new elektro project 'BhBm' : Hydrogen + analogue synths

It has been a long, long time since i posted anything here !


Let me present you our newest elektro project BhBm (short for "Black hole in a Beautiful mind")

All drums and samples are done with H2.  Almost all bass and melody melodies are analogue synths controlled by H2 via MIDI.

Softsynths and FX are done using Carla and LV2 plugins.

I use H2 as a live sequencer in stacked pattern mode controlled by a BCR200 running, so there is no 'song', ony patterns that are enabled/disabled live > great fun !!

Check out our demo songs on Soundcloud :
Or follow us on Facebook


Enjoy and comment please !
Thijs

MOD DUO has arrived !

Hi all !

I know that it has been a loooong time since i posted anything but i do have a life you know ;-)

Anyway, i just wanted to share that my MOD DUO arrived and my son an I made a little MOD DUO unboxing video about it !

Great device, really nice build and so far the interface just blew me away !
I plan on doing some more vids on the MOD, but no promises !

Enjoy !

The 'MOD duo' on Kickstarter

Hi all,

It's happening : the 'MOD duo' kickstarter campaign is on !
The MOD team has been working on this guitar stomp box for quite some time, and everything they learned from making their prototype (the MOD quadra) has been applied in the MOD duo concept.

And I must say I'm impressed, so impressed that I just ordered one !

i'm back, with some great news !

Hi all !

I's been a while, i know, but i have some really, really good excuses for that :-)

in order of importance :


On October 11th our daughter Mare was born !
Mom and daughter are doing great and her 2 brothers treat her like a princess :-)

Secondly i have been studying really hard to get my CCNA certification, and on September 30th i finally got it !
It was a lot harder than i expected and it took a lot of time, but i'm really glad i did it.

Oh, and in between we also managed to 'upgrade' our house (+1 bedroom)
How's that for an excuse ?



Now i'm back on the linux/audio track and making some great progress with arps, synths and controllers.
More on that soon !

Grtz
Thijs

move from Garageband to Linux : can it be done ? - Part 3

- make sure you read part 1 and part 2 before reading this post -


In this post we will split up the song into different parts, making it is easier to analyse.

1) Preparation
While i was preparing this post i was looking for a way to visualize the waveform and add some sort of indication or markers to identify the different parts in the song.
My first idea was to take a screenshot of the waveform and use Gimp to add a couple of lines and some text, similar to the way Soundcloud lets you to add comments to a song as you are listening to it.
I could actually use Soundcloud to do this -and it would simplify things for you guys-, but since it's not my own work this could potentially get me into trouble (yes i know that chances are very very small, but you never know)
Exit Soundcloud, back to to Gimp.

While i was preparing to go the Gimp way i started up Audacity, loaded the song, started playing around with markers and accidentally discovered the 'label track' option.
A 'label track' is a non-audio track that lets you add comments at a specific moment in time, and also allows you to define a time range and give it a name : brilliant !

The result :

move from Garageband to Linux : can it be done ? - Part2

- read part 1 first -

Hi all,

To make it a bit easier to understand what exactly we are trying to accomplish i would like to tell you first what our current setup(s) looks like :

1) the setups
As you probably know we have been using Hydrogen live for a while now and that worked out quite well so far.  The Hydrogen setup consists out of a midi drum controller, an old laptop-in-a-box (LT1 on the drawing) and some extra wiring to be able to use the Left and Right output as 2 individual channels :

move from Garageband to Linux : can it be done ? - Part1

We (my cousin and I) are currently working on a rather interesting experiment : the goal is to move my cousins setup from Garageband (on OSX) to Linux.

First some background on the current setup(s) and where we want to end up:
Currently I'm running AmSynth + Calf Monosynth on my Ubuntu laptop and Stijn (my cousin) is running Garageband on his Macbook 13".  We both have a midi keyboard hooked up to our laptop and  use the built-in sound card.
An important detail : we are using these laptops live on stage so whatever we run it needs to be rock solid and easy to set up.

The idea to switch to Linux is not new, in fact I already dual-booted Stijn's Macbook some time ago, but it was more of an experiment because it wasn't clear what we really wanted to do with these laptops.  Since that time we started using the laptops for some songs we play with the band so now we have a better understanding of 'who-will-do-what' and also what sounds we need.

Being guitarist with 0 piano playing skills we use an _absolute_ maximum of 3 fingers to play the keyboard, so you can probably guess that we mainly use the laptops for a couple of monophonic electro/dance riffs and also some more old-school sounds like Hammond or piano as backing to create a richer sound.
Sounds pretty simple, but in fact that covers almost the complete spectrum of existing synth types : soundfont player, modular analog synth emulators, sound modeling synths ...

This should be interesting to see how/if we will move from Garageband to Linux.

To be continued ...

- read Part 2 here -

music made with linux

This is a listing of music that was (partially) made with linux and is really well recorded IMHO.
Wether you like the style of music is a totally different question of course :-)

Hope you enjoy it !

Jazzy-electro by Attack
http://sharpattack.bandcamp.com/

Electro-ambient by Pneuman (some nice Air influences)
http://pneuman.bandcamp.com/

Avant-garde rock by Platypuse Egg
http://platypusegg.bandcamp.com/album/little-street-of-happiness-2

Experimental-electro by Chordpunch
http://soundcloud.com/chordpunch

Crazy stuff by Sebkha-Chott
https://soundcloud.com/Sebkha-Chott

Metal by Pupkovem (drums are Hydrogen)
http://soundcloud.com/pupkovem/cutthroat_notalive_instrumenta


If you know of any other album/demo that was recorded using Linux be sure to let me know in the comments below!

Denon CRB 90 Rhythm Box for Hydrogen

Hi all
I finally found some time to finish my 'Denon Rhythm Box' Hydrogen drumkit

A Denon Rhythm Box ?
That's right, a Denon Rhythm Box :

Check out this video if you want to see it in action (note that this box has been modded), and I even found a blog dedicated to this device !

As you probably have noticed : the capabilities of the box and the quality of the sounds are not all that fantastic compared to what other boxes can do, but keep in mind that this box dates from ... euh ... way back !

Btw: I actually don't own the Denon box I used to record the sounds from.  A friend just kinda left it at my parents home after one of our rehersals and 'forgot' about it, but now that I have the samples I can give it back to him (he'll be really happy ;-)

Hydrogen drumkit creator script V2

An improved version of the original script is ready.

What's new:
- some small bugfixes
- more options
- espeak sample generator

Hydrogen GM espeak test kit : the drumkit that can speak

A couple of days ago Emanuel Rumpf (one of the H2 users) pointed me to the fact that it is really important to follow the GM midi mapping when you create a new drumkit, and right he is!
Since we are in the middle of the Hydrogen spring drumkit contest I updated the info in the H2 manual right away, but while doing that i noticed that there is something very weird going on with Hydrogen's 'GM kit' : is't not GM compliant  :-(

While figuring out the correct mapping i decided to create a GM compliant drumkit template, and added something extra ;-)

Hydrogen drumkit creator script

Some time ago we (the Hydrogen team) launched the first edition of the 'Hydrogen Spring Drumkit Contest'.
The goal of this contest is to encourage the Hydrogen users to contribute new drumkits.

The goal of the 'Hydrogen drumkit creator' script is to make it easier to make these drumkits.

Hydrogen pattern editor buttons

After finding out about some nifty 'new' features (not really new, i just didn't know they existed!) in Hydrogen i created some more mockups:

It still needs work, but it's getting better IMO !


And a previous version :

PRO DSP1000P automation with Hydrogen PART 2

The original post can be found here, but to recap :

The goal : control a hardware FX unit with Hydrogen
Why : to be able to select a specific FX per song (or part of the song)
How : using Midi + minimal tools

After some googling and great help from the Linux Audio Developer mailing list (thanks Harry, Jeremy, Clemens, Frank, Olivier, Adrian) my FX unit now switches to a specific preset whenever i jump to the next/previous song in Hydrogen !

Hydrogen 0.9.6 feature freeze

yep !  it's that time  :-)
see this post

Hydrogen GUI update

I'm currently working on some updates for the Hydrogen manual, and i also made some mock-ups of the Hydrogen GUI.  More specifically the pattern editor control buttons (the part just above the pattern editor)
Currently this is a mix of buttons, 'LCD' displays and dropdowns.  This inconsistency has been bugging me for some time now and i decided to have a go at it.
First priority : replace the different elements with simple, intuitive buttons. Simple.

The buttons are all bitmaps so it is quite time consuming to get a good looking 'icon' on them.

Below is a first attempt (top=new, bottom=current) :

It's far from perfect, but it's a start !

rugged laptop : part II

I upgraded my rugged laptop with a 3.5mm stereo jack > 2x 6mm mono jack sockets 'assembly'.

This makes is a lot easier to connect the laptop to the mixing console since i can now use regular guitar leads + the fragile 3.5mm jack is tucked away safely  :-)

I also added a power strip.  You can never have too many power outlets !

KRK VXT6

Today i bought a pair of KRK VXT6 studio monitors  :-)

This is how it works : "take your favorite CD's with you, listen to the monitors, chose the one that sounds 'right' for you"

Some remarks if I may :

rugged laptop for live usage

About a week ago i got an old Compaq EVO N610c laptop from my brother to see if it was good enough to run Hydrogen for live usage. Specs : P4 2GHz, 512 Mb ram
I started by installing standard Ubuntu 11.04, applied all the usual audio tweaks and found out that i could get the Jack latency down to about 10ms without running into any X-runs. Not bad, not bad at all :-)
Next i copied all the Hydrogen songs and the playlist from my main laptop to the EVO, connected my midi keyboard (to simulate the midi drum that would normally be connected to this laptop to trigger sounds and patterns) and i was rockin' !

With all the software in place i wanted to go just one step further and see if i could 'ruggedize' the laptop to make it suitable for live usage. I also wanted to see if i could reduce the setup time (connecting cables) and make it as reliable as possible.

This is what i came up with :

Amsynth jacksession support

Beginning of the week i filed 2 bug reports for Amsynth.  Today one of them was fixed. And the other one, well, was no bug :-S BUT it did help the developer of Amsynth (Nick Dowell) to figure out how jack_session works in QjackCtl and fix an other minor bug :-)
It is always nice to get some feedback on a bug you file, and its even better if the bug actually gets fixed.
I love Amsynth