On 05/12/2011 10:54 AM, James Morris wrote: Qtractor

On 12/05/11 18:54, James Morris wrote: 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

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Jeremy Jongepier <jeremy(a)autostatic.com> wrote: For an all-in-one option, Neil is pretty ideal I would say (recording vocals could be tricky but still do-able using the record machine plugin). I never got my head round LMMS back in the day (but to be fair I haven't looked at it recently). It could work, but I found the implementation of piano roll so unintutive as to be unusable. My no1 suggestion would be Renoise tho - if you are willing to go the non-open route! It's a kind of industry standard for writing this kind of music. Less temperamental than Neil (at the moment). Fantastic piece of software, and rock solid too. Does recording vocals super-easily. James