Re: [LAU] Questions on New Recording Gear

Ectropic Harmony <ectropic.harmony(a)gmail.com> writes: You didn't mention monitors.. I assume you have a pair or are planning to buy them: they're a central piece of equipment. While doing everything on phones is doable, is not very comfortable. In particular, experts usually tend to dissuade you to mix on phones. A good point to start is the manual of the mixer: study it thoroughly as it is where the "sound" is created. Study its routing, how to connect it to the soundcard and how to connect the soundcard to it, especially how to avoid dangerous loops (a very high and unpleasant "beeeep" sound). Install and study also the software mixer (envy24control) that controls your soundcard, especially how monitoring works. Ardour is a great application, and since you have real instruments it will likely become your main recording application. Yes, JACK is central here and you need to understand it and configure it to obtain optimal performance with your soundcard. Jack is used to route any internal audio signal (like for example, the audio output of a soft-synth) to ardour: so you can for example use your MIDI keyboard to play a soft-synth whose audio output is recorded into ardour. Since you have also MIDI equipment, you may also want a sequencer application for composing or recording editable MIDI performances. There are various sequencers around, the main ones are rosegarden, muse and qtractor. If you're fluent with notation, rosegarden is a good choice (the other two don't offer notation). You can sync the sequencer to ardour with a mechanism called jack_transport which shares the musical timeline between different applications. MIDI however is a whole can of worms in itself, so if you want to keep it simple at the beginning, just use ardour to record audio like if it were a multitrack tape recorder. There is a new manual for ardour here: http://en.flossmanuals.net/ardour/ Then there are lots of other softwares you can use, for example soft-synths (zynaddsubfx, phasex, ams, fluidsynth/qsynth, etc...) music engraving systems like lilypond or abc, languages such as csound, puredata, supercollider, etc.. You can do ear training with solfege, work with loops with freewheeling or sooperlooper, do mastering with jamin, edit soundfiles destructively with audacity, rezound, snd or mhwaveedit, make drum grooves with hydrogen, and a whole lot of other tools. Look at this site: http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/apps/start Many of the applications listed will be available directly through the ubuntu software package management system, but some may offer only source code and require you to build (compile) them yourself: not difficult but not the easiest thing if you haven't done it before. This skill too can be set aside, at the beginning. HTH Ciao -- Emiliano Grilli Linux user #209089 http://www.emillo.net