[linux-audio-user] A Simple Plan

Chris McCormick chris at mccormick.cx
Mon Feb 5 21:17:47 EST 2007


Hi,

I've re-formatted your HTML email to plaintext, sorry if I messed
anything up.

On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 11:11:30AM -0500, oktyabr at linux-studio.org wrote:
> > From: Chris McCormick
> > Date: Feb 4, 2007 6:44 PM
> > Subject: [linux-audio-user] A Simple Plan
> > 
> > Hi,
> > <http://sciencegirlrecords.com/chr15m/music/CD005/Chris%20McCormick%20-%20A%20Simple%20Plan.mp3>
> > Made in Modplug tracker (GPL) and PdVST running under Wine on Linux. Enjoy.
> 
> Wow! That's pretty good! Sounded a bit early on like a couple of
> different songs put into one, especially where it drops into that
> swing sort of rhythm, but once you break out that formant filter (Delay
> Lama?) it really comes alive!

Thanks. :) I was a little afraid I'd subconciously ripped off another
song, but I still can't figure out any specific tune so I think I'm safe.

The formant filter is called JSHumanizer and is a free, but not Free
VST from around 1999. You can get it here:
<http://membres.lycos.fr/jeje1999/index.htm>

> I'm curious how you did that song, especially the gating on the formant.

Tracking gives you very fine grained control over the temporal
characteristics of a tune, so basically I just hand-programmed the
gating of the formant sound. That's what I like best about tracking -
it's sample accurate. When it was open sourced one of the coolest
features to come to modplug tracker was the ability to program VST
effect changes at the same level of detail using hex codes for the
slider value. This means that I can do stuff like set the exact formant
mixture at any given point in the track.

> Also curious... do you prefer Modplug over the native linux trackers and if so, why?
> Thanks!

I have used Cheesetracker, Shaketracker (MIDI), Schism tracker, and
Soundtracker a fair bit before, and for the most part I like them.

Soundtracker is probably my favorite in terms of interface, but lacks the
features of Modplug tracker, and is not very speedily developed. Plus
newer versions tend to crash under Debian for me and I can't figure
out why. I have used it to do a few remixes when I didn't need to apply
any effects other than those fake kind of effects you can do with a
tracker.

Cheesetracker has many more of the features of Modplug, but I've always
been more of a FT2 person than an IT person and so Cheesetracker feels
slightly clunky to me. Schism tracker is a direct impulse tracker clone
and hence has the same problem for me. If Cheesetracker had have had
the ability to hand-program effect changes like Modplug can I probably
would have put more effort into getting used to the interface.

Shaketracker I used to use to send Midi events into Puredata, but after
I discovered seq24 I started using that as it feels better for that kind
of thing, and takes less work to write music.

Modplug just has a really beautifully developed interface. I find that the
speed at which I can write tunes is an order of magnitude higher using it,
and I never get bogged down trying to do something complicated that
should be simple. It has a really intuitive access to your
sample/instrument library, for example, and key strokes do what you
expect them to. You can edit patterns pretty much solely using the
keyboard (e.g. holding down shift to select rows and ctrl-cut and paste)
which you can't do in some of the Linux based trackers. I just find it
really non-annoying to use.

When it a) started working under Wine and b) went FOSS a year or so
ago I was sooo happy as I hadn't been able to use it for three years
before that since I switched to Linux. An even better treat was that I
can now write effects in Puredata using PdVST. The best of both worlds -
tracker interface with Puredata power!

Best,

Chris.

-------------------
chris at mccormick.cx
http://mccormick.cx



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