Introduction to Music Production (Coursera)

I just finished another course at Coursera: Introduction to Music Production by Loudon Stearns of Berklee College of Music.

The most demanding stuff from this course were the assignments, in which we had to create short lessons explaining some of the concepts that we learned each week. I went for the screencast mode of teaching, and these are the assignments for each week. Doing the assignments was hard work, but I learned a lot that way, and I hope I can take another music-related course from Coursera in the near future...

Week 1: Topic: "Typical recording signal flow using your own equipment"

Week 2: Topic: "Efficiently create a compile from multiple audio recordings in your DAW."

Week 3: Topic: "Submix practical: Demonstrate the configuration of a Submix in a DAW or physical mixing board and Parallel effects practical: Demonstrate the configuration of parallel effects in a DAW or physical mixing board."

Week 4: Topic: "Demonstrate how to use a specific compression plugin, including threshold, ratio, attack, and release. Describe what visuals the device has, including gain reduction meters, transfer functions, and gain reduction traces if any."

Week 5: Topic: "Demonstrate the delay spectrum with examples of comb filtering, creating pitches with delays, slapback delays, and synchronized long delays."

Week 6: Topic: "On a synthesizer of your choice demonstrate the usage of these controls: Oscillator waveform, oscillator frequency, filter type, filter frequency, filter resonance, and amplitude envelope ADSR. How are they similar and how are they different from the simple synthesizer used in the video demonstrations?"

Aria Sinsonido AS-100C

As a Christmas present I got an Aria Sinsonido AS-100C silent guitar

I've been playing it last few nights when the kids were sleeping, and overall I'm really happy with it. The sound is not the same as in a classical guitar, but the measures of the neck, strings, etc. are the same, so it is great for practice.  Playing alone with the supplied headphones is trivial (just need to plug them in ...).

Recording it in the computer is also very easy. With a 3.5mm male-to-male audio cable we can connect the Aria to the Microphone input in the sound card (the "Free Music Intrument Tuner" automatically detects the input, so it provides an easy way to tune the guitar).

Once it is connected, the sound is not redirected automatically (Ubuntu Studio 10.04) to the speakers (or headphones), but with Jack it is very easy to do so by connecting the "caputre" clients to the "playback" clients: 

With this in place, I can play the guitar and listen to it via the headphones, and also easily record it via, for example, Ardour.

A first test of this setting can be seen at http://vimeo.com/18801768 (the video was recorded separately and mixed with the sound with Kdenlive. For the video I was using my Pentax Optio M40 camera, which in daylight does a decent job, but at night it leaves much to be desired. Next one will be a decent recording in daylight...)

Virtual Pianola...

In my quest to try out new things related to sound and music with my Ubuntu Studio laptop, I decided to try and emulate a pianola (or player piano), as seen in this video (you can see in the following link a real piano player in action).

The first thing was to change the preferences in MuseScore (version 0.9.6.2). In the I/O preferences tab, I selected "Use JACK MIDI output":

Then I restarted, Jack, Musescore and VMPK (version 0.3.0), but in the Jack Audio Connection Kit "Connections" view, I could see "Mscore1" in the MIDI tab as a readable client, but VMPK input only showed in the ALSA tab, so I could not connect them.

With the help of the experts at the UbuntuStudio mailing list I found out that I would require a bridge between alsa midi and jack midi: a2jmidid. The best option seems to just put "a2jmidid &" in the Jack Connection Setup "Execute script after Startup" Option, so that the bridge will be in place every time I start Jack.

With this in place, and after restarting everything, I can connect the output from MuseScore into VMPK (and also into "FLUID Synth": otherwise I will see the keys in VMPK being pressed, but we will get no sound).

Now we only need some nice music to demonstrate... and I download "Lock and Key" from http://musescore.org/en/node/6707. And everything seems to work pretty well. But I don't want you to take my word for it, so I planned to record it.

I used gtk-recordMyDesktop (version 0.3.8), which is a front-end for recordMyDesktop. With it (in the Sound tab), you can click "Use jack for audio capture", but with this option enabled I always got errors like "... exited with status: 2816. Description: Improper window specification.", so I decided to record the sound (with Ardour) and the video (with recordMyDesktop) separately, and then mix it with Kdenlive.

Kdenlive is not happy with the .ogv file created by recordMyDesktop, so first I had to convert it to an .avi file with the command:

angelv@palas:~$ mencoder -ovc lavc -ofps 30 pianola.ogv -o pianola.avi

Synchronizing audio and video is not always straightforward always, but for this video it was quite easy. The resulting video can be seen at: http://vimeo.com/18783287

First Steps with Music Software in Linux

There are not (so far) many musical things that I want to do in the computer, but playing a MIDI file; mixing it with my own recording of playing one of the parts, and exporting it all into an audio file is one of them, so today I set some time to learn the basics.  In the computer I did this I'm running Ubutu 10.04, and I have followed the instructions in the Ubuntu Studio pages to quickly install all the software that I need (and much more), and to configure it.

With that in place, I rebooted the PC into the RealTime Kernel, and then I started by running JACK, Qsynth and Rosegarden. (Qsynth needs some soundfonts, and I downloaded some into the file /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2. I don't remember where I got them from, but you can get them, for example, at http://musescore.org/handbook/soundfont). This looks like:

Then, it is time to check that all connectivity is working OK. The "Connect" button in the JACK interface will show the connections available. In my case:

This shows that the "General MIDI Device" in Rosegarden is connected to FLUID Synth (QSynth is just the GUI for fluidsynth), so all should be OK.

Then in Rosegarden we load a MIDI file, and select the instruments you want, modify the volume, reverb, etc. It took me a while (perhaps it should have been faster if I had read the documentation) to figure out how to select different instruments for each track, but it is actually quite easy. Just select one of the tracks:

Then say which instrument number you are going to use for that track:

My confusion for a while was to trust the name of what it would appear in the "Instrument" description, before I actually configured each instrument sound. So, the description in the "Instrument" field can be wrong. I guess it keeps whatever it was used last time with whatever synthesizer, so don't trust it, and instead, once you have selected the instrument number, you should specify the sound to be used for that instrument number:

With that in place (you will see that now the Instrument description in the track parameters section above reflects the change made here), you can now use Rosegarden to play the MIDI file with whatever instruments you choose.

So now we just have to record it into an audio file. This is done quite easily by just routing the output of Qsynth to Ardour. First, we will need to create at least one track with Ardour (here in the example: Audio1):

 Then, in JACK we will have to connect the output from Qsynth to Ardour:

And lastly is just a matter of recording (first we have to select in which track we will be recording, in this case Audio 1,and then proceed with the "main" recording):

Adding other audio tracks (from an external mic, another software, etc.) would follow similar steps in Ardour. The last step is just to "export session to audiofile".

A  basic MIDI-performance obtained in this way can be found at vimeo