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Hey ho! Dave Phillips over at Linux Journal has up a series about Linux Arpeggiators:
Linux Arpeggiators, Part 2

Linux Arpeggiators, Part 1

Reading Mr. Phillips’ excellent articles and working on some musical stuff recently got me to thinking about back when I first moved over to Linux.

One of my major concerns was on the audio production front. Under Windows, I was using Cakewalk Sonar for demo production; it was a decent program that I knew fairly well. A friend used it (which is why I took it up), so we could exchange projects and so forth.

The exchange process never worked perfectly. We didn’t have the exact same plug-ins, samples, and other such supporting doo-dads so even though we were running the exact same version, there were always workarounds and glitches every time we exchanged the project.  Nothing that stopped work, but it was always a bit annoying. Furthermore, when we flew the demo tracks into the real studio (with of course used ProTools), they only wanted the raw audio anyway – a real engineer is not going to want your reverb and EQ settings.

The realization that it probably wouldn’t matter much in terms of collaborating or exporting my work was encouraging, but I was still a bit worried about moving my workflow entirely over to Linux.

Well Worry Not
There are 3 main programs that I rely on in Linux:
Ardour – The DAW proper. Very full-featured, well designed, constantly updated.

Ardour

Ardour is a fantastic DAW and I have no real complaints – outside of the routine complaints engineers always have about their workstations: they can’t read our minds. (I greatly boast here by implying I am an audio engineer. I merely play one at home.)

The one thing that a newcomer is sure to notice is that effect interfaces are not modeled after real-world products, but instead use sliders and other computer widgets. Nothing you can’t quickly adjust too, but it will throw you off a bit a first, and admittedly it’s not as shiney as those UIs that look like real rack-mounted gear.

I like working with a lot of tracks. Even for little home demo stuff, it’s nothing for me to have 8 tracks of just guitars, with the whole thing having 30+ tracks. Ardour has the routing and busing options to comfortably handle projects with a large number of tracks. There is a little bug/glitch in how they re-sort when a track is added or deleted that I hope gets resolved.

I also can’t wait for Ardour v3 – the changes are way exciting!

Rosegarden – MIDI sequencer (and more, but I mostly use the sequencing side of the house)

Rosegarden

Now, Sonar had a very decent MIDI sequencer built-in, but Ardour does not. This complicates the set up a bit, but sound dudes are old hands at patching devices so once you grasp the concept of routing sound through Jack, everything makes sense again.

Rosegarden is my sequencer of choice. One important feature to me is that it allows me to work in “piano roll” mode or regular music notation. There just seems to be times where one is much much better than the other and I like the ability to switch between them easily.

Hydrogen – Drum machine. I never record drums for demos.  Who has time to mic up all those drums? Plus, you have to worry about the noise. And the drummer. Bleh.

Hydrogen

I remember when I first was patching up Hydrogen through Jack and the channel names weren’t listed. That is if I had the Kick Drum on Ch. 1, that channel would only say “Ch. 1″ in Jack. This is quite annoying to xref yourself when you have a dozen or more channels.

Lo and behold, I went out and got the latest version (at that time) from the site and channel names (“Kick Drum”) were exposed to Jack. Very nice! Been a big Hydrogen fan ever since.

I mainly use Hydrogen as a sampler – meaning I use Rosegarden to sequence the drums, and just send that through Hydrogen for the drum sounds. Hydrogen can be used in a more traditional drum machine mode where you actually sequence the drums in a grid-based view. There’s nothing wrong with that, and Hydrogen does it well, but I just happen to prefer having all my MIDI “scored” in Rosegarden.

Other stuff

There are a host of smaller tools (QJackCtl is indispensable and worth special mention) that help round out a project studio, but the biggest shift in thinking was from running one program, to connecting multiple ones together via Jack.

It’s funny because in that sense even GUI-heavy big applications mirror the “do one thing and do it well” Unix philosophy.

I’m interested in Mr. Phillips articles because most of my past efforts have been more in the traditional metal genre, but I’m thinking about playing around with a more electronic-music sort of thing and would like to put together a Reason-style setup. I played with Reason one time and was quite impressed and would be very interested in having something like that under Linux.