So Frustrating

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Sunday 25 November 2007, RoLo wrote:
> 1. Can somebody explain in simple words how do you do your musical
> process overflow on Ubuntu studio??

I can think of two representative examples from recent memory.  One involved 
notation, while the other did not.

First, Zynfidel started life when I was playing with ZynAddSubFX one day.  I 
had started ZynAddSubFX, and routed its JACK audio outputs to alsa_pcm in 
order to hear it, using the Connect button and Audio tab in QJackCtl. I had 
my keyboard's MIDI output routed to ZynAddSubFX by way of the Connect button 
and MIDI tab also in QJackCtl, which an indispensable application for 
managing JACK audio and ALSA MIDI connections, as well as starting the JACK 
server itself, and monitoring its status.

I found one particular patch that sounded really cool when I played one note, 
let it ring a bit, and then played another one.  It was a seed of 
inspiration.

So I fired up Rosegarden, routed Rosegarden's first MIDI output device to 
ZynAddSubFX via its Manage MIDI Devices button, and recorded this little two 
note motif.  I looped it.

Then I went back to ZynAddSubFX, configured it to receive input on more than 
one MIDI channel, found a drum patch that also sounded cool, set that up to 
play on channel 2, and went back to Rosegarden to do something with the 
drums, which I also looped.

I wound up using five different patches in ZynAddSubFX, along with a live 
recording of me playing two arpeggiated chords on acoustic guitar.  This all 
formed the endlessly repeating and unchanging backbone of a long and 
rambling "ambiance" piece.  It went on for something like 8-9 minutes before 
I finally came in with a long off the cuff acoustic guitar solo noodling 
around on top of the tapestry of other sounds, including some 
random "whacking on something" noises I also produced with ZynAddSubFX.  The 
whole thing wound up being all Zyn and live guitar, with nothing else 
included, which I thought was rather cool of Zyn to be functional enough to 
be pushed to what I thought was an impressive limit.

Then I probably used Time Machine to record a mixdown of all the tracks into 
one file, probably by routing alsa_pcm directly to Time Machine.  These days 
I've taken to recording the mix directly inside Rosegarden, so I don't have 
to load a gigantic file into an editor to cut off the first two minutes.

As I said, that example didn't include any notation.  For another recent 
project, I went back to a MIDI file I composed with Cakewalk in 1996 or so as 
a pure MIDI piece, imported it into Rosegarden, and then I worked on a "live 
instrument remix" version from there.

I ditched the lame MIDI acoustic guitar, and replaced it with a live 
recording.  To do this, I turned my external speakers off, and listened to my 
Sound Canvas on headphones, so I wouldn't record the MIDI parts along with my 
acoustic guitar.  (This didn't completely work, and I can still hear the 
synth instruments in the guitar recording a little, but it's close enough for 
my low standards anyway.)

After I had replaced the worst part, I decided to use Hydrogen's superior drum 
sounds to replace the lame drum kit on my aging Sound Canvas.  I started 
Hydrogen, found an appropriate kit, then went to the drum track in 
Rosegarden, and assigned it to a MIDI playback instrument that was part of 
the device connected to Hydrogen.  Then I had to use various Rosegarden 
features to remap the part to find the correct drums in Hydrogen, which has 
different and all non-standard mappings for each one of its kits.  After all 
of that was said and done, I went ahead and recorded the drum track into an 
audio segment.

Once I had that going, I replaced the MIDI pipe organ part with Aeolus, and 
recorded that into an audio segment too.

Then I moved into the melody lines.  One of them was written for "pan flute" 
and the other for "trombone."  I took each of these parts to convert for live 
brass.  I started with the "pan flute" part, transposed its playback -2 and 
opened the segment in a notation view.  I double clicked the key signature 
and re-inserted the same key, directing Rosegarden to transpose relative to 
the segment level transpose, which moved the notation +2 automatically, and 
wrote the right key for me.  Then I cleaned up the notation a little, 
smoothed out some weird rests, moved pitches around to avoid anything too 
high or too low for my own trumpet chops on a real instrument, and printed it 
via LilyPond.  I repeated the process for the "trombone" segment, moving it 
around to fit my "Alto horn in Eb," and printing that as well.

As it happened, my alto horn chops are not good enough, and I was under a time 
crunch to get this track onto a CD for an old friend, so I wound up using a 
lame fake MIDI instrument on that part, but it does include a live trumpet.

Then I had considerable trouble mixing this one down.  I was recording several 
live tracks from my Sound Canvas mixed with several canned audio tracks.  I 
had to fiddle with the MIDI and the Audio mixers in Rosegarden, and my real 
external mixer endlessly to get the right levels, and still wound up not 
quite happy with the mix.  I should do another mixdown one day, of a future 
version that includes a live horn part, but this will suffice for today.

This last example really shows why I like Rosegarden so much for my own way of 
working, because I can do everything in one place for compositions like 
these.  It is less satisfactory for trying to arrange big pieces of music for 
a wide array of real instruments, but I will probably never do that.  I 
usually only need to make a small number of the parts playable on real 
instruments for people who read music (flutes and brass, in other words, 
because I don't read music for guitar anyway, and play all my guitar parts 
(as well as most of my flute parts, actually) out of my head.)  The rest can 
be ugly in the notation view, and it still sounds fine.

I'm going to avoid getting into the rest of your questions, and hope somebody 
else has something to say.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre