Jeff Hendricks (.net)

I’ve been tossing around the idea of looping with hardware for quite a while, basically since I first heard of it a few months ago. It would allow me to perform music with much more flexibility than just me playing a single instrument, and it is a lot of fun, too. I am now at the point where I have to decide what kind of setup I want to use, and work on getting it functional in my setup.

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, there’s three routes you can go: a dedicated looping pedal, an analog tape delay (or equivalent), or a computer with software. Here’s a brief look at the three, and why I chose the last one.

Looper Pedals

These would include pedals by Digitech, Boss, Line6, and a few others. Each company makes a few different models, each with more buttons/features than the last. The two most popular are the Boss RC-20 & RC-50, and the Digitech JamMan, both of which come in different sizes and with different features.

There’s single-sized pedals, double-sized, and huge-sized ones. These pedals start at around $180 for the singles, and up to $400 or more for the full-featured ones. Now, I understand the attraction of a portable self-contained unit, especially the Digitech ones that have SD flash card slots, which let you pre-load it with background loops. However, the single pedals only have the most basic functions, and having only one footswitch really limits what you can do with it. You can get an add-on switch for most of the smaller ones, which helps, but you’re still looking at $300 to start off with.

Delays

There’s also the way to overdub, the way the old-school guys did it, with a looping tape recorder and moveable record/play heads. The original units cost a large fortune, but you can get smaller “tape simulation” pedals that work almost exactly the same way. Some of these include the Danelectro Reel-Echo, the Line 6 DL-4 and a few other units of note.

PC Software Looping

However, I have access to lots of old computer parts, and there is plenty of free looping software. I can use a setup like this, but you need some way to control it live, of course, preferably with a footswitch. I happen to have a MIDI foot controller, but it’s old, and doesn’t recognize double-steps very well at all. I also have a small MIDI keyboard, but that would be hard to use with my feet.

So my next course of action would be to build a foot pedal. Yes, it’s possible to do this, it just requires some electronics know-how and a little persistance. However, the cost is significant, as the controller “brain” boards are quite expensive. You can get keyboard controller “brain” boards for fairly cheap, though, most notably for arcade cabinet emulators! This would give me almost the same functionality as a MIDI pedal, but at a much cheaper price. So I placed an order with Ultimarc for an iPac-2 controller, and ordered some arcade buttons from Sparkfun.com to complete the hardware list.

The software I’m using is called Sooper Looper and runs on Linux and OSX. It’s free, and has tons of features based on the legendary Echoplex Digital Pro looping unit.

My personal looping setup is now just about complete. I’ll post up some shots of it in action soon!

I’ve recently run across a type of musical performance called “Live Looping” which involves a performer on stage using a delay device to layer sounds until they have an entire song. After watching some of these musicians, I am extremely impressed, and very much inspired to try it myself. I will have a detailed video on how I set my rig up later on, but for now, I’ll just say that it is incredibly fun, and perfect for musicians with Attention Deficit Disorder. Why? Because you not only get to perform the whole song, but you get to do it all yourself, jumping from instrument to instrument, and part to part, while keeping track of everything you’ve done already.

I’ve got two guitar amps, a digital effects unit, a MIDI keyboard controller, a computer, and a MIDI footpedal controller. Oh yeah, and a couple of guitars!

I know it’s kind of a tease to just describe it without some sort of photo or video, so here’s something to tide you over! This guy is one of the best I’ve seen at this kind of music. Yes, this is what I am going to learn how to do.

Okay, most of my readers know I’m a big proponent of Linux as an alternative to Windows. But lately, there’s been dissension among the ranks. And in a rare fit of frustration, I find myself dissatisfied. I suppose I should be more specific. I’m not installing Windows on my workstation, not getting rid of my MythTV box. I’m not talking suicide… just need to get a few gripes off of my chest about the best free OS ever made.

For years, I used Red Hat Linux. It was the de facto standard, and most servers ran it. Then along came SuSE Linux, which was a huge step in advancement. There are still times when I wish I ran a SuSE distribution, it’s that good… at least as of a year or two ago it was.

Then I discovered the phenomenon of Ubuntu, and all its flavors. For people like me who wanted to try out all the newest apps and have them work out of the box, Ubuntu was a Godsend. Everything worked for me right off the bat, it had all the apps I wanted already in the repositories, and you could get it with different desktops preinstalled.

However, in a surprising turn of events, I’ve discovered Ubuntu has utterly failed in several categories in the last year, specifically with version 9.10. I happily ran Ubuntu 8.10 for quite a while, and had no issues until I replaced my graphics card one day… all of a sudden it wouldn’t autodetect it, and I couldn’t get X to work right no matter how hard I tried. When I tried putting the original card back in, the system was rendered useless. So I backed up my stuff, made a note of apps I wanted to install, and did a fresh install of Ubuntu Studio 9.10. This is when the irritation set in.

I discovered that while I was happily working away with a 2-year-old distro, the people at Ubuntu had been amassing a huge list of apps that they would be upgrading to newer versions. The problem? The newer versions had less features than the older ones. Two apps right off hand I noticed were Amarok and GDM. One is a media player, the other is the graphical system login screen.

Ubuntu 8.10 uses Amarok version 1.4.10, which is fantastic. It supports every media type I can think of, has a fantastic media management system, looks slick, supports neat features like Last.fm scrobbling, has a nice OSD, and so forth.

Then the developers at Amarok broke it by introducing version 2. I can’t find a single thing it does better, but now I can’t even figure out to add internet streams to the favorites list. I mean, why is that? Because they weren’t thinking. The Amarok development forums are full of people who hate version 2, because it still does not have all the features that 1.4 has!!

Also, for some reason, the Gnome Display Manager (gdm) that is the first thing users see when they log into an Ubuntu system is now not only ugly, but is no longer skinnable, and cannot be customized in any way. Why?!? What is the purpose of releasing a new version of software if it has less features?!?!? And what’s more, you can’t just downgrade the package, because they broke a config file in the process!

Now, I shouldn’t say it’s Ubuntu’s fault for including the newest packages; that’s what they got popular for. But if you see the developers are shooting themselves in the foot, for heaven’s sake, do something! Don’t just blindly include the newest packages without checking to see if they’re actually worth anything! I’m afraid to dig any deeper, for fear of what else I might find they they missed. I’m seriously thinking about downgrading to 9.04 or even back to 8.10 because it actually works. Better than 9.10, anyway.

The newest big hype with Ubuntu is version 10.04 which is supposed to be the new LTS version (which means it is Long Term Support, and will not get EOL’ed for several years). I hope, I really hope they pull their heads out of their butts and decide to not include the newest versions of everything, but the best versions. If they won’t, there’s a good possibility I will switch to another base distro, like… well, like anything else that uses a Debian package base.

ADDENDUM:

I’ve just read through the release notes and improvement for Ubuntu 10.04. Right off, here’s what I see:

• Default search is changed to Yahoo!
• Integration with UbuntuOne, an online file storage/music store service
• faster boot times (less functionality)
• Built-in social networking
• improvements on the free nvidia driver (which nobody uses)

I’m guessing I will be leaving the Ubuntu camp in the near future for something with more long-term stability.

First, let me begin by saying I am neither a professional recording engineer, nor a full-time musician anymore (though I majored in music performance in college). I have little to no experience with the other major DAW offerings, but I will make note of similar features when I see them. I could go into all kinds of detail about the program’s history, etc. but you guys just want to know how it works and what it has to offer, so I’ll try my best to stick to the practical. If you want a thorough walk-through of the whole program’s features, you can go to http://en.flossmanuals.net/Ardour/ for the whole manual.

Ardour runs on top of a low-latency audio server called JACK. It’s very flexible, networkable, and can record in 24-bit 96Khz rates down to the lowest latency your interface will support under ideal conditions. Jack not only transports audio, but can act as a master timeclock to interface with all the other programs you can run that are JACK-aware, such as loopers, drum sequencers, MIDI recorders, etc.

Hardware support isn’t really anything to do with Ardour, but a lot of people won’t switch to Linux (or OSX) because of lack of hardware support. Needless to say, anything that is compatible with ALSA and/or FFADO drivers will work with JACK, and therefore work with Ardour. On Macs, anything supported by CoreAudio should work as well. Before you can run Ardour, you have to set up your Jack server. There are plenty of how-to’s out there, and that’s not really in the scope of this review.

Here’s a shot of Jack’s config screen:

Once the main window is open, you’ll see the main track editor window. You have your (dockable) transport controls, action buttons, menus, timeline, clock, and off the the right is the playlist/regions area. At the top right you’ll see your system’s resources. Press Alt-M and it toggles the Mixer window, which is handy if you don’t have a multiscreen setup.

Click here to read more.. »

No, I haven’t lost my mind. But like all good geeks, I’m interested in learning more about how to use what’s already available. Instead of doling out thousands of dollars, I can use some time and effort and get similar results with no cash whatsoever!

And no, you can’t build a true DAW for nothing, unless you’re like me, and have people give you old computers for parts. If you go this route, you will likely still have to buy at least a sound card and a microphone, but you get the idea. I’m going to show you how to set up the software to turn a plain computer into a Digital Audio Workstation. For nothing.

The current “studio” setup:

First, the easiest way to get most of what you need is to install Ubuntu Studio on that old second-hand computer. I’m going to assume it’s an older computer, with less than 4GB of RAM. Unless you have a newer computer with more than 4GB of RAM, just use the 32-bit version of Ubuntu Studio. You’re going to want to download Ubuntu Studio version 9.04, because the newer version of Ubuntu changes a lot of things it shouldn’t have, which causes problems. There are also known issues with 9.10 and M-Audio Delta sound cards (which are a fantastic value for a home studio), so I’d recommend sticking with 9.04.

I’ll post up a few more articles with more info on how to set up something like this in your home!!

More progress on my entry for the Mod Brothers Cardboard Case Competition (though since it’s partially my site, I’m not sure how eligible I am). I am also trying out some new editing software called Kdenlive since what I was using before, Kino, is very limited. To be honest, though, I did the titles in this video in Kino and imported them into Kdenlive… Kino is limited in what it can do, but it does that very well.

At this point, if you’ve read through the Encryption article series, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what encryption does, and how it works. So what else is there left to cover? This is the “Skip to the end” part of the series… I’m just going to show you step-by-step how to set up usable GPG encrypted mail in Linux. No fuss, no hassle.

You only need two programs to do this, but a third (key manager) will make it easier.

First: install GPG for your distro of Linux. If you’re running Ubuntu or Debian, then

sudo apt-get install gpg

But whatever you use to manage software for your system, you should be able to find “GPG” and install what it needs.

Second, you need to create a new key pair (public and private). Make sure you use an email address that will not disappear in a year or two! This email address is your key’s form of identification.

gpg –gen-key

This will start the key generation process. Just follow the instructions, the defaults will work fine. Come up with a fairly long password… and DO NOT forget it!

Third, install some sort of email client with GPG plugin support. I use Mozilla Thunderbird with the Enigmail add-on. I also use a program called Kgpg to manage my keys. It runs in the tray and lets me encrypt/decrypt things on the clipboard. Not necessary, just makes things much easier.

Once you’ve installed your mail client, it should automatically pick up your GPG key (it’s set to import your local GPG keys automatically) and you can then either send your public key to your friends, post it to your website, or even upload it to a key server. Most key management programs have a feature that lets you upload your public key to an internet keyserver.

And that’s it. You’re done! When you send mail, just use the OpenGPG menu to find the recipient’s email address, and if they have one on a keyserver, it will automatically retrieve their public key and encrypt the message to them. Likewise, it will automatically decrypt messages sent to you if you want.

Easy cheesy!

In the last few articles on GPG encryption, we talked about software, and generating a private key. Now we come to the part where we put out our public key which will let others send us encrypted messages, and get other people’s public keys which let us send messages to them.

Ideally, you would personally give your public key to a friend, and they would give you theirs. You would know 100% it came from them. However, sometimes you want to send things to people you can’t meet, and it’s also possible for someone to falsify an encryption key with someone else’s email address… which would let them read it if they had the matching private key.

This introduces something called trust. Let’s say my friend sends me his public key. I trust him, I know his key is correct, and I trust it’s secure. I can then sign his key and verify it’s secure. I can also assign it a level of trust that tells me how much I can rely on it.

Normally, you’re going to only mess with keys from people you know. However, an interesting feature of GPG encryption is that you can encrypt a message or file to more than one person at a time! If you specify more than one public key to encrypt it, then any one of those keys can decrypt the message. This is why it’s important to verify trust! You may know person “A” very well, but unless you know every single person you’re encrypting to, there’s potential for hacking or foul play. You can read up more on trust at GPG’s website. It’s worth a read, but it’s beyond the scope of this article.

There is also a way to verify a key without meeting the person directly: each key has what’s called a fingerprint. This is a string of letters that lets you verify the key is from who they say it is. You can contact the actual person by phone, chat, etc. and if the string they read off matches their key’s fingerprint, then you know it’s from them. You can then sign it to verify it’s trusted. Click here to read more.. »

This is kind of an extension on part 3 of my articles on GPG encryption. I talked very little about front-ends for GPG, so I’ll give you a quick simple (and free) way to use GPG for basic email encryption and signing.

Since I’m using Ubuntu Linux, I have a few options as to what program I’m going to use for sending and receiving mail. I’ve decided to use Mozilla Thunderbird, which is a free, fairly basic email/RSS program. However, what I’m really interested in is an add-on for it called Enigmail which integrates GPG security when you send/receive emails.

With Thunderbird, you set up your email accounts like normal. Thunderbird supports several mail server types, so it will work fine for most people. If you need support for Exchange mail servers, you can look into a mail client called Evolution for Linux.

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