to resort to raw audio files. Even my trumpets and sax files are MIDI tracks played via the Akai EWI and played through the excellent SampleModeling plugins.</div>
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MIDI is in all ways...better! Easy to transpose - simple to edit, change the time in and almost anything else. I can cover up a lack of performing talent with constructive post-production editing! Audio files, on the other hand are difficult to loop - hard to cut up and edit - sound weird when transposed or sped up or slowed down. Not only is most of my music MIDI, but its mainly virtual inside the computer or via USB cables. I don't have a single MIDI cable. </div>
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Conversely, on my iPad, I often use Auria or MultiTrack DAW which work on only audio files. Lots of very large, uncompressed audio. On top of that, Auria will periodically store "snapshots" with copies of those large uncompressed audio files! This eats up space quickly and its a pain to manage/migrate and move these files to dropbox or to delete unused ones. </div>
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MIDI on the iPad is still in its infancy it seems. In self-contained apps like Garageband or Gadget, tracks are stored internally as MIDI but its hard to get them out. The gold standard for MIDI is currently Cubasis, but even there, if you are using many IAA instruments, the memory quickly fills or bogs down until you have to freeze tracks - which, again, leads to more audio files. </div>
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Back to iSymphonic - I haven't played with it yet but the advantage will be having one app that can handle 16 MIDI connections (I hope!). I plan on trying it with Cubasis and driving the MIDI via Noatikl. I anticipate lots of crashes, but we'll see!</div>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-84860736039707378002014-11-12T16:34:00.001-05:002014-11-12T16:34:28.227-05:00Classical iPad optionsAnyone who listens to my electronic music pieces quickly finds that I am a bit eclectic in my musical styles and creations. The same is true for my listening. Most iPad created music falls into EDM, Ambient or somewhat electronic styles since they are really the natural domain of synthesizers.<br />
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However, I also grew up listening and playing a lot of jazz and classical music (on trumpet in those dark days) and I often long to make similar creations electronically. On the desktop I have some great samplers (Kontakt, Logic and and old version of Sampletank). Jazz-wise I've invested (heavily!) in SampleModelings Saxes and Trumpets but classical-wise, I have been more restrained. I do have the full version of Sampletank's Miroslav orchestra on the desktop which is a huge set of sampled orchestral instruments done around 1998 by the famous Miroslav Vitous (of Weather Report fame).<br />
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On the iPad, the choices are somewhat more limiting and for classical music there aren't as many options. Garageband on the iPad has some excellent string instruments. Sampletank has a cut-down version of <a href="http://www.ikmultimedia.com/news/?item_id=2850">Miroslav</a> that I purchased and <a href="http://thumbjam.com/">Thumbjam</a> has some excellent orchestral samples. There does exist the <a href="http://crudebyte.com/isymphonic-orchestra/">Crudebyte iSymphonic Orchestra</a> as well, but I don't have that one.<br />
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I may spring for the Crudebyte someday but its a bit pricey. Since I do many of my classical pieces with MIDI sequencing and generative tools such as <a href="http://intermorphic.com/noatikl/">Noatikl</a>, my favorite tools for classical sounds are the Sampletank Miroslav orchestra and Thumbjam. Garageband, while excellent, does not really let you feed it MIDI without significant work arounds.<br />
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As a test, I tried putting together a small string orchestral piece in Noatikl with 4 parts (Cellos, Violas, 1st Violins and 2nd Violins) which I then fed into both Sampletank Miroslav and Thumbjam. I recorded the results into Auria and added some nice convolution reverb there for a performance hall. The results were (at least to me) interesting!<br />
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For this experiment, I used IAA tracks into Auria. A few interesting notes....<br />
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Miroslave samples in Sampletank are already "positioned" by a typical orchestra. This means that the cellos are off to one side, the violins off to the other even with your "Pan" settings are central. Its important to note this when using Miroslav so you don't try to position your instruments manually and really throw them off.<br />
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Thumbjam samples, on the other hand are not panned and you would want to pan them yourself to get a nice stereo mix. Also, since I used Noatikl to generate these pieces, they are NOT identical! Noatikl will use randomization, chordal harmonies and other tricks to create the voices. It is never the same twice. Also, since Thumbjam doesn't have a pizzicato violin, I used staccato for Thumbjam in its place.<br />
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So here is what Sampletank's Miroslav samples created with Noatikl:<br />
<iframe frameborder="no" height="450" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/176488786&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe>
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The Thumbjam version is here:<br />
<iframe frameborder="no" height="450" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/176488454&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe>
I think overall, I lean towards the Thumbjam version. The samples provided sound a bit more realistically performed to my ears. If enough of you are interested, I could repeat the experiment with Desktop tools (at least the ones I own).<br />
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Overall, I did find the results listenable even though the sample sizes on the iPad are a fraction of what is available on the Desktop.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-4825910527131683212014-11-01T12:46:00.002-04:002014-11-01T12:50:30.248-04:00iPad Reality Check?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So, I'm working away on the iPad, popping in track after track and decide to sit down at the desk and hook up to the <a href="http://www.iconnectivity.com/">iConnectMIDI2</a> to finish things off. I start reaching to the iPad in <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.steinberg.net%2Fen%2Fproducts%2Fmobile_apps%2Fcubasis.html&ei=YwtVVOa_E_DLsASY14DoDQ&usg=AFQjCNHrmjLhY-4_UGD37Jn653sJzRLikA&sig2=hp7JYC9k-iDG_mDahaFy0Q&bvm=bv.78677474,d.cWc">Cubasis</a> and stop and ponder.<br />
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Here I am, sitting at the iMac, Logic X on the screen and I'm struggling to fit tracks in Cubasis - what is wrong with this picture? Obviously the best DAW at my disposal is Logic X and I can easily add iPad tracks into my mix over the iConnect MIDI.<br />
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In getting the iConnectMIDI2, I was looking to better integrate iPad music with my desktop. But it is important to think of the best tool for the job. At my fingertips is Logic, all of its plug-in synths, <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CEwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.native-instruments.com%2Fen%2Fproducts%2Fkomplete%2Fbundles%2Fkomplete-10%2F&ei=ggtVVIaUO_jfsATBjoH4CQ&usg=AFQjCNF1IWweW5KATTPbggDJdriWkPw_8A&sig2=hd6WfEMZR8ypv6sXberoMw&bvm=bv.78677474,d.cWc">Komplete</a> 8, <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.madronalabs.com%2Fproducts%2Faalto&ei=lwtVVLPdFKPlsATWg4GQDQ&usg=AFQjCNF0-jayNf2O_qDplPzrVU9qO8nu7g&sig2=ygnLhARWX_n9aF93Ma3krw&bvm=bv.78677474,d.cWc">Aalto</a>, <a href="http://arturia.com/">Arturia</a> AUs, Korg M1 AU, <a href="http://www.samplemodeling.com/en/index.php">SampleModeling</a> Trumpet and Saxes and more plugins than I can ever hope to use.<br />
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So, why the iPad? Until recently, there were few, if any sounds on the iPad that I couldn't do better on the desktop but that is changing in a few areas. <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.moogmusic.com%2Fproducts%2Fapps%2Fanimoog-0&ei=0QtVVK3hIMLmsASp9oKYDw&usg=AFQjCNF-nJGsCmLW7rQlL1WsJ6hMUs0AjA&sig2=XcCsFINJQx4yNlo9I9J51Q&bvm=bv.78677474,d.cWc">Animoog</a>, for example is completely unique with its modulation possibilities and I can do things on the touch screen that are very hard to "automate in" with traditional desktop plugins. I also have some very unique add-ons such as the Grateful Dead set in Animoog that don't exist on my desktop.<br />
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In other areas, my tendency to "cheap bastardhood" weighs in. I have most of the libraries for <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.camelaudio.com%2FAlchemyMobile.php&ei=-AtVVN_ECqjjsAS0toDgAQ&usg=AFQjCNFoPXO6tRMSoVbuJbluVzZq_dZ4cQ&sig2=E3Snyo_Yl9Q01NeMyn-srA&bvm=bv.78677474,d.cWc">Alchemy Mobile</a> edition on my iPad but I only have the "free" Alchemy player on the desktop. To buy those libraries on the desktop is an expensive proposition, but I have the best of them on the mobile (I know the bitrate is different and its not the full library, but its still damned useful).<br />
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<a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Fapp%2Fz3ta%2B%2Fid810393174%3Fmt%3D8&ei=MAxVVJzoLZDasATDhoDQBg&usg=AFQjCNG1LqNaa0H1AN-gLTzVpdTC6Xm31g&sig2=iV-T-2hDOM_tFxQMMiOeLg&bvm=bv.78677474,d.cWc">Z3tA</a> - likewise, I don't have the desktop version, same goes for <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDAQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Fapp%2Farturia-isem%2Fid673921187%3Fmt%3D8&ei=UwxVVI-DI9GIsQT774GoAg&usg=AFQjCNElkyKPYn8ijVCmtRvzL1-PHNpzHA&sig2=zBPKmi7reo7LAxAXU9g6Vg&bvm=bv.78677474,d.cWc">iSem</a> and many other unique items on the iPad. So for all of these synths, I might use them and pass the audio into my pieces.<br />
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The other area where the iPad shines is as a MIDI controller. Using <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCYQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Flaurentcolson.com%2Fsteppolyarp.html&ei=bwxVVJHyAujIsATD0oKADw&usg=AFQjCNGxwUINn4NZKsNVSZcRkpW5OvEZxg&sig2=0L23yuCXSeU-TdgCJrlCmQ&bvm=bv.78677474,d.cWc">StepPolyArp</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gestrument.com%2F&ei=mQxVVI7RINe1sQSUoYKIDg&usg=AFQjCNHPnCTWQeMZj8QjhX1gKOIQn2iHnQ&sig2=d0pF1fT-k852-Wpy4bowqw&bvm=bv.78677474,d.cWc">Gestrument</a> or even Logic Remote is often more intuitive and more fun than using keyboard controllers on the desktop. I can pass the MIDI into my software synths on the desktop and have an extremely responsive controller. <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fthumbjam.com%2F&ei=sQxVVJP0Es-1sQTtkoEY&usg=AFQjCNHTjLBlqOtPSl72eQqCEJDLJezKaA&sig2=-laCD4OXie61nW7au7pzpw&bvm=bv.78677474,d.cWc">Thumbjam</a> too works extremely well as a playing surface and can be used to control much better sample libraries on my desktop.<br />
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I get Computer Magazine and often see adds for novel MIDI controllers for the desktop but I'll sacrifice tactile feel for the infinite possibilities of a touch screen in most cases (the <a href="http://www.akaipro.com/category/ewi-series">Akai EWI</a> is a notable exception that I do have!)<br />
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Often when I am working, I am solely on the iPad and I do make heavy use of iPad DAWs in those cases. For those times when I do connect the iPad to the iMac though, I need to take a breath, think and decide what I want to accomplish with what tool.<br />
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If I want an iPad only experience, which is quite often, I will use the local DAWs and tools. If I want a polished jazz piece, I might opt for a Desktop only piece in Logic. But I think I should do more "hybrid" pieces and use the best of both. For my "sketch pad" style pieces, my best option is Garageband on the iPad and then moving the project file to Logic X. This brings all MIDI, audio and track information intact onto the desktop where I can replace some instruments, extend things, automate etc. I'll probably be doing much more of this in the future.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-11744316229508151472014-10-31T14:28:00.003-04:002014-10-31T14:28:56.442-04:00Cubasis with StepPolyArpIn my last posting, I discussed using DAWs on the iPad and hoping to work more or less in the same way that I do on Logic X on my desktop. Feature-wise, I found that Cubasis offered the closest thing to logic on the iPad.<br />
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<li>Cubasis has a track based interface with both audio and MIDI support. </li>
<li>Cubasis has a fair set if builtin instruments and sounds</li>
<li>Cubasis supports Audiobus and IAA </li>
<li>Cubasis supports IAA tracks as MIDI as well as audio</li>
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With all of this, I can, in theory, plug in any IAA synth, record my track as MIDI and work on larger compositions. In reality, though, stability suffers the more apps that are involved and at times things just get flaky with IAA. <br />
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For my most recent track, I wanted to use the excellent sequencer, <a href="http://laurentcolson.com/steppolyarp.html" style="line-height: 1.3em;">StepPolyArp</a> to create several rhythmic tracks of jazz. Instead of stressing out my iPad, I decided that I will first set up the sequences and record them into Cubasis native instruments. After recording, I could then replace any native instruments with IAA alternatives.<br />
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This worked out very well and I put together a nice jazzy piece below:<br />
<iframe frameborder="no" height="450" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/174736564&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe><br />
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<a href="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-6wGygnhDJw8/VFPTUhdKuZI/AAAAAAAABgw/wmkNHOp1mYE/s2048/Photo%25252020141031142210.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="" class="alignnone" height="375" id="blogsy-1414779739960.5547" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-6wGygnhDJw8/VFPTUhdKuZI/AAAAAAAABgw/wmkNHOp1mYE/s500/Photo%25252020141031142210.jpg" width="500" /></a></div>
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The StepPolyArp sequencer is capable of sending individual lines of rhythmic patterns to different MIDI channels. I used several MIDI channels to send rhythms to Cubasis for the Bass, Piano, Trumpet and Sax tracks.<br />
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The lowest line above is transposed down 12 steps and only plays note "1" of the arpeggiated chord for the first long 3 notes and then the other notes for a little bass break. This goes to the bass part in Cubasis on MIDI channel 1.<br />
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The 2nd from bottom in this pattern goes to the Trumpet MIDI channel 3.<br />
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The top 4 lines all go to the Piano on MIDI channel 2 to play some nice chords (using the transpose number for chords).<br />
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I then went into many notes and played with probability of playing to make some fire all the time and others from 40% - 80% probability. Lastly I added some "swing" to the pattern.<br />
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With all of this, when playing chords on the keyboard, I get a nice alternating rhythm from StepPolyArp which I recorded as MIDI into Cubasis (see below).<br />
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<a href="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-TMMcjZCis8A/VFPTV-RaypI/AAAAAAAABg4/rmMeLQ9-kQI/s2048/Photo%25252020141031142210.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="" class="alignnone" height="375" id="blogsy-1414779739944.1106" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-TMMcjZCis8A/VFPTV-RaypI/AAAAAAAABg4/rmMeLQ9-kQI/s500/Photo%25252020141031142210.jpg" width="500" /></a></div>
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In Cubasis, I added the Drum part later using some MIDI loops and I duplicated the Piano into another track and used a better IAA instrument (iCMP Grand Piano). </div>
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That was about it for this track. A little minor MIDI editing and it was ready to post.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-21287870266021104952014-10-29T21:50:00.002-04:002014-10-29T21:50:11.122-04:00State of the DAWIts been quite awhile since I posted anything here so I thought I'd maybe take some time to catch up with how the iPad has evolved and how music making on it compares to the desktop.<br />
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As I've posted before, I use Logic Pro X on my desktop as my preferred DAW and when on the iPad what I tend to miss most is the ease of working within a single app or DAW without feeling like I'm juggling multiple apps with multiple interfaces. In the past few years, DAWs on the iPad have matured quite a bit and here is my own experiences with them.<br />
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<a href="http://www.blipinteractive.co.uk/images/SequencerPanel1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.blipinteractive.co.uk/images/SequencerPanel1.png" height="230" width="320" /></a></div>
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In the 'good old days' of the iPad, compromises had to be made for memory and CPU which basically made most DAWs self-contained entities with limited music making capabilities. One of the first I used was the (still excellent) <a href="http://www.blipinteractive.co.uk/">NanoStudio</a> which had a very good internal synth coupled with a nice sample pad. What NanoStudio showed was that a traditional track-based DAW could work very well with a touch interface. Similar products out early include <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fintua.net%2Fproducts%2Fbeatmaker2%2F&ei=0o9RVKj4A8WcgwSF3IDIDA&usg=AFQjCNHef6OID3Xxzr5VZqBTsae6k9cpfg&sig2=GzJoR9s2Ra3Tm_xxLxq5JQ&bvm=bv.78597519,d.eXY">BeatMaker 2</a>, <a href="http://retronyms.com/overview.html">Tabletop</a> and <a href="http://www.harmonicdog.com/">MultiTrack DAW</a>. Coincidentally, I have all of those.<br />
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NanoStudio and Beatmaker were the more traditional with multiple tracks of piano roll (MIDI) sounds and some support for Audio tracks. MultiTrack DAW, was more like Audacity in that it was just an audio track app and Tabletop was more or less like a self-contained Rack based Reason. But all of these were more or less "closed gardens" with limited ways to import sounds from other apps.<br />
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The holy grail of DAWs has always been to provide a unified interface that works with plug-ins and a multitude of synths, samples and sounds with effects buses, mixers, etc. More of less like Logic, Live or Cubase on the desktop.<br />
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<a href="http://createdigitalmusic.com/files/2012/05/gb_ipad_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://createdigitalmusic.com/files/2012/05/gb_ipad_01.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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When Garageband arrived on the iPad, I got a very polished DAW with fantastic built-in instruments, though with very limited interoperability and no automation at all. The good news for me was that I could start a project on the iPad in Garageband, tweak it all I wanted and then move it to Logic X unchanged and continue working there. The bad news, its a one-way trip but this worked (and still works) very well.<br />
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<a href="http://5c57b567a0d01ecef3a6-257ef4105fe922eb0b2024203903ce8a.r30.cf2.rackcdn.com/Auria-Hero.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://5c57b567a0d01ecef3a6-257ef4105fe922eb0b2024203903ce8a.r30.cf2.rackcdn.com/Auria-Hero.png" height="214" width="320" /></a></div>
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When I wanted more power on the iPad, I turned to <a href="http://auriaapp.com/">Auria</a> which has partnered with many professional companies to provide plug-ins as in-app purchases within their product. Prior to audio's and IAA, Auria had incredible plugins that could be purchased and used within the app. The downside was that all tracks had to be audio and my preferred method of working on music is MIDI, but it is still one of my favorite DAWs. The other downside was that their professional plugins had um...professional pricing. They were a fraction of the desktop price to be sure, but for iPad pricing, still a bit of money.<br />
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<a href="http://audiob.us/">Audiobus</a> started the revolution in inter-app processing and Apple eventually caught on and brought out inter-app audio (IAA). This changed everything and made it possible for DAWs on the iPad to act a bit more like desktop DAWs with their AU or VST plugins. This also probably ate into Auria's business model since iPad users could use IAA effects instead of buying them within Auria but that's another matter.<br />
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With Virtual MIDI, Audiobus and IAA, I should finally be able to get something approximating the Logic X DAW use. So is that possible yet? The short answer is sadly, no. But there is hope and things are close.<br />
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<a href="http://www.steinberg.net/uploads/pics/cubasis-1.6-mixer-with-ipad_01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.steinberg.net/uploads/pics/cubasis-1.6-mixer-with-ipad_01.png" height="257" width="320" /></a></div>
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Steinberg has ported their Cubasis app to the iPad and more than any other DAW, this sort of has all the pieces. It is possible to use internal instruments as MIDI and they give you a credible built-in synth and sampler. It is also possible to put audio tracks in. The killer functionality for me is the ability to include IAA instruments such as Animoog, Nave or Z3tA into individual MIDI tracks. This is as close to plug-in VSTs as you'll get on the iPad. </div>
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The only problem is that this doesn't always work all that well. I have an iPad Air (first gen, not the new one) which is limited to 1 GB of memory. Start adding in lots of IAA synths and you will quickly hit a wall. The workaround is to freeze your tracks and that should work but when you work with some "frozen" IAA tracks in Cubasis, adding additional IAA tracks doesn't always work for some reason. Also, when freezing, you have to set latency to 256ms or the frozen track will have the wrong BPM (a bug!). </div>
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In theory, once you "freeze" a track with IAA, Cubasis should no longer care if the app is open or not since you have an audio version of the frozen track. For some reason, Cubasis still cares and on occasion will complain that it cannot open the IAA for a frozen track. </div>
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Another limitation is that IAAs can only appear on one track. You can't easily use 3 instances of Z3tA for example. Again, freezing SHOULD work, but doesn't. I think all of the pieces are there but sadly they don't work very reliably as of yet.</div>
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There are other quirks that make it difficult to use. Cycle MIDI recording is lousy, for example. I continue to use it since it is a close as things get to a full DAW but it has a ways to go. </div>
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Since I do almost all of my work in MIDI, this is the single most important feature for me. Easy use of external synths as MIDI instruments. Cubasis is probably as good as it gets, but it ain't there yet. </div>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-5010053205461546062014-02-19T17:05:00.002-05:002014-02-19T17:05:54.232-05:00Plumbing concerns<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioFN1PRLFvYuW5A6eLPcb9WkOTd3zSR9vxaHTQPb7flbRNfmN5zf6KTqa70XS1cVX-FTHjhnR8TgxC3ziW40vCpqSm83CjIqHjwCOdPvzYTxfX_Gd38-M5mfmBE6XEwty1HsX5KpEGgHOU/s1600/Pipes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioFN1PRLFvYuW5A6eLPcb9WkOTd3zSR9vxaHTQPb7flbRNfmN5zf6KTqa70XS1cVX-FTHjhnR8TgxC3ziW40vCpqSm83CjIqHjwCOdPvzYTxfX_Gd38-M5mfmBE6XEwty1HsX5KpEGgHOU/s1600/Pipes.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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There have been many articles lately about inter app audio and Audiobus 2.0 on the iPad and I just wanted to put in my two cents. </div>
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As much as I enjoy creating music on the iPad, the one area that still feels a bit "primitive" is getting apps to play nicely together. Much of this is due to Apple's app "sandboxing" but another aspect is the maturity of the whole infrastructure. </div>
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Audiobus arose more or less "organically" outside of Apple and managed to provide a much needed but still somewhat limited means of combining apps musically. Up to 3 sources can all pipe through effects and into one target. I believe that this introduces a degree of latency, but it can be handled as long as all items are going through the same path.</div>
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IAA (Inter app audio) is Apple's solution to combining musical apps and uses internal API items not accessible to 3rd parties - not exactly fair but who's counting. IAA works with much less latency and you can concurrently use as many apps as your CPU can handle (not that many really!). </div>
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The exciting news is the upcoming Audiobus 2 which will actually save your plugin settings (assuming that the source applications support the feature). This is slowly getting to where you almost use the iPad like a desktop DAW.</div>
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The big difference on the iPad is that you are constantly worrying about the plumbing! How many apps are open? What presets need to be in each synth to combine my music? </div>
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This happens quite a bit in my own creations with Noatikl where each synth must be played and captured at the same time (since Noatikl has each voice harmonize and play off the others in real time). I have experimented with both and once tried mixing and matching both IAA connections with Audiobus at the same time. They don't mix! Latencies are just off enough that the resulting files were way off time-wise and it was too much work to finagle them in Auria after the fact.</div>
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This means that for my Noatikl pieces that need many concurrent synths, they all need to be Audiobus (limit - 3!), or they all need to be IAA. </div>
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When back on my desktop using Logic Pro, I never worry about the AU connections - they just work. If I save my song, all the settings are retained, there is rarely a CPU issue and I concentrate more on the creative process than on plumbing.</div>
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As things stand now on the iPad, I'm still feeling like Super Mario at times!</div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-82436794335010589492014-01-22T12:29:00.000-05:002014-01-22T12:29:36.344-05:00Shameless Magazine plug - Apptronica.us<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6f3M2gK4q9gDxzwPUGjxgAgPbCuTLQfDQlQ0SxbuTCXbL0prfNSOVmyC172b2sHhwj4-XlnDvGBexGrbmi5H0yvVXANOZ2RrrHXT_mOZvM53V6kbTqoRegyLHwJh88yaF2nBSLxq7I9vk/s1600/january2014-768x1024.png" height="200" width="150" /></div>
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One thing I've gradually taken to is reading magazines on my iPad (when not composing). The convenience of having every issue at my fingertips has surpassed the occasionally awkward task of zooming pages etc. Furthermore, many magazines on the iPad Newsstand have built in video links, audio links etc. that are great for quick access.</div>
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Recently, Clif Johnston has put out a new magazine named <a href="http://apptronica.us/">apptronica</a> that is dedicated to music-making on the iPad - the first, and best magazine of its kind that I've come across! Full disclosure, I'm a contributor to the magazine and I will be writing a small series of articles on creating music with <a href="http://www.intermorphic.com/">Noatikl</a> - similar (but simpler) than the tutorial available here.</div>
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In the upcoming series I will be focusing on using Noatikl to help compose a solo piano piece using Noatikl and IKMultimedia's <a href="http://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/igrandipad/">iGrand Piano</a> app. The magazine is FREE on the Apple Newsstand and I encourage you to check it out when you can.</div>
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The website (<a href="http://apptronica.us/">apptronica.us</a>) also provides a free PDF version for downloading if you are reading on non-iOS devices.</div>
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I hope you follow my articles there and check in here for any more detailed discussion or posts.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-35753676525412477392014-01-01T13:46:00.002-05:002014-01-01T13:59:11.220-05:00Noatikl for iPad tutorial files (in order)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuVz5FOksx_mkUmXW7o1-LNf8z6Ybqr2kIubB5kI0SVLAVr14Idzl-Rk1ykKSiRJGy04YKjgcTFUuHuysM398xKTAl32ytGpy199fBMvy8bxXKyUUmABsLNUF_LlwzaSG2NAl5iEvNwViW/s1600/screen568x568.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuVz5FOksx_mkUmXW7o1-LNf8z6Ybqr2kIubB5kI0SVLAVr14Idzl-Rk1ykKSiRJGy04YKjgcTFUuHuysM398xKTAl32ytGpy199fBMvy8bxXKyUUmABsLNUF_LlwzaSG2NAl5iEvNwViW/s320/screen568x568.jpeg" width="187" /></a></div>
Happy New Year! I am working on some posts about Cubasis and IAA but in the meantime, here is my tutorial for Noatikl for iPad in order (these are spread amongst July and August in the blog posts).<br />
Enjoy!<br />
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<a href="http://whitherwalter.blogspot.com/2013/07/noatikl-for-ipad-tutorial-1.html">Noatikl tutorial part 1</a><br />
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<a href="http://whitherwalter.blogspot.com/2013/07/noatikl-for-ipad-pt-2.html">Noatikl tutorial part 2</a><br />
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<a href="http://whitherwalter.blogspot.com/2013/07/noatikl-for-ipad-pt-3.html">Noatikl tutorial part 3</a><br />
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<a href="http://whitherwalter.blogspot.com/2013/07/noatikl-for-ipad-pt-4.html">Noatikl tutorial part 4</a><br />
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<a href="http://whitherwalter.blogspot.com/2013/07/noatikl-for-ipad-pt-5.html">Noatikl tutorial part 5</a><br />
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<a href="http://whitherwalter.blogspot.com/2013/07/noatikl-for-ipad-pt-6.html">Noatikl tutorial part 6</a><br />
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<a href="http://whitherwalter.blogspot.com/2013/08/noatikl-for-ipad-pt-7.html">Noatikl tutorial part 7</a><br />
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<a href="http://whitherwalter.blogspot.com/2013/08/noatikl-for-ipad-pt-8-wrap-up.html">Noatikl tutorial part 8</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-55274533603638013282013-12-21T12:04:00.003-05:002013-12-21T12:06:06.355-05:00Fun with Forgeries!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Ur6dbTIkAVkQxQZfey-UdNOmBXcKdpBrwvvB53h8vneRIN7UJeapXG5R2HM19YTf7WiKTmScpbt_30tz4fBW_ApVk1xzZv0_rO87mhNoswZV0SwkcKrEcB73VEmhj7MwyZk6NhiPsr1-/s1600/220px-Herbie_Hancock_Sextant.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Ur6dbTIkAVkQxQZfey-UdNOmBXcKdpBrwvvB53h8vneRIN7UJeapXG5R2HM19YTf7WiKTmScpbt_30tz4fBW_ApVk1xzZv0_rO87mhNoswZV0SwkcKrEcB73VEmhj7MwyZk6NhiPsr1-/s1600/220px-Herbie_Hancock_Sextant.jpg" /></a></div>
Way back in 2004 when I started posting music, my main tool was Garageband on my iMac and the main site for posting was <a href="http://macjams.com/">MacJams</a>.<br />
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I've continued posting there for 10 years now and even though it is waning in popularity, some of the best folks and feedback on my music making seemed to come from there.<br />
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Sadly the site has been up and down for the past few weeks due to technical problems but it is still one of my favorites despite posting more to <a href="http://soundcloud.com/oldlibmike">Soundcloud</a> and <a href="http://icompositions.com/oldlibmike">iCompositions</a> of late.<br />
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Recently there was a challenge called LSP (Lost songs project) where you get the chance to create a song that should be "missing" from a commercial album. It was terrific fun with many postings emulating everything from classical to the Doors or Beatles.<br />
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I went obscure with my entry and went back to one of the early Jazz albums I fell in love with. In the early 70s there was a post-bop, fusion movement bringing electronic instruments to Jazz. Bitch's Brew by Miles Davis and the birth of Weather Report were highlights of this era. Herbie Hancock also put out a few albums in this style and my favorite was Sextant - worth popping over to Spotify for a listen!<br />
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For my LSP entry, I tried to emulate the afro-electronic jazz sound of this album, though I used more modern synths. The original used a few old ARPs and a Moog III. I used Absynth, a synth I'm trying to learn much more about, the Korg M1 legacy edition with my wind controller (EWI) and the Aalto synth (modeled after the Buchla).<br />
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While I don't even have a fraction of Herbie's talent, here is my humble attempt:<br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/124821888&color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true" width="100%"></iframe><br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-52737125947966191792013-11-23T14:00:00.001-05:002013-11-23T14:00:52.477-05:00Art, Science, Neither or Both?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If you are one of the very few that follow my blogging or music, you probably know that one of my favorite tools is Noatikl, which is essentially a super-sequencer or music composition tool.<br />
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Recently on a few pieces I received some nice feedback on my "playing" or the performance aspects of generative pieces and that got me thinking a bit on how to take that. All of the pieces that I put together and release are usually 100% MIDI or close to that which means I am using computer generated sound in one form or another.<br />
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If my pieces are synthesizer based, I am using software synths as plugins on the iPad or on my desktop. If my pieces use "traditional" instruments, I am resorting to samples played on either a keyboard or other creative MIDI input devices using Logic or Kontakt on the desktop or any number of samplers/Romplers on the iPad.<br />
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Some of my pieces are performed track by track with MIDI keyboards and then edited (for mistakes), tweaked for sound and/or timing issues and then combined. This is a bit closer to traditional performing in a studio environment. I NEVER perform anything live.<br />
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Other pieces, such as those from Noatikl are more akin to composing. I program each voice with rhythmic patters, keys to use, rests, probabilities, instructions for harmony, etc and more or less "turn them loose". This is certainly not performing in the traditional sense but is setting music into motion and then tweaking the program until it sounds "done" to me.<br />
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One aspect very close to performing is when I use the EWI (Electronic Wind instrument) in my pieces. This device requires fingering the keys, blowing into the mouthpiece and translates all of this into MIDI events that are passed into a (usually) sample-based instrument. This can be a flute, trumpet, sax or even synthesizer - all modulated and controlled with my breath. Despite the "disconnect" from an analog wind instrument, it reacts and acts almost exactly the same.<br />
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So with all that, is this just a shortcut to music? Is this just winding up a music box or turning on a player piano? I think with all the setup and parameters, its more than that but also its not quite live either - even if done in one take.<br />
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I think music has evolved further and further away from direct creation over the years and that computers are just one more step along the way.<br />
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From the initial singing or chanting, we have evolved more complicated ways of making sounds throughout history. First with pipes and blowing or percussion with sticks, then strings or harps. These evolved into mechanical versions - harpsichords, pianos. Is the musician still performing when "just" pushing keys that turn levers that make hammers strike strings? What happens when it is electronic as in an organ? Sample based as started with rotating drums or tapes?<br />
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Overall I think studio work is a mix of composing and performance and the tools used don't really define that. So when my beautiful violin part is merely a mutating rhythm based on:<br />
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<100 R 30 -30 60 60><br />
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it is still in some way a musical composition. I get to play "George Martin" to the performers in these cases and hopefully come up with something palatable!<br />
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Here are a few pieces "generated" more or less in that fashion - one from the iPad and the other from the desktop:<br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/121073386" width="100%"></iframe>
<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/121544867" width="100%"></iframe>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5610949173869447747.post-15211923573368939632013-11-18T23:07:00.001-05:002013-11-18T23:26:26.281-05:00Throwing hardware at it!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I tend to keep with a policy of skipping each generation of hardware and since I dutifully skipped the 4th generation iPad, I broke down and bought an iPad Air. There was a $200 buyback that I took advantage of for my ancient and unused iPad first generation as well so it wasn't quite as much of a wallet shock. I went with the 64GB model because I do store tons of music samples on my iPad and the size does matter! I opted for the full size model instead of the Mini because again, with synth apps, the size matters.<br />
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Early reports have been very good related to music making on the Air and I can confirm that most of my performance concerns on CPU have been addressed. If you follow my tutorials or postings on <a href="http://www.intermorphic.com/noatikl/index.html">Noatikl</a>, you might remember that I used mainly <a href="http://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/sampletankipad/">Sampletank</a> due to its ability to give 4 MIDI channels without too much CPU overhead provided you use a light DAW along with <a href="http://audiob.us/">Audiobus</a>.<br />
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So, with the Air, I decided to try a piece with a heavy DAW and with 3 concurrent synths recording. The heavy DAW is my favorite, <a href="http://auriaapp.com/">Auria</a> and the synths are the <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dxi-fm-synthesizer/id370138065">Dxi</a> synth, <a href="http://www.propellerheads.se/products/thor/">Thor</a> and <a href="http://www.camelaudio.com/AlchemyMobile.php">Alchemy Mobile</a>. I drove all 3 synths with Noatikl which would usually bring my 3rd gen iPad to its knees. Without a hitch I was able to record all three concurrently into Auria, which is a very heavy DAW by itself.<br />
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Another recent addition to music making on the iPad is inter app audio as I blogged before and I added some additional tracks using the <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/arturia-isem/id673921187">Arturia Oberheim SEM</a> synth and my old standby Sampletank for the violin.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/120563486" width="100%"></iframe><br />
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Throughout the piece, Auria was responsive and the tracks all recorded without issue. I think I can now add many more concurrent tracks with Noatikl and Auria is now a go-to DAW for me. I'll be posting more as I experiment further. Thanks for reading!<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07926163368994218783noreply@blogger.com2