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

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

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.

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.

RPM 2010 Listening Parties

Last night I was fortunate to be able to attend the RPM 2010 Listening Party at the Portsmouth Music Hall. RPM was celebrating their 5th year and its participants have collectively produced about 3600 albums. I hope to be able to participate in future years. It is a great experience and really does motivate musical growth. I found out later that the person organizing the listening parties (a huge undertaking for a few hundred attendants at 5 different small venues around downtown Portsmouth) contacted me requesting the song from i that I would like played. At least they still chose one for me even though I did not respond. So track i01 was played at the Music Hall in the group "Electronic/Ambient." I wish I had responded so they played i08 instead. Oh Well.

RPM Challenge

The Wire Magazine from Portsmouth, NH has held an annual "open challenge" to musicians all over the world (over 2000 participants this year) to motivate the recording of 10 new tracks or 35 min. of music. I have a friend who has participated for a number of years and was finally motivated myself, having been enabled by several flexibile/portable iPod Touch apps I recently acquired. My nOe rpm challenge page is http://noe.rpmchallenge.com. It was cool to see that the fine people at The Wire used xspf as their flash media playlist component like the one on my blog (look more lefter). They also use audio-player for individual tracks on the owners back-pages so songs can be reviewed individually (I'm using that too for embedding into my blog posts). Here also is the collection from i
nOe-i

Overall, I am happy that I was able to participate, even if the final product is a bit sloppy and brief for my liking... At least I learned a lot about what I can now do myself to make music, something I was previously incapable of. I have a long way to go, but I will be tracking progress here along the way.

Some future plans include:
- cutting a more polished nOe album from many of the ideas in i (which I think of more as a musical notebook).
- record some Betsy and Murgatroid tracks with Elia
- sell my Honda Shadow to buy an improved recording studio set-up (research still to do)
http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/39751