Jeff Hendricks (.net)

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.

For those of you who remember, I rode the MS150 bike tour last year in October. It’s a 2-day 150 mile fundraiser bike ride to support research for fighting Multiple Scleroses. Last year, I rode my chopper. I’m planning on riding it again, and hopefully the weather will hold out the whole 150 miles!

Have you ever thought about what separates great people from ordinary people in history? It’s more than being rich. They were remembered through time because they impacted enough people to make a difference. They lived their lives with meaning, with significance.

I have been wanting to have more of an impact on the world around me for years. But as most of you know, corporate America doesn’t care about innovation or impacting people’s lives if there’s no money involved. I can see myself in the near future breaking out of the corporate mold that has held me in prison for so long. It has provided a living for my family, yes, but has stripped me of the ability to do anything but work 8 to 5.

For me to make an impact with my life, I am going to have to step out on faith, and find a way to make a living doing something more than paperwork. We will see, in the near future, how successful it will be. Wish me luck.

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.

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Sorry about the problems we’ve been having lately. If you’ve had trouble hitting the site, it’s because were were having DNS server issues, which hopefully will get resolved. In the meanwhile, go to Soma FM and listen to some soothing trance music…

Psychoacoustics is the study of how humans perceive sounds. Since I’ve been working on setting up a low-to-no-cost music production workstation, I’ve run into the limitation of how to listen to the music I’m creating. What happens if you mix the music to where it sounds good on junky speakers? When you play it on nice speakers, it sounds junky again.

Pro studios use a type of speakers called Monitors to listen to music. They are sonically flat- they play all frequencies at exactly the same level (or as close to it as possible) so that you can hear when a part of the music sticks out. It lets you hear when things are wrong, and allows you to fix them.

The problem we run into is that to use monitors, you also should “treat” the room acoustically… putting in baffles, bass traps, acoustic tiles, etc. to reduce the amount of “coloring” the room does. All of this is to create a perfectly accurate reproduction of what you’re recording.

Most of us, however, have no way of having a room dedicated to just this. Our wives will look at us funny if we start hanging foam panels in the bedroom. Not only that, but quality monitors and room treatment are rather expensive for a frugal guy like me. We’re talking in the thousands of dollars… I’m thinking more in the hundreds, if that much.

So how do we solve this dilemma? “Ah, why not use headphones?” you ask, and rightfully so. But that opens up a whole different problem. Headphones don’t reproduce sound perfectly, either. However, it removes the issue of having an untreated room, so that’s something. But why can’t you use them?

Well, that goes back to Psychoacoustics. When you listen to stereo music on headphones, it sounds like the band is inside your head. This is because when you listen to speakers, the two signals reach your ears at different times, and you hear a little bit of the right channel in your left ear, and vice versa. You also get some echo off the walls, all of which your brain interprets as hearing something “in front” of you. With headphones, there’s no echo, no delay, and no crossing between ears… left and right are 100% separated. It makes for cool effects, but it doesn’t reproduce the music the way you naturally hear it live.

Being the geek I am, I knew there was a solution to this. After some research, I discovered that hi-fi headphones amplifiers include a feature called “crossfeed” which does exactly what it sounds like: feeds a little of each signal to the other side, with some delay, to make it sound like you’re listening to speakers in a room. Well, I don’t have great headphones, nor can I afford a $400 amp with this feature. And of course, after some more searching, I found the answer: a Stereo to Binaural Simulator!

What this little program does is simulate the crossfeed and echo of listening to speakers in a room. It allows you to use good quality headphones without sacrificing what the music actually sounds like.

How well does it work? Well, it definitely does what it’s supposed to, but I’m sure I’ll need a much better set of headphones before I realize the true potential of a program like this. Still, even if I spend $200 on a set of Grado SR80i cans, it’s cheaper and less space-intensive than acoustically treating an entire room and a good set of monitor speakers. It’s not ideal, but hey, we don’t live in an ideal world. Those of you who are heavy headphone listeners, try it out and tell me what you think.

Sorry for no updates recently. Had two busy weeks at work, and was gone all this past weekend. I’m working on a tutorial for using Ardour (free sequencing software for Linux and OSX) and will post it up as soon as it’s done.

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!!

Well, we had some fantastic entries in the first ever Mod Brothers Cardboard Case Competition. My entry wasn’t spectacular, but I think I did an okay job considering. Here’s a couple shots of my finished computer case made entirely out of cardboard and paper, including the mech! You can see some of the other entires here, at the official Mod Brothers site.