Music work

Hey all. For some time, I've been learning and producing music. Starting with playing piano, then learning to compose and improvise, then moving on to computer synthesis with ABC2MIDI in FreeDos, beast, Audacity, FL Studio, LMMS, and more, I managed to stick a little experience under my belt.

I recently realized something. I've almost always worked under one program or instrument. I never mixed things together. Only recently have I began to change my perspective to more of a studio point of view. I even shelled out the space on my HD for Ubuntu Studio, which I highly recommend for optimal music production on Linux.

I realized that many people have several synths and programs running, and link them together using JACK or something similar. I've started doing this a bit myself. I'm even considering throwing in recordings of my piano with the rest of a track.

I also picked up a new open source synthesizer:

This, my friends is Phasex. It's really a pretty cool synth, although missing detune knobs on the oscillators. It's not a VST, and it's not an LMMS plugin or anything like that. It's stand alone, which means I can't open it in LMMS. However, it does support MIDI I/O. So, I just have to open up JACK and plug the output of some track into phasex and I can sequence that way. The major disadvantage is that I can't figure out if there is a way to automate it yet.

This same solution is how I can fix the delay problem on my keyboard, should I ever end up playing live. I guess the delay problem is exclusive to LMMS, which apparently has really frumpy MIDI latency.

So yea, I'm still experimenting with a lot of this stuff, including trying to see if I can hack together VST automation through this setup. It's pretty fun right now, even though school still takes up most of my time.

        --LazerBlade