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

Guitar playing on Debian 7.1

I don’t count the times I used Linux for several topics: programming, web browsing, watching movies, etc…
But one of the point that really blocks me to ban Windows OS was the guitar playing under Linux.

I’ve starting using linux in 1997 and even few years ago I struggled under several specific linux music distributions. Event under Ubuntu Studio I found that is was always a pain to use softwares (but it was easier, the effort done by the communities were making believe it a little bit more).

And now my dream came true. It happened on my favorite distribution. I’ve recently installed Debian 7.1 and the whole environment really rocks. It is done on my old thinkpad T43 and it is working !

First my Behringer UCA 202 is working out of the box. Just plug it and that’s ok!

Then I can use guitar effects like guitarix with jackd enabled to play with my clean electric guitar and get some interesting effects.

Furthermore TuxGuitar had real improvments and now I can open all my guitar pro tabs until gp5 without any problem. The only annonying thing is that you have to « geek » a little bit to find a « midi player ».
I’ve chosen « timidity » and I’m running it like this: « timidity -iA » (to use alsa).

Now all is ok, I just have to play ;=)

Of course, I’ll let installed my old Windows XP. And if there is no more use of it I’ll free some gigs of my laptop 😉

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