Music Producers, and creatives, introduce yourself :D

jawkins

Hi solus brothers and sisters, ive been using solus as my main production system in my little home studio and am in love with the experience

i play guitar and bass and have a huge passion for music production, my primary tools are ardour, guitarix, calf, drumgizmo and kpp-tubeamp

the only two that are not in the official repos are drumgizmo and kpp-tubeamp, easy enough to build from source, but id love to learn how to package these things for solus.

anywhoo, introduce yourselves fellow creatives =] whats your tools, whats your experience with solus been?

yours, some nerd

[deleted]

jawkins whats your experience with solus been?

so far its been good 🙂 . In the begining i had some small problems with the steam client and other than that,its alright. i am just an average science student with some interest in computers and tech. currrently exploring Linux!

dUbLEo

jawkins Hi, I too would like to integrate drumgizmo into ardour, however, even though the instructions for compiling seem straightforward enough and I think I have the correct tools installed, not having much success. If you have found a way to successfully build it could you describe the necesary steps or required tools to install? Much appreciated in advance.

RicSense

jawkins I'm also a musician and I'm very happy with Solus. My last two songs I produced entirely at Solus.

jawkins

[deleted] ahh thats cool man, any specific scientific discipline?
what sort of issues did you face with steam? ill be honest, since lutris came along i forgot all about my steam library

brent

jawkins I am huge music lover of most genres. 40's/50's American jumpin jive and swing and punk coexist on my listening schedule lately (they are damn similar btw). At the end of the day I just like that rock and roll.
I like music so much I've wondered what I would have to do to isolate tracks and vocals?
Is there a linux application to take an mp4 (for instance) and strip everything out but the bass line? Then go back and hear the bass and drum only? Or vocal? Or trombone? Lotta people do this on youtube and I wonder how they do it?
edit: sp

[deleted]

jawkins physics with mathematics, mostly. And the problem i had with Steam was when i couldnt view any broadcasts on the client, which was my fault because i did not reboot after the weekly update 😛

jawkins

brent hmm, its not something ive ever looked into doing, cant imagine its an easy process, ill let you know if i find a way

stalebrim

I never got into Linux DAWs, instead I use FL Studio 20 via Wine and WineASIO with JACK to achieve pretty much perfect latency.

brent As far as I know they're not separated, instead they're either leaked stems or from Rock Band or similar. For extracting vocals there are some AI solutions, like lalal.ai though.

brent

stalebrim jawkins
It occurred to me that this technology couldn't possibly exist to the layman. Everything recorded in a studio has a different track for each dub/instrument even back to the day of vacuum tubes and analog. Only the record company/engineer could isolate the tracks. They own it. There's no profit to make selling a bass track, for example, to the general public. These stems as you call them probably do originate from the studio and a royalty is paid by Rock Band. By the time it is MP4 or other, it is a wholly compressed file anyway so unworkable.

This ^^^ entire paragraph is 100% speculation on my part, but seems likely the truth or close to it, whatever the truth may be regarding acquiring a particular drum track, vocal etc.

****Footnote. There are craploads of guitar players and drummers on youtube playing over an existing (copyrighted) song with a their particular instrument stripped out. A guy playing Eddie Van Halen over a guitar-less "Running With The Devil" for example. So we know some technology exists to us peons that can strip out a single track...so everything I wrote up to now is invalidated. But what becomes of the single missing track? Can I have it?🙂
edit...unless ALL the youtubers above are using rock band?

stalebrim

brent How Rock Band works is it contains all the stems separately, so it can mute the corresponding track when you make a mistake while playing. My hunch is most of the backing tracks are either remakes or indeed, original stems layered without the one (in this case guitar) track.

Bouquins

Hello ! I play flute and saxophone (tenor sax and baritone sax).

Cheers !

hdansin

I use Ardour for recording songs, mainly just guitar and vocals. Somewhat recently got a Spark Amp, which has a USB cable, and the recording quality has skyrocketed. It's my first real amp, and I've been enjoying it a lot.

Have yet to take the plunge with a drum machine. I play a lot of blues and rock.

However, my main creative endeavor is writing. I am self-published (though without much fanfare or sales), and I wrote the entire thing on Solus and open source software (even included a little mention in the back of the book). Apps I like are ghostwriter, pandoc, and Vim.

TeenCorn

My experience in the beginning was very bad lol. I had this issue where I had to logout and log back in every time I needed to start JACK. Having automatic login was the cause. For whatever reason no password at login meant no JACK. Eventually I figured out that any program that prompts the "Unlock Login Keyring" thing will make JACK work without having to logout. No more impeded workflow 🥳

But overall I loved producing music on Ardour. I loved exploring all the cool things the linux music community had to offer. Seeing people like Unfa (an open source music producer and sound designer) doing cool things inspired me to continue fiddling and having fun with it all.

Nowadays, I just want things to work. There are a bunch of inconveniences that make it frustrating when you want to jot an idea down. The midi editor for example 🤮 , the constant crashes, no workable inspiring presets for a lot of the plugins, and so on. For example, when I'm making music with friends these inconveniences will show up a bunch through out the session, but what's really upsetting is when you don't even have an approximation of the tone that you want for a song your making and they give you that face 😞. Very uninspiring when working with other people in the moment. By myself its fine because I'll eventually find the tone, but still very unfun.

Basically, I see a lot of potential. Things sucks but they suck everywhere don't they lol. One day I hope that I can contribute to the community and make things suck less, but for now I'll continue making music with the mediocre skill I have 🤠

As for my tools:
DAW: Ardour
Guitar: Squier Jaguar
Amp: Blackstar HT-20
Audio interface: Behringer U-Phoria UM2
Plugins: Calf Stuff, LSP stuff, Vitalium, Zynaddsubfx
Drums: AVL drums, Hydrogen

Links to Music:

My first attempt at a completely electronic song. It's definitely not on the grid and the sounds are terrible 😂 But there are some good ideas in there that I would like to expand upon.

This is one I made as a joke. If you understand spanish this one may be funny to you LMAO. First time working with samples. If you recognize the intro, your a friend of mine 🤝

qsl

TeenCorn I'm under the impression (perhaps mistaken) that much best in class software and gear is Windows or Mac only.

All of the stuff I use is one or the other (with Windows making great strides in this space). Graphics I think is at least on par on Linux (at least for my limited uses), but anything audio it seems Linux is too much of a handicap (Ableton, Foobar2000, EAC, etc.).

We'll see if this changes.

TeenCorn

RicSense Would you be willing to share. I'm interested in listening might find inspiration in your work

SOLUSfiddler

Hey y'all!
Do you know this guy?: [https://www.youtube.com/c/unfa000/featured]
He works with open source software only and produces tons of electronic stuff, but he also explains why and how.
So, check him out!

RicSense

TeenCorn Of course! I'm sharer much stuff on youtube. If you interested in my autoral work there's a playlist on my channel titled "AUTORAL / demos".
If you want to know the two songs entirely produce in Solus: and

TeenCorn

RicSense Really like the production in your demos 😮

RicSense

TeenCorn I'm glad you liked it and thanks for your feedback. This motivates me to continue sharing the results of my "study" of how to make a diy production in the gnu/linux world. It's been a great learning experience for me.

dUbLEo

OK, think I am close now, found I was missing some build tools, (probably have too many installed now) mainly being solbuild{duh}, arcanist and solbuild-config-unstable as well as component system.devel. Now when I run the ./configure I recieve an error that x11>= 1.0 not found, this is after installing xorg-server-devel package. Could this be because solus doesnt name the package as 'x11'? Still hacking at it blindly in case I make a lucky hit to report.