The PsychoVoyager Journal

No news, no updates, no nothin' lately (except a change of domain due to a "miscommunication"). If I wasn't lazy, I could figure out (maybe) how to update some of the programs, especially Ardour which I understand has to be built from the source. But I'm not trying to do that right now.

Ubuntu Studio looks interesting, but isn't due till April. I'll try it out once it's released, but until then, I want to re-record my song, April Fool's Day. I need to be able to play around with pitch, and I don't know how to do that in the version of Ardour included with Agnula*, so I'm gonna play around with Sonar temporarily(?), and see where that gets me.

This project will end a fairly long, creative dry spell for me.

Assuming I get started...

* Feb 28th 2007 Been away (From Agnula) for awhile. Forgot about the LADSPA plugins. I'd rather be able to slow the tempo down, record the vocal or guitar and then speed up to normal tempo for that effect. I know I've done it in Cakewalk, but I don't feel like relearning that software, so I'll play around with the plugins in Agnula, for now.

Labels: Agnula, Ardour, DAW, distros, Linux, Sonar, Ubuntu

Well, so much for recording one cover song a month. I started this one back in April, and then stopped doing any recording for a while. Including my song of the week. Hopefully my dry spell is over for now.

Today I went back into Ardour and recorded a bunch of kazoos. 4 tracks during the bridge, one for the last verse and end of the song and two for the intro, which were cut and pasted into the ending of the song. I wonder if the kazoo voids the a cappella-ism of this song? Doesn't matter. It's just about done, save effects (if I so choose) and final mix.

I attempted to upload this to Archive.org, but the upload tool ccPublisher 2.2.1 is as screwed up as the last one I was using, 1. something or another. I'm gonna wait to see if it pops up within the next day or two, if so I'll post the link here, if not, I'll ftp it to the site and then post the link here. I don't want any more multiple posts showing up there. I still haven't cleaned up my eariler messes.

Edit: finally uploaded the song here. I'll be using the FTP option from now on with archive.org. Less headaches. 10/02/06

Labels: a cappella, Agnula, Ardour, covers, kazoo, Linux, Politikill, Richard O

Politikill is a tune originally written and performed by someone who calls himself Richard O. It's about eating facists. I'd wanted to cover this one for a little while, so here we are.

I made one minor change in the lyrics because I do eat meat. Even had some red meat over the last coupl'a Judeo-Christian holiday periods, and for the most part, liked it. Also "hold the feet" was easier to sing.


I wasn't sure what the "name of a cheese" thing was about, but found out there is a President brand cheese. That bit might've been neccesary, because threatening the President may be against the law. Found that out from an episode of The Jeffersons, a long time ago.

I thought I might combine my experiments with Dokaka-eque a cappella recording with PSP Rhythm beats. Naturally any mixture between voice and instrument would void the a cappella-isms, but that's not why (so far) I went with with straight vocals. It was faster. I may still add other stuff later, like guitar and maybe an automated beat. My rhythm is still a bit sloppy.

I recorded in Ardour, starting with the melody and words. Even though I used the click to keep the time, starting out this way could be a problem if I try to introduce a tuned instrument.

I added drum sounds next and then a bassline and two separate tracks kinda mimicing a rhythm guitar. After that, an extra vocal for the very last verse.

I'm not sure if I'm adding anything else. Maybe more harmony. maybe effects and/or instruments. In any case, I may get this done on time.

Here's what it sounds like so far.

Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

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Labels: a cappella, Agnula, Ardour, covers, Linux, Politikill, Richard O

Thought I'd be done with this by now, but, nooooooooo.

A couple of days ago I recorded some guitar onto two tracks. It was a single performance but divided into left and right. I plugged the Peavey into the SGX, using setting# A 048 (Semistort) with the left cable out going to the Tascam 688, which used to be a multitrack recorder. Now it's a mixer/patchbay thing. The right cable out from the SGX to the Zoom 505 (I forget what setting) and then into the Tascam which is connected to the soundcard inna computer. So anyway, I do that for the bridge and outro. I like the way it sounds and I won't have to do anything with the crap I recorded before because the mistakes are completely covered up. The major one's anyway.

I found a tutorial that showed how to use automation for volume gain (and a couple of other things related to Ardour) and played around with that as well as using Jamin. But that's getting ahead.

Recorded some reverb added to the vocals to a separate stereo track. Used the LADSPA Tap reverberator (warbler) on a post fader on a bus recorded to a stereo track. Don't know if that makes any sense, but that's what happened.

Decided I didn't care for the drum track so I ditched it and came up with something else. Soon I decided I didn't need a drum track and that's kinda where I am now.

Some efforts were made at mixing, using Jamin and then not. Had a few crashes from using Jamin with Ardour (with about twelve tracks of audio) and now there's some weird shit with the tracks not having any output connections. Too tired to fix it write now or talk anymore about it.

edit:
This version was announced as finished, but I came back to it here, to release a commercially available download single.

Labels: Above It All, Agnula, Ardour, covers, Crystal Walters, effects

Hooked up the electric guitar (Peavey Vortex 1) to the Zoom 505 FX pedal, used a couple of basic settings and recorded a few tracks starting at the chorus.

Sounds horrible so far. My head's not in this right now, so I stopped. I'll have another go in a day or so.



Based on The World They Loved To Hate, written by Crystal Walters. Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike

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Labels: Above It All, Agnula, Ardour, covers, Crystal Walters, guitar

Recorded a new lead vocal track in one take and then 4 tracks of harmony for the choruses and bridge. Used the MXL 990 microphone.

Most vocal and instrument tracks are recorded mono (in Ardour), but I usually edit the input to accept both left and right channels thru alsa_pcm:capture_1 and alsa_pcm:capture_2.

I think that's all for today. May add some 'lectric guitar tomorrow, and then it should be ready for some editing/mixing.

It goes a little something like this.

Based on The World They Loved To Hate, written by Crystal Walters. Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike

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Labels: Above It All, Agnula, Ardour, covers, Crystal Walters

Forgot to mention this yesterday, but the rhythm pattern created in Hydrogen was set in that program to 40 bpm, while the tempo in Ardour was set to 80. Ardour is in sync to Hydrogen, thanks to JACK, but the 80 bpm does not cancel out the 40 in Hydrogen. Hydrogen seems to automatically sync to JACK, so I haven't messed with anything there. Ardour was set to sync to JACK before I started recording. No biggie. Something else to look into, and so far I like the way it's worked out.

I spent a little time (an hour or so) trying to figure out why I couldn't split any tracks and found out that the edit cursor (blue) was different from the playback cursor (red). I also set the "snap to" properties to bar.

Before doing any more recording, I extended the bridge section by cutting and pasting the guitar and vocal tracks and then replced the ending chorus section with a previous guitar take.

Recorded three tracks of Bass with the Fender Jazz, with the third being the best of the bunch. I may still incorporate the earlier takes somehow.

Here's what I have so far.


Based on The World They Loved To Hate, written by Crystal Walters. Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike

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Labels: Above It All, Agnula, Ardour, covers, Crystal Walters, Hydrogen, Linux

I worked on this a little yesterday, but didn't post about it. I'd simply opened up Hydrogen and created a drum track using the HardElectro1 drumkit by ArtemioLabs. I also used LADSPA effects on a couple of instruments: Simple amplifier on Kick 2 & 3 & FX and TAP Flanger on FX.

Today I opened up Jack Control and set the sample rate to 88200 just because, however my soundcard may not support that as Ardour seems to indicate that I'm at 48 kHz. I'll look into that later. Hydrogen seems to stay at 44100 no matter what. Hmmm.

In Ardour I recorded a bunch of guitar takes, trying to get input levels right. Adjusted the levels via the Tascam 688 and then there was the issue of playing the song right. There were a couple of extra chords at the begining of verse two I wanted to cut out (easier than playing the whole song over again) which seemed tricky. Through right-clicking I tried to split the track, but no go for some reason. Instead I pressed the range button on the upper right hand side of the screen and was able to select the area I wanted to delete. Then I went and dragged the two pieces together. Not sure how accurate the placement was. Sounds okay, I think, as far as timing is concerned. This kinda thing would be much easier in Cakewalk. Also recorded a scratch vocal and then the Hydrogen output to a track so that I can mix it down and listen to it at my leisure.

I changed my mind about posting the in progress audio files. I'll continue to do that and then remove them from my server once the song is completed, and then post the miscelaneous tracks to archive.org.

So, here's Above It All, based on The World They Loved To Hate, written by Crystal Walters. Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike

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Labels: Above It All, Agnula, Ardour, covers, Creative Commons, Crystal Walters, DAW, Hydrogen, Linux

About a week and a half ago or so, the newest version of the Agnula/DeMuDi music making Linux OS was released, much to my surprise and delight. I was expecting, maybe another release candidate. I didn't think it would be finished anytime soon. I had installed the previous release candidate (rc2) out of impatience. Release candidates are sorts like advanced beta releases. This one had some issues, which I think I mention somewhere on this site.

Impatience got the better of me again and instead of backing up the music I worked on since the last upgrade before proceeding, I went ahead and attempted to upgrade to 1.2.1. I think you know where I'm going with this.

I was interested in this thing called apt, which allowed for upgrading from the server. I wouldn't have to burn a cd or whatever. Sounded cool, but as usual I only glanced through the instructions before deciding I was ready to go.

I didn't use the command prompt for apt. There was a program in DeMuDi which I used, but I don't remember what it's called right now. All seemed to be going well until a point where I was asked if I wanted to update a few programs or keep the current versions. There was an option "D" which would explain the differences or something. I chose "D", but it didn't give me any info I could make any sense out of. I tried to get out of that screen, but couldn't for whatever reason. A number of things were tried. This was about last weekend so I don't remember what exactly, only that I failed repeatedly and when I succeeded I still couldn't get the install to continue. There was a mesaage at the bottom of the window telling me it was stalled at 66%.

At some point I found an option that appeared would roll back what I'd done and I figured I could start from scratch after that. You know where this is going, don't you? So anyway I'm watching tons of shit get uninstalled including fonts and stuff and I'm staring at the screen, going "this can't be good". I manage to stop the process, but I still can't get the program to do what I want (start over). So I reboot the machine and it all goes to hell.

The computer boots back up, but there's barely readable type on the screen. What's more, instead of a GUI, I'm looking at a command prompt. I have no idea what to do here. At least I can go back to Windows, go online and figure out what to do. Nope. Something happened to the boot loader in the process. There's a dll file missing and I can't boot into Windows either.

I'd created another partition previously in Fat32 to share files between the two OSes. It was only a gig in size but I figure I'd attempt to install DeMuDi 1.2.0 on it and maybe manage to fix things from there or at least get some answers. I should've known better than to attempt a full install. There wasn't enough space. I used the Windows installation disc to erase that partition. My plan was to used the disc to repair XP, but I had administrator password issues, so I went ahead and deleted the shared partition and rebooted. This time XP came on with no problem, but no DeMuDi.

I use Explore2fs to grab wav files and whatnot from Linux to Windows. I decided to use it to see if my crap was still on my Linux drive, and so it was. I transferred the songs that had been recently updated. All of the others had been backed up on CD. The problem here was that previous attempts to burn Ardour and Hydrogen files in XP and then have those CDs readable in DeMuDi came with problems. In Windows, the discs contained the original file names from Linux but in Linux, those same discs had slightly altered filenames which made things difficult for Ardour and Hydrogen. Impossible, actually. In the previous situation I simply learned to use the CD burner in Linux. Couldn't do that now. The plan was to migrate the files from Linux to Windows, Install DeMuDi 1.2.1 from scratch and figure out a way around the filename problem.

The migration and installation went fine. A preliminary check showed that most of the issues I had with rc2 were resolved. The only thing was to figure out what to do about the weird file names. I make audio mixdowns of every song at each stage, and those are both on my hard drive and for the most part, here as well. It wouldn't be a total loss if the saved files couldn't be saved. Any re-recording I would have to do would likely be somewhat different than the tracks being replaced. I am as undisciplined at music as I am at everything else. But re-recordings can be made if neccesary. I just prefered that they not be neccesary.

Ardour files are divided in a number of folders within a folder for each song; automation, dead sounds, peaks, and sounds. Thus far, all of my dead sound folders have been empty. So that leaves the other three folders and the main *.ardour, *.ardour.bak, and *.xml files in the main song folder. Not only would the filenames be shortened with number appended to them, but the file extentions would often be abbreviated as well except for *.wav. So, what was my plan? To manually change each and every file name back to it's original and see if that would work.

Before I'd come to that conclusion I did try to look for another answer. I'm sure it's out there, but again I was impatient. I used Screenshot Utility to make jpgs of my files for Menage A Trois With Robots, the song with the most data. I figure, let's get that one out of the way first.

In the midst of manually renaming all these files, it occured to me that they may not be in the same order in Linux, that they were in Windows. I may've been giving some files the wrong names. My suspicion later proved very probable, but I continued to make sure no stone was left unturned. When I was done Ardour was at least able to sort of open the song, though with a ton of error messages. I don't think any of it was playable, though I may be wrong. It then occured to me that the automation and peak files were small enough to be e-mailed to myself, though not in great numbers. Through email, the filenames retained their integrety until they were saved. When saved, a space often became an underline in a filename, so I had to manualy see to it that the saved file had the same name as the emailed file. Once that was done Ardour opened with a bunch of error messages, though less than before, and I was able to play some of the tracks. A few of them were not where or when they should be, but I figured how to fix that.

The wav files were too big and to email, so I took another snapshot of the wav files and included the file sizes so I could better match a wav to it's name. All of this was naturally very tedious, but it got done and the song seems to be fine, though it still opens with a few error messages.

I'm not complaining. I knew I screwed up, and hopefully I've learned my lesson (not likely).

I'm just about ready to get back to making music (or something like it).

Labels: Agnula, distros, Explore2fs, Linux

A few weeks ago I changed the power supply on my computer and soon replaced the 8 gig harddrive I was using for Agnula with a new 80 gig one. Also because of my impatience, I installed the latest release candidate (RC2) of Agnula/DeMuDi rather than continue with the latest stable release. Not bright, but like I said, I was impatient. I'm having a few problems with it, that I hope will be solved shortly. I'll list those at some other time.

This song had caused me a number of issues the last time I messed around with it and I found I couldn't record more tracks. Also, a crapload of error messages would pop-up whenever I'd open up this file. Instead of solving the problem, I created a new session and imported the audio, taking note of where each track starts. Some do not start at the begining of the song.

I re-did some vocals on Sunday (the 22nd), after importing most of the audio. Wasn't sure I needed to, but I did anyway. I also created a new beat in Hydrogen, and unlike the first time was able to sync the two programs. I unmuted the keys from before. The result sounds like this.

Today, I recorded more guitar. The original guitar tracks stop abruptly at or near the third chorus for some reason (probably related to the old hard drive, or maybe the previous version of Ardour/Agnula). I wanted a track to play all the way through and also a track of some ad-libbed stuff near the end. This is where it is so far...

Labels: Agnula, Hydrogen, Ménage à trois with robots