[LAU] Synths and sequencers for house/pop music?

[Leigh Dyer]

On 12/05/11 18:54, James Morris wrote:
> LMMS might be worth a look.

I was thinking that, too :) I'm still yet to try it myself, but it seems 
like it might be a good starting point, given that it's an all-in-one 
app that seems suited to that style of music.

Synth-wise, I don't think you'd need anything too exotic -- 
ZynAddSubFX/Yoshimi would be great with some appropriate patches, and 
even something like Whysynth would probably work, too. It might also pay 
to scour the web for sample packs that you could load up in the likes of 
Specimen or LinuxSampler.

Hydrogen would be ideal for drum parts, as long as you can find some 
appropriate samples. I'm not super-familiar with those styles of music, 
but I think you're as likely to find real instrument samples (with bags 
of compression and/or distortion) as you are to find electronic drums.

Something else to consider, especially for the drums, would be loops -- 
I'm sure there must be some good free collections of loops out there 
covering these styles of music. Try loading some drum loops in to 
Ardour, stretching them to fit the desire BPM, and pasting them around 
to make a drum track. For some variety, try chopping a drum loop in to a 
bunch of tiny parts and rearranging, repeating, or reversing them. I had 
fun working directly with drum samples in Ardour the other week:

http://wootangent.net/2011/04/sketchbook-hand-arranged-glitchy-drums/

Thanks to Ardour's pitch-mangling abilities, synth loops are fair game, 
too, even if they're not in the key or pattern you want. You may get 
some artifacts in there from the process, but crunchy aliased sounds are 
all the rage these days. If it's not crunchy and aliased enough, the 
Decimator plugin will help :)

Another left-field suggestion would be Renoise. It's not open-source, 
but it's cheap, and it's all-in-one, and with a good selection of 
samples to pull from, I think it'd be very well suited to this.

Thanks
Leigh

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> James.
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