[linux-audio-user] DAW Dillema -- Seeking Advice

[Eric Dantan Rzewnicki]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 01:46:10PM -0400, Peter Lutek wrote:
> > Instead of keeping many different versions of
> > the actual audio files, you would keep different iterations of the 
> > mixdown/effect settup scripts. 
> thanks, eric! yes, this meshes better with my workflow -- i'll look into
> it.
> but you now have me curious. can you describe your workflow, in a way
> which would illustrate how it differs from what i've described? i am
> NEVER interested in being stuck in a rut, and would like to learn from
> an alternate viewpoint.

Ok, but bear in mind that at present and probably for several more years
I am not attempting to make music at all. I'm really just playing with
sounds to hear what might be possible. I find it liberating to not be
directly concerned with pitches, scales, harmonies and rhythms. Instead
I am letting those happen as they will as a consequences of manipulating
sounds with time shifts, reversal, looping and effects processing.

Some idea of what I do might be understandable in these scripts and 
notes:

http://zhevny.com/bin/

I need to do an rsync tonight to update that, but what's there should
give a decent idea, if not a very clearly organized one.

I have a huge pool of mono files, about 100GBs now. This pool includes 
previously completed works (split to mono if they were originally 
stereo), digital recordings of a wide variety of sounds I originally
collected on cassette tapes over the past 8 or so years, recordings of
myself playing guitar, piano and bass trombone, some recordings of
myself speaking gibberish or reading written works of my own, sounds
collected more recently with mini-DV camcorder, etc., etc.

My scripts largely center around randomly selecting a random number of 
files from this large pool, selecting a random portion of the selected 
file, applying a random degree/direction of pitch shift, looping the
result and mixing that together with various panning, volume and effects
controlled either by randomly generated controllers or live by myself 
via midi.

There are numerous variations on the above planned. They are in various
stages ranging from rough ideas sketched out in plain text through
hacked together mish-mashes of shell and python all the way up to a few
that are actually in use daily.

Eventually the random selection process will feed the generation of
.beef banks for use in specimen, and perhaps soundfonts, to create
midi playable instruments w/arbitrary scales/tunings. The ardour based
projects I speak of will grow out of this as well. The sound materials
will be again selected at random. But, I will spend more time with a
chosen set, studying the sound of various autogenerated submixes,
playing with and getting to know a set of sounds over a period of weeks
or months. Then, eventually I'll sit down to lay out a more structured
composition. For this final stage I agree that ardour will be a better
suited tool. Perhaps this last type of work is most like other people's
work flows.

In addition to those sound manipulating type of work, I'm also using
ecasound as a LADSPA host to control the paramaters of some sound
generating plugins via midi CC messages. These session are primarily
improvisatory in nature with now set plan of action ... I just slide and
dial and tweak to hear what happens and revel in the exploration. In
many ways I'm am simply and happily playing as a child would with a
bucket full of building blocks.

-Eric Rz.