The PsychoVoyager Journal

I am done with this one for now. I work on it on and off for the last coupl'a weeks without blogging about it, so I'll jot down what I remember...

Recorded more handclaps for a total of six. Bounced to stereo.

Was having trouble with x-runs, slowdowns, and crashes so I cleared out tracks I clearly wasn't using. That left me with seventeen tracks of recorded audio.

What really seemed to help, aside from some slight adjustments in JACK, was changing an audio option in Ardour. In options > audio file format > data, I changed from 32-bit floating point to 24-bit signed integer. I don't know what either of those are but that seemed to help a lot.

While I was having trouble, I played around with the latency settings a little. This while recording one of the hand claps. The slight delay helped fatten up the sound on one section, which gave me an idea. I was gonna copy those tracks and double them, synced at a slight delay. I decided I liked the claps the way they were and didn't bother.

Recorded some bass guitar to the later sections of the song. I don't think it's needed before then. Bass was plugged in directly into the Lexicon Lambda. I was using the Zoom 506 pedal, but the battery died on me, before I was ready to record.

I was thinking about some lead guitar, but I don't think it is needed either. Or maybe I'm just lazy.

Added some LADSPA FX. 1st applied them pre-fader, but after reading a little of the online manual, applied them post.

TAP equalizer on a guitar track that had too much hiss on it.
TAP Stereo echo and TAP reverberator on the handclaps track.
Frequency modulator on the bass guitar track, which punches it up a bit.
Setup a bus to route vocals to apply effects. right now only using TAP DeEssor.

I took the spoken chorus bit off the DeEssor bus cuz I didn't like the way it sounded there. Also normalized that track as the choruses for that track got louder and louder.

I'd experiment with more effects, but I seem to be pushing this computer to it's limits. I'm not sure that should be the case.

I'll revisit this tune when it's time to configure the next album, whenever and whatever that is.
In the meantime the song can currently (as of this writing) be found on MySpace (faded out at a tolerable 4 min, 15 sec) and here in it's full version.

Labels: Ardour, Linux, Ménage à trois with robots, plug-ins, Ubuntu

I'm hoping to conclude this one soon. It's been over two years since I've done anything significant with it. I'd exported the audio to be used in Sonar, but since figuring out how to make my USB audio interface work in Ubuntu Studio, I'm gonna finish this in Ardour. That's the plan, so far.

All I did this go round was to play around with fader levels and cut the not quite silent sections of the guitar and vocal tracks. I recorded a hand clap track during one of the last couple of sessions (but forgot to mention it). I plan on building on that, and then maybe adding some lead guitar.

The latest...

I'll be posting audio on Vox (hat tip to the Undercover Black Man) from now on as it's better than taking up space and bandwith here. Also, it's free.

Labels: Ardour, Ménage à trois with robots, Ubuntu

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

I manged to record one track of vocals on track 21. Could'a sworn I'd recorded keys on that track not long back. Anyway, it came out well enough (I didn't rewrite the lyrics), but when I try and record another track the program (Ardour) flips out on me. The tracks keep playing, but the graphics lose detail and I can't stop it except by killing Ardour in log mode.

After closing Jack and restarting both it and Ardour I managed to record a harmony track and another lead vocal as well as an almost spoken word part of the choruses. every now and then I have to restart Jack and Ardour because of the issue mentioned above.

Trying to record guitar on track 25 I find myself faced with the same problem as before. I restart everything again, take a short break and start over. I manage to record up to the end (almost) of the 2nd chorus. Same thing happens on 26. I keep both those takes. On 27 I start just before the 2nd chorus and make it to the end of the bridge and into the third chorus, when I get an error message about track 16 (which is muted - one of the keyboard tracks mentioned in part six). I go to track 28 (I must be a masochist) and then I get the "pool out of memory - recompile with larger size" message. I don't know what that's about, but a quick Google shows that a few people have had the same thing. At the moment, I don't know if it's been solved by anybody, but I'll leave that for another time.

The guitar (an Ovation Celebrity) was recorded through an ART SGX 2000 on the "Slow Flange" preset (A-103).

I exported the session as a wav, which then crashed Ardour again and again (something about frames overflowed), but I found that the file itself was fine and I opened it in Audacity and saved it as an ogg vorbis file.

Click on the title of this post to hear it. This song is still in progress and a bit rough. Of course it may remain so, once done. I'm just saying it ain't done, yet. That's all.

Labels: Ardour, guitar, Ménage à trois with robots

Lyrics

I turned down the keys as I thought they were somehow getting in the way of my finding the melody in the song. I let the beat and the bassline play and came up with the following;

My woman
doesn't like
grapes or raisins
cranberries or craisins
My woman
doesn't like
when
I shut my mouth
secrets all in my house

She'd rather hear
me coming near
with sweet nothings for her ear
and the sound
of my hand
on her
derriere

she doesn't like
menage a trois with robots
she doesn't like
menage a trois with robots
she doesn't like
menage a trois with robots
she doesn't like
menage a trois with robots

My woman
doesn't like
when I
give up
the ghost
and stop
My woman
doesn't like
mechanical devices
to get her out a crisis

She only wants
to be with me
so we
can be
as one
and free
she only wants
for me to be
with her
in her
for eternity

she doesn't like
menage a trois with robots
she can't stand
menage a trois with robots
she don't wan't
menage a trois with robots
she doesn't want
to have to fuck with robots

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mind you, it's a first draft. Then again, there may be no second draft. Basically, I'm just saying, it is what it is. That line about the craisins should probably go. Ah. I'll think about it and maybe record it over the weekend...

Labels: lyrics, Ménage à trois with robots

The song has a title, now. Though perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. I haven't actually written lyrics, yet.

The title above links to an ogg file. Click to listen or download. Winamp plays Ogg Vorbis. I imagine a few others do as well.

This song is still a bit of a mess, but they all pretty much start out that way for me. I'll post more as the song progresses, but will probably take them down when I feel the song is complete.

I was on vacation last week, just hanging out with my woman. I do have some crap to attend to this week (and perhaps upcoming weeks as well), but I expect to spend more time than I have on this project.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Labels: Ménage à trois with robots

Trying to record some keyboard stuff, both audio from the keyboard itself and sound from amSynth on separate tracks. At this point I have about 18 tracks of audio. About midway through the song everything stops and the log window tells me that audio in those channels (16&17) have failed. The audio already recorded shows up, so it's not a total loss. An attempt to record tracks 18&19 yield similar results. I keep what is recorded so far and go for 20&21 which barely even start.
I close out Firefox on another tab (or whatever you call those boxes on the bottom) and try again, but after the bridge, where the song has stopped recording, previously and I manage to get halfway through the final chorus.
The log window has come up blank for the last few stalls.

Labels: amSynth, Ménage à trois with robots

Though I've figured out (I think) how to sync Ardour to Hydrogen and whatnot, I've already assembled 12 tracks of audio from the various drum instruments. This is probably less effective than syncing, but I'll wait til the next song to find out. I was supposed to do some more recording, which I did do (a couple of tracks of amSynth using the Deeck preset), but the first 90 minutes was spent arranging the various drum tracks into my usual song format; verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-etc. Next time I'll do all of that in Hydrogen. During that time I learned how to trim regions and duplicate them. If I understand correctly, each of the 16 bar audio snippets which occupy my tracks count as a region. Or something like that.

Eventually I'm gonna have to incorporate a midi program into this routine as I could probably use some quantizing. Or perhaps just learn to play better. However the the two takes (sort of a bassline) when played together and panned into separate left and right channels don't sound quite as bad as when I was recording them.

Labels: Ardour, Hydrogen, Ménage à trois with robots

Okay, I found the Jack transport option in Hydrogen. It's near the top of the screen and looks like a meter. So, I can get Hydrogen to play with Ardour, but while... Nevermind, I got it. If I press play in Jack, I'll hear sound play in Hydrogen, but while that line thing moves across the bars in Ardour no sound plays in the latter. But I see now that they are working together after pressing play in Ardour (sync source is set to Jack). Cool.

I recorded a track this morning with amSynth (played through a midi keyboard - the Roland U-20) without too much effort. The track itself sucks, but I may be able to salvage a couple of pieces of it. I'll do more recording tomorrow (actually later today) after work.

I had some crashing issues a little while ago. Don't know what I did exactly. I thought, at first, it might've had something to do with the Jack Transport in Hydrogen. I had that switched on, but I also had amSynth on. When I'd open Ardour, it would be fine until I opened the file I was working on. I'd get a shitload of error messages in a log window. Then when I tried to play anything Ardour would either freeze, shutdown, or log me out. I avoided the situation this time by not starting amSynth, yet and waiting till I opened Ardour to turn on the Jack Transport in Hydrgen.
I'll see if it happens again tomorrow and take a closer look. Just tried opening amSynth and it won't cooperate. The Jack window logs another x-run each time I try.

Labels: amSynth, Ardour, Hydrogen, Ménage à trois with robots

This song (untitled at the moment) started with a beat created in Hydrogen. Initially, I wanted to use this with Rosegarden, which is both a MIDI and audio sequencer which also imports Hydrogen song files. Things were going well with that (for a different song - Thinking Of You), until my attempt to record a third track of audio on top of two drum tracks (from Hydrogen), and two acoustic guitar tracks. Anytime I pressed record, the song would start in the middle of the song. I couldn't find a way around this, so I gave up on Rosegarden for the time being. The song was re-recorded in Sonar in Windows (needed to be done and e-mailed on Valentine's Day). I had some problems with Sonar, since I hadn't used it in while, but while not great, the job was done. I continued my Linux experiment with Ardour, which is an audio multi-track which doesn't do midi (I gather).

There's supposed to be a way to sync Ardour with Hydrogen using JACK, but I've not figured out how, even after reading this. I'm using Hydrogen 0.8.2 (instead of 0.8.1 mentioned in the link), I think, and the Jack transport slave option seems not to be available in audio preferences.

I'll figure it out eventually. What I did instead was something like what I used to do in Cakewalk/Sonar with the Hammerhead drum program in Windows; I'd program the beats first, then separate each instrument and export the patterns to wav files. Import the wavs (one for each instrument) into the Cakewalk tracks where they can be looped, edited and panned into some sort of arrangement. Here I did the same with Hydrogen, though some patterns contained more than one instrument. These were panned in advance of being converted to wav. The wavs were imported into Ardour's sound library and then placed into tracks 1-12. Those tracks with panned instruments were placed with right and left on separate tracks.

Labels: Ardour, Hydrogen, Ménage à trois with robots, Sonar