3 Mar
2016
3 Mar
'16
10:15 a.m.
On Thu, March 3, 2016 8:32 am, Ffanci Silvain wrote:
Ben Bell, Mar 2 2016:
...
Several companies have asked this question over the years and the usual
result is a product that ends up costing significantly more than £2500.
However it is certainly possible to roll your own custom keyboard synth.
Ken Restivo has done it and had some success.
http://www.restivo.org/
Boot time may be an issue if you want to load a full desktop environment.
However it is also possible to boot directly into X and run your UI there.
That also saves a few resources but means you are locked into a specific
application.
If you don't need a visual environment then you can run without X. I have
servers online running this way. They don't even have sound cards and use
jack -dummy instead. Everything can be controlled by external hardware
and/or command line fu.
If you want to save yourself time and hassle buy a prebuilt manufactured
solution. If you want to save some upfront costs but are prepared to spend
your time and efforts then you can build your own and make it work. You
might not get much appreciation from the audience as they tend to get
gooey over sponsorship agreements rather than self realised technical
expertise but you will solidify your tech cred with the gear head crowd
who do appreciate such things. i.e sound engineers, lighting technicians
and roadies.
Probably a good scene if you are into hairy, dirty, sweaty, boozy men ;-P
--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd
I figure some sort of Mini/Nano ATX with SSD,
stripped back systemd
boot, Jack,
LinuxSampler, a reasonable low-latency multiple output soundcard... some
leftoevers for good quality sample libraries...
Exactly, what I would have gone
for. Perhaps the Banana Pi may serve you.
I think it has an SATA slot and a quadcore 900MHz CPU, which should be
fine for LinuxSampler. I've had it running on a slower machine without
issues. The only caveat: RAM. But with an SSD, LinuxSampler doesn't need
too many samples buffered.
For sounds: Sampletekk should still have a few nice pianos. I enjoyed the
acoustic sound of the Yamaha 7CG (7 sea grand). Take your pick really. The
Salamander and Maestro free pianos are good too.
Mellotron: QGB's/Taijii guy's Gigatron gigasample sounds good. The sound
range is limited. You can buy samples on CD and hack them into SFZ format.
It's not that bad. Perhaps there's even some nice software for that.
Organ: I love setBfree. When it comes to the other electronic organ
classic: bristol. Yeah I know, many of its synths don't convince as
emulations, they weren't meant to be. But the organ sounds great! Pipe
organ: Aeolus (also has a textUI for low resource consumption) or download
or buy a gigasample or soundfont.
Electric pianos: Either Sampletekk, which is very good or I've seen a
lovely post about acoustic, electric and toy pianos on bedroomproductions.
If you search for free toy piano sound library, you should find it.
If you go for all the commercial alternatives included: about 400GBP for
the sounds, including Mellotron. There was a two-CD set, which was highly
regarded, containing just raw audiofiles. I suppose you have enough MIDI
keyboards. :)
...