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 -