All I want for my birthday/xmas is world peace...

umm... and also this Line 6 M9 http://www.zzounds.com/item--LINM9

possibly more to come...

Betsy&Murgatroid 001.1

started playing murgatroid and got this fun progression. recorded with Tascam DR-03 while listening to kick-track. dumped to Ardour and imported this weird 6.5 min track of a Dory soundmaker toy from "Finding Nemo" that had almost completely dead batteries. decided i would build the rest of the song around the die-dory-die track. lead guitar is shit in some places as is the synth bass, but an interesting starting point.

Foggy Bottom or Bust - liner notes

all tracks written, performed, recorded, and engineered by Ryan Paul using exclusively FOSS software @ OpenSourceSoundLab in Rollinsford, NH. album art by Ryan Paul.

track 14 "swirlywhirlywee" synths performed by Elia Brooke

thanks to Nate Brand for permission to use voice sample on track 8

special thanks to Lucas Ryan, Ethan Mitchell and Gavin Dennis for kindly lending various toys for audio samples heard on tracks 1,2,6 & 7. additional vocals on squeelin' provided by Gavin Dennis.

A few to dos

Mixing in phones
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan07/articles/mixingheadphones.htm

choose some commercial audio as a headphone/loudspeaker reference

try mixing in my car at night
car speakers, circumaural phones, canal phones.

wu tang

nOe - rpm compilation

nOe RPM albums i & ii are "done." However, I would like to work a little harder on some of the tracks to do some more polishing and select several tracks from each rpm album to produce a finished album that I will release and "sell" to start raising money for my fav FOSS. Particularly I would like to raise enough in album sales to give the suggested donation of $45 to Ardour once Ardour3 (with MIDI tracking) is released. I think $5 each from me or $3 on the web would be reasonable. Here are the planned tracks:

nOe-ii: all tracks with the 3 SL tracks as bonus

nOe-i: i02, i06, i08, i09, i10

Track List:
yummy
cookies (zxcvb-vmpk)
drive
squeelin' (i08)
fresher (i06)
00110100011
hangman
choosing-to-walk (i010)
sunday breakfast (i09)
keep-the-time (i02)
synth-cocoa-phony

bonus:
bananacabananana
f*n pentatonic
swirlywhirleywee

seq24

I have been interested in and revisited seq24 a few times over the past year or so. Each time, however, I was apparently overwhelmed by its simplicity and could not make heads or tails of it since there is little to no documentation on it. However, I now have a much better grasp having followed a Dave Phillips tutorial from here. Now I am starting to realize the potential of this excellent little midi loop sequencer. Although it would take some time to get it set-up, I'm thinking of using seq24, standalone or with sooperlooper as an addition to my live looping set.

Betsy&Murgatroid: New Plans Forward

I have two acoustic guitars, Betsy (a 12-string Yamaha) and Murgatroid (a Guild) that I acquired in 1997 and 2001 respectively. Toward the end of my high school years and all through college, I focused on using these instruments as my principle tools for expression. Just after getting married in '03, Elia and I recorded a collection of a few of the 30 or so acoustic songs I had written using my very first crude studio, cakewalk on my MS-XP computer (no idea on specs). Despite my total inexperience with recording, the rushed job, and overall low quality, it still managed to be a hit with our family, despite several of them misplacing their copy... Nevertheless, I have decided to rerecord the album with my newer 'crude' studio. Below is my working track-list for this effort:

Soul Searching

Bullfrogs

Fascination Wonderment

Rain Turns to Snow

Moving to Arizona

Believe

Eternity

Funny Little Games

As it stands, I would like to have the record done by the 11.10 release of Ubuntu (october) and I am planning on putting out an album every 6 months from then on (following the Ubuntu release cycle).

nOe ii - RPM 2011 - liner notes

all tracks written, performed, recorded, and engineered by Ryan Paul using exclusively FOSS software @ OpenSourceSoundLab in Rollinsford, NH. album art by Ryan Paul.

track 8 "swirlywhirlywee" synths performed by Elia Brooke

special thanks to Lucas Ryan, Ethan Mitchell and Gavin Dennis for kindly lending various toys for audio samples heard on tracks 1,4 & 5.

FOSS Credits

Audio Engine & Routing:
QJackCtl
JACK
Patchage

Recording (Multi-tracking, MIDI, Looping):
Ardour2-GTK
Qtractor
SooperLooper

Mixing&Mastering:
Ardour2-GTK
Audacity
Jamin

Drums:
Hydrogen

Synths & Samples:
Qsynth
ZynAddSubFX
Yoshimi
Swami
VMPK

Plugin FX:
Jack-Rack
Rakarrack

Playback:
VLC
Brasero

Artwork:
GIMP

comments on the web @ overhauser.blogspot.com

album ii - second critique - car speakers

nOe-ii
car speakers

015 -drums too loud (esp. bass), robot okay

012 -drums too loud

014 -ok

hangman -awful! muddy, guitar way too quiet, drums too loud

OS002 -guitar too quiet, muddy

SL010 -chh too loud

album ii - first critique - over-the-ear mixing headphones

ii


nOe-ii
over-ear headphones

015
high synth a little sloppy - like the 1/8th note chord part

012
ok

014
loud!
short outro

SL004-hangman
noise-clicks :(
guitar a little too quiet
really long outro

OS002
guitar a little too quiet
missing bass?

SL010

SL011
too long and just a bit weak

SL007
drags on a little long for main theme at 2min
fade out guitar part then fade back in?

016
omit chh

robot drums and nursery rhymes?

This groove has been the funnerest I have put together yet for the rpm2011 challenge. I had the goal to build a robot drum library as well as use some more kids-toys samples. nOe-015 has these built into a techno groove. Feedback welcome!

nOe-015

RPM Challenge 2011 - nOe-SL-011

I have been having some software woes lately that have blocked my creative juices, I got pumped when I found out qjackctl patchbay would save all my jack connections, except not totally since it cannot differentiate between my two E-MU XMidi1X1 USB connectors. And Yoshimi let me down in a big way when it kept crashing if I tried to used more than one channel or otherwise load a preset .xmz file. So I finally gave up and switched back to ZynAddSubFx for my live looping since I like having 5 different softsynths loaded in channels 5-9. With looping it's all about flexibility and options on the fly! I mean, you need that. Yeah?

Anyway, after pouting a bit, I managed to put together a new piece:

SL-011

It's nearly 01:00 so I think it's time to throw in the towel.

Open Soarz

I have been using open-source software for music creation for about a year and a half now.  Actually, I have mostly been learning the ropes until recently and now I have a chosen set of tools with which I plan to compose record and edit audio art.  The ability to have freedom and flexiblity is important to an artist, and I am truly becoming passionate about open-source software as it has given me an opportunity to create, a journey of the mind and spirit.  I am hopeful that I can return the fruits of their labour from the fruits of mine.  I don't really like the idea of selling my music, however, should I have the opportunity to collect donations from live shows, I plan on giving at least 50% to the open-source projects that have helped me create.

I also decided that "Open Soarz" would be a good "industrial/metal" band name that used only open-source solutions to making music.  My first couple attempts at some edgy-er material for Open Soarz (OS) is below.  I realised quickly that I will need to keep practising.

OS-002

hangman

Live Looping

About 2 years ago now I happened across a webisode of KCRW's "Morning Becomes Eclectic" featuring Theresa Andersson who blew me away with all the music she made "flying solo." She explained on the show that she uses a combination of "loop pedals" to accomplish her complex artistic expression. I started thinking about how I might be able to do something similar and as mentioned in an earlier post, I bought and tested a Boss Loop Station which I ultimately traded in for a more flexible solution to meet my needs: combining a Behringer FCB1010 with Jesse Campbell's SooperLooper software.

I have now been working with this set-up for a few months and I am really starting to put together all the puzzle pieces. I have learned (partially) how to program the FCB1010 so that I am currently able to use the one pedal to MIDI-control SooperLooper, Rakarrack (a nice digital effects pedal), and Hydrogen drum machine. I also have a small, old, simple but excellent (it was a free gift) MIDI keyboard that I connect to ZynAddSubFX and Qsynth routing different sounds on 7 channels (for now). Additionally I run my Les Paul and a 3/4 size bass I got as a gift (thanks Sadie) through separate channels (L and R) into an ART USB DualPre which is my "off-board" sound-card / preamp.

It took me a long time to figure out how all these different softwares work together, alone, with MIDI, etc. but now I'm getting results (clips below). SooperLooper is great and I really like how it syncs with Hydrogen and quantizes to my drum-loop. I only wish Hydrogen had some more MIDI bindings (like switching patterns which I cannot get to work) and that there was a linux equivalent for midistroke (Mac).

edit: I discovered a "secret feature" in Hydrogen. It seems that it will allow for selection/deselction of the patterns (1 - n from top to bottom) using MIDI program-change (PC) commands 01 - n. I programmed my FCB1010 to send PC-01 - PC-04 at bank 08 where I control the muting of Hydrogen and Sooperlooper, only it sends on a separated channel so that PC-01 - 04 are still free for Rakarrack to use.

SL-010

SL-007

RPM 2011

RPM 2011 is underway and I have gotten a slight head start in hopes that I can make a more professional looking product this year than a CD-R with Sharpie labeling. My focus this year is to use completely open-source software and my strategy for a workflow is to spend an hour or so 3 nights a week to "get my groove on" using my live looping set-up and then dump the loops to my DAW (Ardour2) and paint my picture there. I have found this has been a very efficient workflow for me given my often debilitating time constraints.

You may take notice of two new tracks to the left where I have used this strategy: SL-007 and hangman01. Tonight Elia helped me with SL-007 by accompanying me on synths. The process took about 30ish minutes to grab a few loops and then about an hour to arrange, add automation and mix to generate the recording. hangman01 has some computer artifact blips that I don't like so I will have to remix at some point.