Linux music production

Here are some tools I’m using they are really valuable :

• Tux Guitar to play guitar pro files
• Guitarix and rack arrack are interesting for pure guitar effects (that can be used for live playing or in an audio sequencer)
• Ardour 3 as audio/midi sequencer
• Hydrogen as drum machine and step sequencer (very powerful)
• QSynth as instrument to load sound founts (to test)
• After having tested ZynAddSynth, Yoshimi, Hexter, Phasex it seems that Bristol is far the most complete
• SooperLooper to make some loop improvisations with guitar
• Ladish to save Jack sessions and related applications.

More to test:

• Some DJ stuffs (why not?).

Plugging MIDI master keyboard in LInux

In order to have your master keyboard pluggable in Jackd, you have to install the following daemon that will perform a bridge between the ALSA driver and the Jackd server.

sudo apt-get install a2jmidid

# start the gateway

a2jmidid -j default

Now you can see your MIDI input « a2j » in the MIDI tab and you can plug it to wathever instrument in Ardour you want.

Saving your music sessions under linux

There are lots of applications under Linux to make music. Thanks to Jack, the connectivity is without limit but not your time 😉 When you spent several minutes or hours to configure all your instruments and applications how to save your configuration ?
The answer is ladish.
You can see the whole description here: http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/apps/all/ladish

By default, here are my different use cases:

• Guitar playing with a sampler/looper
  • SooperLooper + MIDI foot controller
• Guitar improvisations with drum machine + MIDI synth
  • Hydrogen used as drum machine + step sequencer
  • FluidSynth to load sound founts