[Matt Kemp] remade this super 8 film camera into a synthesizer. Inside you’ll find a light sensor pointed through the lens. This way, zooming, focusing, and pointing the lens elsewhere will change the sound. He also refit the original controls to monkey with the output. Turn your speakers up when you watch this, your co-workers will love you for it.
If you just let things happen in a collaborative project with design/artwork needs, you will likely see a few people creating proposals that mostly cover the same ground. They all will base there work on their own assumptions regarding various aspects of the project. This might not even happen consciously, but be more about gut feeling.
The same applies to other collaborators providing feedback. Everyone has an opinion on matters of design. People talk a lot of what they like or don’t like, seldom giving reasons.
This way there is no shared idea of what should be achieved and how to judge proposals. No common ground for collaboration.
A collaborative project should have a documented mission statement/vision/set of goals. You need to define where you wan to end up, before you can take care of getting there. Otherwise you rely on chance alone. This is especially important for artwork, because it shouldn’t be about individual taste or the latest fashion, but rather be constructed to help further the goals of the project.
Even making some people unhappy is better than having no direction.
You should work from a mission statement, a project briefing, towards defining your audience, the desired tone and your message. This will be your measure to decide what is and isn’t appropriate regarding design and artwork.
Your audience, your users might be quite different from your collaborators.
There’s also the aspect of breaking a big problem down into a set of smaller ones. This helps with covering every aspect and detail. As far as there is subjectivity, it’s much better to deal with it in small parts instead of at once, for the entire design.
[Yoshi Akai] built a sequencer that is part steampunk, part injection molded plastic. The LEGO sequencer MR II has eight steps in a loop that is manipulated by adding the colorful blocks to a green base plate. Each color corresponds to one particular sound which can be modified by building skyward. On the other side of things he’s added a beautifully crafted control area for knobs and switches. We didn’t see much info about what is inside the device so, watch the clip after the break and then feel free to start the speculation in the comments.
This is a similar concept to the coin sequencer. From the picture above it seems the blocks have been altered and perhaps use light to identify the different blocks.
[Thanks Fuzzthed via Westword]
Awe! Times they are a-changing although Bob Dylan has no D-Business here. The old and cutie gooey for JACK just got one turn around the verge of bit-rotting. This time it brings full JACK D-Bus support, or almost. It also adds D-Bus access for most GUI actions which some might find pretty handy for keyboard shortcut binding from your desktop environment of choice. 
However, if babies health is your top concern you can just turn this D-Bus thing off and play with the Old times ;) Ahem...
More details in the change-log, below.
The slides for my talk about the audio infrastructure of Linux mobile devices at BOSSA 2010 in Manaus/Brazil are now available online. They are terse (as usual), and the most interesting stuff is probably in what I said, and not so much in what I wrote in those slides. But nonetheless I believe this might still be quite interesting for attendees as well as non-attendees.
The talk focuses on the audio architecture of the Nokia N900 and the Palm Pre, and of course particularly their use of PulseAudio for all things audio. I analyzed and compared their patch sets to figure out what their priorities are, what we should move into PulseAudio mainline, and what should better be left in their private patch sets.
Episode 34 - Community Call In - Leigh Dyer / Steve Baer
QmidiCtl is a MIDI remote controller application that sends MIDI data over the network, using UDP/IP multi-cast. It has been designed primarily for the Maemo enabled handheld devices, namely the Nokia N900. In its current development state, which is obviously alpha as of this writing, it puts a mini multi-track recording control surface on your hands and on the go, so to speak. MMC is the feature and yours truly Qtractor the target. However, any other MMC enabled DAW may be considered.
However nothing of this would be possible without this little thing that gets also here its release announcement: QmidiNet is a MIDI network gateway application that sends and receives MIDI data (ALSA Sequencer) over the network, using UDP/IP multi-cast. Fundamentally inspired by multimidicast and designed to be compatible with ipMIDI for Windows, it's a little tiny application that sits as an icon on your system tray and exposes one or more ALSA Sequencer client ports which open the way for a MIDI network mesh. Pretty neat if you think wireless and not necessarily because of QmidiCtl.
Alas, you can transform any Linux/ALSA computer (or Windows/ipMIDI enabled one, if you dare to) into a MIDI-over-IP inter-connected node.
Be free, without cables :)
Worked the Boom Boom Room tonight, warmed up for the Greyhounds, who were awesome. Then walked across the street to the Fillmore where the Galactic show was letting out, and handed out flyers. Handed out a thousand flyers, and ran into 4 people I knew. Then, walked back to the Boom Boom, and the second set of Greyhounds features Stanton Moore on drums. And in the middle of the set, none other than George Clinton gets up on stage and sings a short medley of his hits, and works the crowd.
The most fun part for me was looking at the shit-eatin’ grins on the faces of the Greyhounds. See, throughout our set, we had a similar expression on our face that was like “Holy shit, we’re warming up for Stanton Moore and the Greyhounds!”. And then when George Clinton came up on the stage during the Greyhounds set, those guys had an expression on their face that said, “Holy shit, we’re backing up George Clinton!”. And I’m out there in the audience watching and dancing and listening, and thinking, yeah man, I know exactly how you feel.
I think it was at the end of 2007 that I started to slowly get involved with Ubuntu related artwork after most of my previous efforts had to do with the Linux Audio scene.
Considering myself a member by my acts since a while, I only now got around to apply for it formally. It was found to be a clear case, making it a nice experience 
Have a look at my Ubuntu wiki page to see my contributions, or my blog for lots of graphics, some music and not too many words
“It looks alien at first, it looks scary … [but] it’s like, here’s your paper; be creative.” “A tracker basically turns your computer an instrument.” -Dac Chartrand, Renoise, trying to explain Renoise to those who haven’t yet gotten religion
Renoise 2.5 is here, for real – not a beta, a nice, golden, final release. The modern take on a tracker now introduces a set of features that takes it to a new level of usability:
None of these additions is like to make Renoise a mainstream hit, but then, that’s not the point. What it could do is expand Renoise’s already passionately-loyal user base to a new crowd, and encourage users to find expressive new ways of producing music with computers at a time when some of those processes have become stale. Thanks to its recent support for ReWire (plus JACK on Linux), it also doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice what you love about your host of choice; it can be part of your existing workflow.
For more on what’s new, check out Neil Bufkin’s terrific video interview for CDM with Renoise’s Dac from NAMM, seen at top. That interview was popular enough to become an “electric acid jungle test” demo by Hitori Tori, below, sampling Dac’s initial quote before ripping into controlling Renoise with a clever mapping for the Livid Ohm 64. (Check out more Renoise-on-Ohm action on Hitori’s channel.)
Full feature list:
http://www.renoise.com/about/what-s-new-2-5/
Ready to dive in this weekend and start learning Renoise 2.5, for instance, making use of its fully-functioning demo? There’s a full set of revised beginners’ tutorials for 2.5, and they don’t assume any previous knowledge of trackers. (Hey, it’s okay — I sure didn’t own an Amiga.)
http://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Main_Page
This isn’t the end of the story with Renoise, however. Dac confirms to CDM that they are working on support for OSC and easy extension of Renoise’s capabilities through Lua scripting — even without any official promises, that’s exciting news. It could make Renoise easier and more powerful for control and customization.
Previously: Renoise 2.5: A Matrix for Everything, Modulate Everything; Full Scripting, OSC Coming
Recently added:
Looper module: Pretty self-explanatory. Record, Play/Pause, Stop, Clear. Of course MIDI mappable. maximum length can be set in user preferences, so if you have a lot of RAM, you can use it :). If you are a person who never uses a looper, you can set small so Rakarrack doesn’t map the memory for it when launched.
IR Convolution module: Model Amplifier cabinets, and frequency response of anything for which you can obtain an IR file. For the experimental natured folks, this means you can do strange things like convolving with bells, gongs, voice…anything that’s a .wav file, you can try it :).
For the Tech-minded, this is a straight-forward time-domain convolution algorithm. High CPU demands, but also high quality results if your CPU can handle the load of about 100ms IR file.
Of course, this is all the “bleeding edge” of development available in the git repository.
~Transmogrifox
Open Source Musician Podcast
Episode #33 - Tunestorm01 Reveal
Contact Info:
Podcast Out!
The Squeezbox media streaming systems are compact Linux WiFi enabled radios that let you stream your collection anywhere,so long as you have an AC or USB outlet nearby. But [Achim Sack] wanted to stream his collection from anywhere with no wires attached (translation). Some poking and prodding revealed a connector actually designed for a battery and serial, but no commercially available battery yet.
The system requires a temperature sensor and if you want serial, a USB converter, but overall a simple process that could be done in an afternoon. Giving your box ~10 hour of life and even fits inside of a back compartment.
[Thanks Thomas]
On December 29, 2009, I announced that I was working on my seventh Jamendo album, tentatively called ‘VII‘.
A lot of things have happened since then!
The album is still coming, but it has changed completely from my original plan. Many of the songs from FAWM 2010 will be updated, remade, remixed, and (in general) worried over until they’re ready for release 
[Probably in April, 2010.]
I also have a few surprises coming.
Now, as always, when I focus on music, something else has to go. During the week, I only have a few hours of freedom in the evening; I prefer to spend my time making music. In the past few months, I’ve been all over the internet. I still will be, but my presence will be slightly reduced.
Tonight, for instance, I’ve been working on two projects:
). I am remaking this song from scratch, and trying to improve it a bit along the way.One of the things to look forward to is that I will release some of these tracks on Uvumi before the “official” release date. There will be a lot of twists and turns on this one — hard as it is to believe, I have 20 songs lined up for ‘VII‘. Will this be my first ‘two disc set’?
Stay tuned!
[Moritz Wolpert] built this gem of Victorian hardware by hand. It is a sequencer and features beautiful detail work as shown in its MySpace gallery. Other than that we don’t know a lot about it. You can also take a look at [Moritz's] main page, but prepare to be annoyed by the hideous web-styling that really undercuts the beauty of his physical product.
[Thanks Freax via Schaltzentrale]
Hi All,
I have published the Csound questionnaire results here:
Csound Platform Questionnaire
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=thOIuVAwieK4eKoKikmqGwA&output=ht...
Csound Usage Questionnaire
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tDC1zduouO7pF195RdMYkmA&output=ht...
Welcome to this seventeenth issue of the LilyPond Report !
Yay, the Report is back, with a new team ! It has been said that two heads are better than one — does it apply to newsletters as well ? Read on and let us know ! In this issue we'll talk about websites and poetry, frogs and bugs, not to mention an extensive review of the Frescobaldi editor !
As always, you can post your comments at the bottom of the page, or even register and contribute to the LilyPond Report's next issues.
At last, the Report is back ! Hopefully for long, since it is now being handled by two editors, namely yours truly and… (wait for it…) Graham Percival himself !
When he's not living without the Bunnies in Glasgow, Graham `I'll be gone in a month' Percival is still on board, grumpier as ever. As a result, you can expect the new Report to have a very different tone than it used to have in the past !
Our goal is to publish this newsletter on a bi-monthly basis (that is, every two months, not twice a month). Is it reasonably achievable ? Well, it depends.
If we try and keep up with the mailing lists and the LilyPond community, then two months is just ridiculously too long : that amounts to four development releases, dozens of major decisions, hundreds of bug reports, thousands of (often interesting) discussions… On the other hand, if we manage to keep our heads above the water and only mention carefully selected items, then the Report might give an interesting perspective, less directly concerned with the community's everyday life.
But most of all, as I repeatedly said for the past couple of years, the Report needs your contributions ! I know I haven't been quite reliable in running it, but it's somehow a pity that the first person who finally stepped up and offered to give me a hand is also the one who's desperately been trying to leave the LilyPond project for the past three years,
Nevertheless, as Graham said :
A very grumpy Report may or may not be funny ; on the other hand, maybe if there's 1 or 2 very grumpy reports, people will get motivated to write something, if only to make it more enthusiastic !
Cheers,
Valentin.
The new LilyPond website is nearing completion. If you haven't taken a look at it yet, try reading it now !
(Note that the translation infrastructure is not yet completed for the new website.)
If you have any design suggestions, it's not too late to make changes — get in touch with us.
The current stable release is 2.12.3-2 ; all normal users should be engraving with this version. We have no plans on making any more 2.12 releases.
The current unstable release is 2.13.14. This version has 14 known Critical issues, with probably twice that number of unknown critical problems. We do not recommend that normal users engrave with it.
A common question in open-source projects is "when will the next stable version be released ?« ; the typical answer is »when it's ready". LilyPond is no exception : 2.14 will be out when the number of Critical issues reaches 0, and stays at 0 for two weeks. When will that happen ? Well, it will happen when these issues are resolved. Items are resolved by contributors working on them. The more work people do, the quicker issues get resolved.
Unfortunately, most of the current Critical issues require attention from experienced developers ; any helpful users trying to jump in right now would only delay matters. However, issue 989 (ensure that no information is only in the regtests) could benefit from helpful users.
What does this entail ? Well, you need to look at all the lilypond
syntax inside a regression test (a short piece of testing code).
Then you need to check that this syntax is included in the
documentation. In most cases, you can just use your general
knowledge of lilypond — the docs obviously explains
cis'4., so you don't need to literally find each
portion of that syntax in the docs. However, if the regtest uses
little-known syntax or new features, the documentation might not
reflect this. We have a large number of regtests, so it would be
great if we could divide them between 5-10 people !
(Please feel free to contact Valentin if you're interested.)
— Graham.
The Frogs are ordinary LilyPond users who have chosen to get involved in their favorite software's development. Fixing bugs, implementing new features, documenting the source code : there's a lot to be done, but most importantly : this is a chance for everyone to learn more about LilyPond, about Free Software, about programming… and to have fun. If you're curious about any of it, then the word is : Join the Frogs !
In the past several months, most Frog activity has been concerned with guitars.
Back in 2009, our Italian contributor (and Free Software activist) Federico Bruni noted on his blog how fast LilyPond's support for tablatures was improving :
Now also the modern musician who needs tablature will be able to use LilyPond easily and enjoy the good-looking of TabStaff. I guess this will open the doors of LilyPond to many new users. […] Marc Hohl, an expert user of the LilyPond community, committed himself to creating a configuration file which allowed any tablature user to get the desired output without being forced to tweak the source file each time. Since the last spring he has submitted his changes to the users' testing and expert developers' assessment, until a great result was achieved.
I do thank a lot Marc Hohl for the great work and the patience shown in answering the questions and requests from users, who often ask for the most weird things
.
By the way, there is now a specific mailing list for tablature users : http://lists.lilynet.net/tablatures/
And yet, the situation has improved again since this blog post : for instance, hammeron and pulloff are now supported as well, and bends implementation is on its way, thanks to the huge amount of work provided by Marc.
Ian Hulin has also fixed an old (and quite annoying) bug about tuplet brackets.
More importantly, the Frogs have spent a lot of time discussing LilyPond architecture, debugging techniques, improving the Contributor's Guide, and generally laying the foundation for future contributors. Judging from the number of posts that I don't understand, the Frogs are definitely learning advanced parts of LilyPond programming !
— Graham.
Feeling lighthearted again, I decided that the time had come for something I hd been meaning to do for a long time already : give Frescobaldi a proper review !
Frescobaldi is a LilyPond-oriented text editor for KDE4. It has originally been intended as a plugin for the Kate editor, for KDE3 then for KDE4 when it became widely used. Frescobaldi is now developed as an independent program, albeit deeply integrated into the KDE desktop environment. It has its own website, in English and Dutch ; Frescobaldi itself is well localized, and supports no less than ten languages !
Much like LilyPondTool, the other easy-LilyPond-editing environment of choice, Frescobaldi is essentially a one-man work. Wilbert Berendsen is a well-known contributor of our project, and is responsible for the Dutch LilyPond community. Wilbert is also an organist, teacher, editor, composer, conductor, performer (if I understand well, he'll be giving a concert in a few days). His website is quite interesting, and contains some scores and recordings (I particularly like this short piece by Louis Vierne in Ogg Vorbis, too bad he hasn't specified a license or I'd have embedded it here…).
Unlike LilyPondTool, where many features and graphical widgets had to be implemented (almost) from scratch, Frescobaldi uses the KDE libraries, glued together in Python using PyKDE. As a result, it has a very nice, professional look (did I mention how fond I am of KDE4 ?).
This is particularly visible when comparing, for instance, Frescobaldi :
… with the Kate editor :
As you can see, the text-editing part looks basically the same.
From what I can tell, Frescobaldi is relatively well-known in the KDE community (with an 85% rating !) ; as a result it is available in most major distributions and you may not have to compile it from source (which is, by the way, not a particularly pleasant experience for any KDE app, as it requires installing hundreds of megabytes of -devel packages, plus cmake and the like).
Interestingly, the Frescobaldi packagers for my distribution (Funda Wang & Frederik Himpe) didn't specify LilyPond as a dependency, and that was a smart move : this leaves me free to download and install whatever LilyPond version I want, be it the stable, development branch, or even a home-compiled git source.
A couple of clicks is all it took for me to find myself with Frescobaldi installed, and listed in my menu under « Sound&Video » (go figure). The very last version (1.0.2) had been released just a few days ago, and yet my distribution's repository had already been updated.
By default, Frescobaldi opens with a very minimal text area. When you're used to KDE, your first reaction will probably be to look at the vertical tabs on the left and right borders, that actually are retractable panels.
The left panel gives access to a number of articulation marks :
On the right, you may notice a « LilyPond » button. Clicking on it immediately opens two things : a terminal emulator at the bottom, and a PDF-preview panel on the right. KDE's PDF engine is used here (like in the Okular reader), whereas LilyPondTool has to rely on the (er, much perfectible) JPedal library. One minor downside though : there aren't any buttons/icons/toolbars in this PDF-preview panel, so quite a few functions are missing — plus, you better have a scrollwheel if you want to zoom it…
Unlike in jEdit/LilyPondTool, you do not have to save your source code first (and carefully give it a .ly extension). Frescobaldi is obviously meant to work « out of the box », and does indeed a great job at it : similarly, I did not have to manually specify the full path to the LilyPond binary.
At the bottom of the window, a few tabs (that I missed at first) allow you to open a terminal (just like in Dolphin,, KDE's file manager), consult the log (if any), and… record music using Rumor !
Unfortunately, I did not have the necessary tools to properly test this feature. But its interface sure looks attractive.
The right panel contains another tab : that's the online documentation browser. Where LilyPondTool embeds its own copy of the docs (with a very useful documentation browser that includes a search function), Frescobaldi, once again, takes advantage of the KDE libraries by embedding a web browser (the same engine as Konqueror).
This might come as a disadvantage though, as you will need an active connection to be able to browse the docs. On the plus side, this ensures that you will always have access to the latest docs build. But then again, there's still room for improvement : the browser points to the stable Documentation by default (which might be fine), but surprisingly enough, users are not offered with an option to change the URL (for example to use the latest development documentation, or an offline doc-build instead).
Another annoyance, that Frescobaldi is certainly not to blame for, is that the language detection didn't work, so foreign users may have to use the documentation and website in English by default.
Frescobaldi itself comes with its own offline handbook, like LilyPondTool (though Frescobaldi's may be a little more newbie-oriented).
As we've seen, Frescobaldi relies on KDE's Katepart component, and therefore has a smooth and pleasant look-and-feel when it comes to source-code editing. Blocks folding/nesting is beautifully indicated with a color gradient :
Unlike in LilyPondTool, not only { ... } blocks are indented, but ... >> blocks as well :
Context-sensitive autocompletion is well supported, which is a plus with regard to LilyPondTool : here are a few examples…
Scheme syntax-highlighting is simpler, but better-handled than in LilyPondTool (where, for instance, Scheme keywords aren't highlighted only in Scheme blocks). Still, I somehow prefer LilyPondTool's indenting and folding when it comes to Scheme code (but it's probably a matter of habit — and taste : Kate's brownish coloring of Scheme isn't very pleasant).
Like LilyPondTool, Frescobaldi features customizable code expansions :
Frescobaldi includes a Score Creation Wizard, that very much resembles LilyPondTool's… but with a twist.
The first window looks exactly like LilyPondTool's… but if you look closely you'll notice that the preview « image » (that is precisely not an image, in Frescobaldi's case) is better centered… and even localized ! How nice.
The usual list of instruments (aka « let's pretend we're Sibelius for a while »). Where LilyPondTool sports a three-pane interface, Fresco only uses two (with submenus), and adds specific options on the left.
Here's the twist : once you have chosen your options, you are presented with a preview of your settings ! I have to confess that at this point, my jaw dropped and the only thing I could say for a while was :
woooooooow…
We already mentioned the « Insertion » panel that allows to quickly add articulations to your music. This certainly looks nice, but one could argue that having to use the mouse to add articulations is hardly quicker than using the keyboard. Most users would probably prefer to assign keyboard shortcuts to these functions. LilyPondTool has also such buttons, but in a drop-down submenus, which is less convenient but preferable from a screen-real-estate point of view.
In this « quick insertion » panel, I was surprised not to find a way to quickly add slurs, phrasing slurs, or manual beams. This seems way more useful than adding \rheel or \lheel indications — but perhaps it's because the author is an organist 
Finally, let's note that this feature is not context-sensitive. It is smart enough to leave rests alone and deal with compound durations such as cis2*5/8, but doesn't identify comments or \lyricmode blocks, nor does it take the notenames language into account.
There are a couple of nice and convenient unique tools. For instance, in the « Pitch » submenu, an option allows you to change the language used throughout your source code. Nothing extraordinary, but it's welcome nevertheless.
Another one, possibly my favorite : a well thought-out wizard allows you to easily create blank staff paper !
Once again, there's even a preview :
Such features make Frescobaldi not just a nice toy to play with, but a considerate editor that has obviously been designed by someone who actually writes music. Wilbert has cleverly used all the power and flexibility of KDE4, and that amounts to a very slick software with an irresistible « wow » effect. I did have seen some screenshots on the website, I had even contributed to Frescobaldi translation, and as someone who's generally used to testing bleeding-edge software, I really wasn't expecting to be impressed. Yet here I am.
One can but regret that this beautiful software actually targets a very narrow range of users : people who run KDE4 (that's between a third and a half of all GNU/Linux users). For these users, Frescobaldi is a treat already ; for example, I could perfectly imagine a classroom full of Free-Software-driven laptops running Frescobaldi. Unfortunately it's a far cry from supporting people who need such software most : that is, Microsoft Windows hostages users.
KDE4 is known to be theoretically portable to this system, so one could imagine building Frescobaldi for Windows. Unfortunately things are a bit complex : from QT4 that run natively without a glitch on Windows (SMPlayer), to KDE4-tied apps that require hundreds of megabytes of dependencies (Amarok), I'm afraid we're not there yet.
One last word about Frescobaldi compared to jEdit/LilyPondTool. As you may have noted, I've been familiar for a long time with this later environment. Does this review of Frescobaldi make me want to switch ? Well, although I do have considered it at some point, I think I am going to stay faithful to my ugly/bloated/Java editor of choice.
Not because of the numerous features it has, which Frescobaldi does not (reverse point-and-click, real-time syntax parsing, virtual piano, MIDI player, offline docs, PDF ruler, etc.) — I have hardly ever used these features, and do not see the need for them.
Not because it's multi-platform : from now on I won't bother running anything else than KDE4 GNU/Linux. Not even because I designed its new icons
But more for a sentimental reason : LilyPondTool and I go way back, and I have seen its progress, I have seen Java become Free, I have seen Bertalan add new features one after another, fixing bugs, in a much less developer-friendly context than what KDE4 provides. I have taught generations of students how to install and use it, I've even made video tutorials about it.
Just like the old laptop I'm using to write this review : it's ugly, tired, I've changed almost every parts of it myself over the years. But while I can appreciate a beautiful and powerful computer whenever I see one, it's the story behind it that counts. That being said, I hope this review will give some readers the curiosity to give Frescobaldi a try, and, who knows, perhaps they'll make their own story with it — and if you do, please do tell us : we all love stories !
— Valentin.
Our favorite bug report from these two months came from Roman Stawski :
This short polyphony employs A trivial customised Voice but the lyrics ignore the first note in the score — that's not the behaviour of choice.
As it happens, it turned out to be another instance of an existing issue. But the creative poem was definitely appreciated !
— Graham.
… Aaand this concludes the seventeenth issue of The LilyPond Report.
The next instalment will be published on Saturday, May 2010 the 3rd.
Cheers,
Graham Percival & Valentin Villenave.
Welcome to this sixteenth issue of the LilyPond Report!
While today's instalment certainly took its time, here it is at last, with many guests and contributions that will definitely make it up. Before reading, here's a little game for you: Who said…
Greetings,
why do you use LilyPond?, asked our new Release Meister Graham 'Grumpy' Percival in a recent discussion. Before the discussion went adrift (interestingly teaching us how an Elvis Presley song can be public domain), a few interesting questions were raised:
Graham:*nobody* knows *anything* about
the non-English forums for discussing lilypond? really?!?
Well, the Report begs to differ:
Why do we use LilyPond? Well, the Report has clearly enough demonstrated in the past why anybody sane enough would use it over of any other music notation software, so we believe this point has been made. The real question would be: why do people keep hanging around even when they no longer use LilyPond? Of all the people who discuss on our mailing lists, contributors, developers, “Frogs” etc., many do not write any music: as he repeatedly said, Graham Percival himself hasn't been writing music for years; your editor has not written a single note in eight months… And yet, here we (still) are.
The way I see it, a Free Software project is not a product. It is a bunch of people, and with regards to LilyPond, a bunch of people who are both brilliant and friendly. Hence, the great high-quality software, that is merely a “byproduct” of our community.
Oh, wait. In a few weeks from now, there will be yet another compelling reason to use LilyPond: our brand new website.
And some of us are already thinking ahead. Last time we discussed the possibility of a future LilyPond 3.0 version; well, Graham — again — has begun thinking about it.
His plan? Making sure that the LilyPond syntax is one-hundred-percent consistent and safely upgradeable. This project is codenamed 'LSD', or 'GLISS', or whatever funny acronym you may come up with.
In a few weeks, you too will be able to help design what the next major LilyPond version will look like!
After almost two years of development, the new version of the LilyPondTool plugin is finally out!
This Java-based plugin will turn any installation of the jEdit code editor, on any recent operating system, into a powerful LilyPond integrated development environnment — shorter: writing LilyPond scores has never been easier.
Many thanks to Bertalan for this contribution.
In the previous issue we begun looking at some statistics by Francisco Vila about the LilyPond project. In this second instalment, he provided us with two graphs:
The first one shows the evolution of the LilyPond installer size over the years. In green, Windows installers; in red, “shar” installers for Linux-x86.
I think it is funny that some sizes were crossed in 2.8 as polyphony voices. These data are grabbed from the download page by a local PHP script which retrieves real byte sizes from the links, not rounded Mb sizes that appear in the web.
The overall size of LilyPond's installers has been steadily increasing. That may or may not be a good thing: it may imply that LilyPond is getting more and more powerful — and indeed, there are quite a few things you can do now in LilyPond which you couldn't several years ago —; but it could also mean that the development quality is decreasing, with less optimised code, for instance.
Of course, we're also putting a great deal of effort in making sure this will not happen. This even led our lead developer Han-Wen to complain about a possible shift in focus:
I am somewhat disappointed that a lot of the latest lilypond efforts seem to be centered around janitorial work. While janitorial work is often useful and a good way to introduce yourself to a code base, it should not become the focus of either development or discussion about development.
Quite interestingly, Han-Wen mentioned the way discussions about development should be handled. Indeed, there has been a tremendous amount of activity these past months, and as a result, the traffic on our mailing lists has recently impressively increased:
on the LilyPond-user list…
and even more so on the LilyPond-devel list.
While more people and more discussions might be a good thing, it also implies less intelligibility. Therefore Graham suggested that we could use some additional mailing lists, in addition to our -user, -devel and bug- list. For instance, he suggested a proposals mailing list, that could be useful to discuss long-term plans.
Well, one of the good things with having an informal community website such as LilyNet is that adding new ressources is quick and cheap, and can easily be reverted if the idea eventually doesn't work. In this regard, I started creating a few low-traffic mailing lists, designed for people who have to discuss something specific that doesn't really belong either on -user or -devel.
These new lists may now be found on lists.lilynet.net; as of today these include frogs, midi, proposals, tablatures and translations
. While this initiative hasn't been officially announced anywhere, it has so far proved quite useful for some contributors, whether they want to keep informed of the translation status or improve LilyPond's support for guitare tablatures — without having to cope with the huge volume of data that's posted everyday on our main mailing lists.If you have been following some discussions lately on the developer's list, you may have noticed a three-letters acronym: GUB.
The so-called Grand Unified Builder — not to be confounded with GRUB, the GRand Unified Bootloader that helps boot your operating system, was created by LilyPond's authors (Han-Wen and Jan) as a side-project. GUB, which has recently reached version 3, is…
Well, what is it actually?
Jan Nieuwenhuizen — Perhaps I can help you with that.
The LilyPond Report — Oh, hi Jan! Sure, I was getting a bit lost here. So, what is this thing called GUB and what does it do?
J. N. — GUB makes the work that the LilyPond developers do available for users: it produces LilyPond installers for all types of computers.
GUB also reduces the frequency, duration and intensity of the developer's or release manager's headaches, as it is an automated system. With a one button press, the release manager can produce up-to-date installers, straight from the latest development version, for all types of computers. So, all users are treated equal.
Having frequent releases that an ordinary, non-programmer user can use and evaluate, speeds up the feedback loop, and thus makes steering development more effective and agile.
L. R. — I understand that it is all about portability. Was it important to you that LilyPond could be installed on different operating systems?
J. N. — Ethically, yes. Han-Wen and I started LilyPond with the intention of providing beautiful and free music notation for everyone. Of course that means: users of any type of computer. Hey, I have even run it on my n770 cellphone!
L. R. — GUB was written for LilyPond only, but could it be used for other cross-platform Free software projects?
J. N. — Yes. It currently supports a minimal set of dependencies to build a few projects such as LilyPond or Denemo (about 180 dependencies/libraries are supported). It can build binary installers of your project for Windows, Linux (also 64 bit) and MacOS X (also ppc) and FreeBSD, from the very latest sources, straight from GIT or SVN. A very light set of dependencies is required to run GUB and compile LilyPond, most everything is included in GUB [notable exceptions: perl, texlive].
It is quite dependable; the builds can be reproduced by using checksummed, rather picky Python build scripts that bomb out on errors by default.
However, please note that:
Also, this means that in GUB there is a difference between a native linux-x86 build tool and a cross compiled linux-x86 tool, say tools::libtool and linux-x86::libtool. This is another fatal flaw, it means that a package provided by the cross build specification is not automatically available as a build tool.
L. R. — You mentioned that GUB supported other projects, can you elaborate on that?
J. N. — As a pet project, I added Inkscape to see if GUB would be able to handle gtk/Xorg dependent projects. I wanted to announce it, but then found Inkscape *did* provide binary linux packages. Recently I resurrected building Inkscape with GUB and wanted to announce it to the Inscape developers, only to find that all linux gtk+-based packages are broken. I'm still planning to do that, but the outcome (if/when) is unknown.
In October 2007, I started working on the Novell-funded version of OpenOffice.org, Go-ooo. OO.o has always been available for windows and mac, but the current builds use the proprietary Microsoft Visual C++ environment to provide Windows binaries. So we'd like to cross build it. So far, the OOo/go-oo mingw build produces an installer, but does not run yet.
It is now being absorbed by a Google Summer of Code project and further developed in the suse build system. If that runs, and if/when I/someone finds some time, GUB could easily be fixed to produce working OO.o mingw installers, but not sure who'd use that.
L. R. — Wow, really? Inkscape and OpenOffice? Jan, you're so like a rockstar to me right now…
J. N. — Er, keep it real. Both OOo and inkscape are not used/blessed by the project and currently do not/hardly produce anything usable.
L. R. — Is it conceivable to use GUB for any software?
J. N. — Yes.
L. R. — Really? Aren't there some downsides? Hard-coded stuff, unportable requirements that may cause a problem?
J. N. — Approach a computer and anything may cause a problem
(Many thanks to Jan “Rockstar” Nieuwenhuizen for his time.)
It has to be noted that, for the very first time in LilyPond history, GUB has (reportedly) been mastered by mortal human beings. As a result, the last few downloadable releases were built by Graham Percival (and others managed to get it working too.
Er, immediately afterwards it did get broken for the past three months. But do keep faith.
As you may have noticed, a strange disease tends to affect overly-dedicated LilyPond contributors: the main symptom of this (as of yet little known) illness is that they simply can't stay in one single country for more than a few months. For example, our Translations Meister John Mandereau has recently decided to move to Pisa, Italy — but the most affected must be our beloved contributor Graham “Grumpy” Percival, whose disease led to move from Canada to Malaysia, then back to Canada, then in a few days… to Scotland.
I stopped using lilypond 4-5 years ago. Not as part of a huge switch to a different music typesetter — rather, I finished my university studies in composition, and nobody was playing my pieces. Oh, amateur musicians quite enjoyed my works, but I wasn't finding any interest from the academic community. So I moved on to other fields, eventually ending up in the emerging field of computer-assisted music education.
So why am I still doing lilypond development? Well, there's a number of reasons. Fondness for open source, personal friendships, adding material to my CV… but the biggest reason is my distaste for inefficiency.
My first steps in LilyPond development were directly fueled by this: I saw people asking the same questions over and over. They were answered politely (it generally wasn't me answering them
However, improving the documentation wasn't trivial: it took me two weeks to figure out how to begin fixing typos. I had to learn CVS, configure, install a ton of dependencies, diff, etc. They were all tools that served me well in later years, but they were a fairly large barrier to contributing. It didn't help that I was very shy about asking for help.
When I decided to stop doing documentation work, I still remembered the initial discouragement, so I started the Grand Documentation Project. The stated goals were to clean up a large portion of the documentation, but the unofficial goal was to train a group of people to replace me. In the beginning, I would take care of all the technical details (source management, diffs, making sure the texinfo files compiled, etc), and if they seemed serious about long-term documentation contributions, I would gradually wean them off my assistance.
Later on, I noticed that potential programmers couldn't figure out how to get started, and the existing programmers had learned that many well-intentioned offers of programing never pan out when they have to actually do work. As a result, existing programmers didn't spend much time discussing potential programmers. In most cases, this saved the community time, but I'm sure that some of those potential programmers _would_ have been great contributors if they had been mentored. I therefore started the Contributor's Guide, as a combination of help and warning to anybody thinking about getting involved. If they were serious, they could read how to get started. If they weren't serious, they would get discouraged before anybody invested time mentoring them.
I'm fond of the phrase "in a democracy, we receive the government we deserve" (the quotation has been ascribed to a number of people). I like to apply it to lilypond: "in an open-source project, the community receives the program / bugs / documentation that they deserve". If a user truly wants something done — explaining something better in the docs, fixing a bug, making a flashier website — then they can help do it.
Of course, what if they want a bug fixed, but don't know how to program? I have three answers.
First, in keeping with my theme of altering political phrases, I employ the term “trickle-up development” (coming from "trickle-down economics). The idea is this: even if you don't know anything about programming, you can help doing other tasks. This means that the other developers don't need to do these tasks themselves, which means they have more time to spend on the tasks which you can't do.
For example, my next task after sending this email is to handle a complaint that our direction-specific documentation isn't clear. One user had difficulty figuring out that \slurUp affected all future slurs, while ^( affected just one slur. So I need to read NR 1.3.2 Slurs and NR 5.4.2 Direction and placement, figure out how it could be explained better, and write the text and/or lilypond examples.
This isn't hard — I'm willing to bet that almost all readers of the Report are capable of explaining the difference. And at least 21 people are capable of modifying the docs accordingly, because that's how many people contributed to GDP. But nobody else investigated this “mundane, routine” issue, so I'm going to do it. After that, I'm going to investigate/document/fix some problems in the release process — I'd like to make a new 2.12 release that has a working GUI for OSX 10.5. If somebody else had done the documentation issue, I wouldn't need to do it, so I would be working on that problem now. The connection between user documentation and better releases might not be obvious, but it's there!
The second way that users can fix bugs when they don't know how to program is simple: learn how to program. Don't claim that you can't learn anything — if you're alive, you can learn. If you truly care about some issue, then you'll spend the time to learn how to fix it.
I'm not blaming you if you *don't* truly care about beamlets, Gregorian notation, or whatever the bug is. There's tons of things that I don't truly care about! But I don't claim that such bugfixes or new features are truly important to me.
The third way is a combination of the above two points: take care tasks so that other developers don't need to do them, but always keep trying to do tasks that are slightly more complicated than you can currently handle. Learn how scheme tweaks work by writing documentation about scheme! Improve your knowledge of lilypond fundamentals by editing the tutorial for beginners! Increase your scheme proficiency by creating a neat tweak, then try fixing a bug that uses the same kinds of scheme constructs!
Of course, this third way is slightly dangerous: as you work on more complicated things, you'll want to stop working on the simpler things. But if those simple things are "daily maintenance" tasks, then somebody's gotta do them. So either you get stuck doing mundane tasks, or you recruit new contributor(s) to do those easy tasks, allowing you to concentrate on more complicated issues.
Say… anybody want to learn how to write documentation for lilypond?
… Aaand this concludes the sixteenth issue of The LilyPond Report.
Cheers,
Valentin Villenave
Welcome to this fifteenth issue of the LilyPond Report!
Where do you go when you're looking for LilyPond scores? Are we soon going to see a LilyPond 3.x series? How _not_ to print music with LilyPond? And why use the Internet to turn on a lamp? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in today's issue of the Report. As always, you can post your comments at the bottom of the page, or even register and contribute to the LilyPond Report's next issues.
Greetings,
at last, a new Report; as you may have noticed, I am currently (unfortunately) unable to publish this column on a weekly (if at all regular) basis, so it's more of a Debian-like “release-when-ready” style. As I said many times, my main problem as an editor is not to find something worth writing about, but about making choices in the never-decreasing number of interesting things that happen every day, every week, within our community and in the Free Software world.
But even when you've decided to deal with a specific topic, finding a proper way to do so is hardly the easy part. Sometimes the material is there, for instance on the mailing lists archives, and it is just a matter of patience to find it. Sometimes there isn't enough material, and you have to investigate a little bit. And sometimes, well, sometimes the hardest part is to put things together with some sort of a logical sense. This week's article about LilyPond scores wasn't a easy one to write in this regard.
In the former instalment, we talked about the new Frogs team; well they now have a dedicated homepage on LilyNet, where you can read (and subscribe to) their mailing list. Please also have a look at their place on the Wiki, which Patrick McCarty has been busy setting up. On the upcoming issues, we will have a closer look at this team and what they do.
Eventually, Francisco Vila has begun to provide the Report with interesting statistics about the LilyPond project; we'll have a look at that today and in several issues to come.
Recently, Wilbert Berendsen shared with us a score he has just engraved, introducing the source code repository he has created for the occasion at Google Code.
The .ly files live in the lilymusic googlecode repository, a repo which I'm btw happy to share with anybody wanting to write good LilyPond scores (of public domain or otherwise Free music) under free licenes and svn version control.
This led Jay Anderson to make a short list of known LilyPond scores source-code repositories:
- Wilbert's
- A lesser known Google Code project, from a Spanish-speaking contributor whom I do not know,
- Jay's own repo,
- Sven Axelsson's repo (mostly bagpipe music),
- Xavier Shay's repository (a few jazz scores),
- your editor's work,
- last but not least, Master Nicolas Sceaux's repository of authoritative editions of baroque music.
Of course, such repositories are meant to host only source code. But a number of free online music libraries include LilyPond scores. On these websites, you can download scores as compiled PDF files, as well as the sources.
for a particular piece of music, I think it makes more sense to either have it on my own website or to contribute it to a more central place where people are looking for music.
In other words, I don't expect people to look for a madrigal typeset in lilypond; I expect them to look for a three-part madrigal, or a madrigal by Thomas Weelkes, and mutopia doesn't particularly have a reputation in the madrigal-performing community as a place to go (unlike Werner Icking or CPDL).
Of course, many LilyPonders do publish their scores on their personal websites, and it would be absolutely impossible to reference these here (if at all). It allows them (like Nicolas Sceaux) to offer their scores either as compiled PDF or source archives.
Source code repositories, online music libraries, and personal websites: quite a lot of resources to look at, and one can wonder if things couldn't be made simpler. In different ways.
I ask myself again why do I have to add another link to my list, when we have a working repository for music: Mutopia.
Following closely discussions on this mailing-list you will notice that tons of scores are engraved with Lilypond. (Applause!) And most of this music seems to be without any copyright restrictions. But I can seldom find them in Mutopia.[…] Why is Mutopia not the official music code repository for Lilypond?
The upside: well, one single place, wouldn't that be nice…
The downsides:
The upside: wiki-like editable scores! How cool is that? The downsides:
There's more to it. Through a customized Google search box, through RSS feeds aggregation, JavaScript embedding etc, we could conceive a simple webpage where people could, at a glance, see the latest Mutopia/CPDL additions, as well as a preview of Nicolas Sceaux's latest score (yeah, that's three times I mention him, what do you know, I'm a big fan), search for a specific score in all LilyPond resources known to man, and so on.
In a similar way, I can imagine a source code repository that would be interfaced with both SVN and GIT, and that would automatically retrieve the source code from given external repositories.
The point with this latter way would be to leave resources were they are, but to reference, syndicate them, and therefore give them visibility, consistency, and ease of use.
So, more than two years after the last stable version, LilyPond 2.12 was released on Christmas Eve. While we had been looking forward to this for months, it still came as a surprise — which some of us weren't happy about, because of unresolved bugs or documentation issues.
Such controversies aren't unusual in the Free world; one can think, for instance, about the KDE 4 quarrel. Moreover, Reinhold Kainhofer made an interesting point:
As things are currently in LilyPond, I don't think that the term "stable version" makes much sense. All our releases seem to me like snapshots of the current development version at some random times
This, in turn, brings up the question of the version numbering model.
For ages, LilyPond used the same numbering model as the Linux kernel: odd-numbered development releases, even-numbered stable releases. This model has one big downside, that we just experienced: it tends to make the development cycle really long, and at some point the 'stable vs unstable' question becomes irrelevant.
Therefore, the Linux kernel has dropped this model, just issuing one release after another, exactly in the same way that Reinhold suggested. Recently, Linus Torvalds even considered entirely dropping the 2.6.xx.x naming model, since nothing compelled him anymore to switch from 2.6 to 2.8, or even from 2.* to 3.*…
While it is unlikely that we'll see a Linux 3.0 version any decade soon, LWN's Grumpy Editor has predicted that the 2.6.* numbering scheme will still go on, and make it at least to 2.6.33 by next year.
And what about Lily?
Well, it seems that, after all, we're not far away from the Linux situation. Like the Linux kernel, LilyPond has moved from a small 0.x project to a bigger community-driven 1.x project with more developers; then some major internal changes (particularly introducing the Guile interpreter) have led to a new 2.x series… And now?
In August 2004, Han-Wen announced:
LilyPond development is gearing up towards a new, better, funkier glitzier stable release, and that is LilyPond 3.0.
In February, he was still referring to LilyPond 3.0. A few months later [1], it became 2.10 instead. And then, 2.12, 2.14, etc…
So, are we stuck in 2.* numbers? I'm not sure. I think it's a matter of generation. LilyPond started approximatively at the same time as other GNU parts, such as Glib/GTK or the Gimp, that are still at version 2.* as well. One could also mention the Blender project [2], that it now at… version 2.49!
Not only does that mean that LilyPond is as active as other successful free software projects, but it also implies that, even as a “niche” project, we're still part of something bigger. And this “bigger picture” is moving forward: fohttp://news.lilynet.net/ecrire/?e… instance, the GNU project's General Public License has reached version 3 less than two years ago; it has also recently been decided that GNOME 2.30 will be renamed GNOME 3.0. [3]
Anyway, as Linus Torvalds once said (at a time where the Linux kernel 2.6 was thought to become 3.0): “Hey, it's just a name”…
Our Spanish contributor Francisco Vila has been busy lately, and he came up with some statistics (and some comments) about the LilyPond project. This week, we'll present the first part of his observations.
I was curious about the health of the LilyPond documentation and I have made this graph.
Though most people browse it online or as a PDF file, LilyPond's documentation is also downloadable as a `tarball' archive on our website. This graph shows the evolution of this archive's size, over the years.
As you may know, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics” (Mark Twain). Nevertheless, what can we notice? In two years, the doc size has been multiplied by 4; this may have something to do with translations (that were basically not there in version 2.8). But the main cause is obviously the Grand Documentation Project that has been led by Graham Percival over the whole last year. On this subject, Graham commented the way these statistics were made:
if you *really* want to see a spike for GDP, let's look at the size of patches in git. Or even better, look at the percentage of patches which are documentation-related (i.e. modify Documentation/ or input/ ) as opposed to code-related.
However, I think the overall shape looks good… and promising for our future. Francisco, on his side, has gathered a different comment:
My two daughters said immediately that the drawing was "a little path of stars". Isn't it lovely?
It certainly is
To me, the “We Can” phrase is much less of a president's motto than a geek-defining mantra. You may know this geek-oriented US TV show called The Big Bang Theory
; if not you can have a look at the first two minutes of this clip and pay attention to this line (slightly rephrased below), which I believe defines the very essence of geekness:
— Why do you send a signal from this laptop, through your local ISP, racing down fiber optic cabel at the speed of light to San Francisco, bouncing off a satellite in GS synchronous orbit to Lisbon, Portugal where the data packet will be handed off to submerge transatlantic cabels terminating in Halifax, Nova Scotia and transferred across the continent via microwave released back to your ISP and X10… to turn on a lamp???— Because I can!
Anyway, from the just because we can collection…
This week's idea was posted by our Ukrainian contributor Dmytro Redchuk on the mailing list:
I thought of \repeat unfold in a context of some experiments with “concatenateable” fragments of music, lyrics etc — can not say now with what exactly; so i can not tell whether i need this or not
Of course, you must already be familiar with the widely-used \repeat unfold n {...} command, that prints the music expression n times. But… have you ever thought of using it not to print music?
\repeat "unfold" 0 { d4 d d d } % "zero" hereTo be honest, i would expect this bar not to be engraved.
This “feature” is currently not available in LilyPond. Maybe someone will implement it some day… “What for”, you might ask? Well, because we can!
This week's “project” is more of an experiment, that could remind you of the special issue we had previously published about algorithmic composition.
On January the 5th, one of our French LilyPonders, Martial, inadvertently posted a mail on the -user list, announcing (in French) a new version of POV-ray (another Free Software project he seems to be involved in).
The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (aka POV-Ray) is a major project of the Free World (it has been developped for more than twenty years), that allows to render high-quality computed-generated 3D images. Similarly to LilyPond, its input format is plain code (it can, however, be interfaced with graphical modeling programs such as Blender). Its development seemed to have been slowing down for the past five years, but Martial's announcement of a new version proved that it's still well alive and promising.
This little mishap led to an interesting discussion, where Cameron Horsburgh believed that LilyPond had precisely been (remotely) inspired by the POV-ray language… But the coolest part is probably when Martial modestly took this as an opportunity to show us his work with computer-generated animations and LilyPond scores
Here are some explanations, translated from his website:
Some Python, some Pov and a lot of LilyPond:
the score (notes and rhythm) is randomly generated by some macros, randomly selected out of a prepared “pot”, and then saved as a LilyPond file.
The image is generated from the same “pot”: a macro somehow rotates a globul-blobtuberence field.
A random factor is seeded by a Python script involvind the system clock; then the score is engraved by LilyPond from the output file. Here's the source POV file that produced this LilyPond example.
Through the Python Imaging Library, the image is converted into EPS to be handled by LilyPond; the MIDI output is converted into mp3 through TiMidiTy.
[…] Instruments are arbitrarily chosen at the beginning of the POV source file.
Example:#declare Instrument_1= "\"trumpet\""or#declare Instrument_1= "\"harpsichord\""
How cool's that? If you're geeky enough and want to experiment making 3D LilyPond scores “just because you can”, then you'll definitely want to have a look at Martial's source code. Feel free to send us your creations, as the Report will happily feature them in its next issues!
Some day in March, your editor had the pleasant surprise to meet someone special on our -user list. I am, of course, referring to Miklos Vajna, a Hungarian young developer whom we owe one of my favorite GNU/Linux distributions [4]: Frugalware.
What better way to introduce this distribution than by quoting this Distrowatch paper from 2006, which I believe is still dead on:
Frugalware Linux is one of those distributions that does not feature often in the news headlines. But those users who take the time give it more than just a passing glance are often surprised to find in Frugalware a clean, fast distribution with a great package manager and a few convenient system administration tools. Loosely modelled on Slackware and incorporating Arch's 'pacman' for managing installed applications, Frugalware Linux is not only a great operating system, it is also an active community project based on open source ideals.
As I said back then, Miklos is to Frugalware what our own “benevolent dictators” Han-Wen and Jan are to the LilyPond project; that should give you an idea of the amount of respect he deserves. So, what brings Miklos in the LilyPond community? Here's what he told the Report:
I play guitar for about 13 years, not that I'm that good in it, but with time I tend to learn a bit. In the past five years most of the time I played religious songs and that has nothing to do with LilyPond, it's just a textbook with guitar chords. But from time to time I occasionally play other old songs like Steve Wonder, The Beatles and such. I buy or download the music sheet, print it out, then usually change it a bit, since the original chords are for multiple guitars / instruments, etc. When I'm happy with the shape and I'm tired of programming, occasionally I try to let LilyPond create the music sheet for my version of the song.
What I like in LilyPond is of course its programming language-like interface, which is quite comfortable for a programmer like me. I used Finale once about 12 years ago and it was boring, I hate to use my mouse too much.
BTW, I first noticed LilyPond because I knew Han-Wen Nienhuys because of his darcs2git and Jan Nieuwenhuizen because of ooo-build (I contibuted a few patches to both projects), so it was something I had to try out as I was sure it'll be quality software.
If you want to learn more about Miklos, you can have a look at this recent interview in the Frugalware Report — sorry, Newsletter.
Upon special request from Graham Percival, this week's quote was found in a long discussion involving (yet another) Grahamized newbie named Tim Rowe:
The lilypond documentation really isn't the kind of documentation that you can go to when you want to know how to do something. It's designed to teach you how to use the software.
Comments are opened below. [5]
… Aaand this concludes the fifteenth issue of The LilyPond Report.
Cheers,
Valentin Villenave
[1] I remember this was explained in a mail on -user (by Mats?), but I couldn't find it. Anyway, in a long (annoying) conversation in July 2006, Erik Sandberg used the 3.0 numbering, then a few days later the 2.10 numbering. My guess is that this is when the change took place.
[2] By the way, the third Open Movie project (codenamed Durian has just been announced, and it looks really exciting.
[3] … And there I have managed to put both KDE and GNOME logos. Hopefully no flamewar today.
[4] Was my top #1 actually. And then KDE4 came out.
[5] In fact, I am not sure that I understand it completely, since I have been learning LilyPond the other way around: at first I only wrote very simple scores, and while reading the documentation my scores became more and more complex since everytime I found a new feature I just had to find a way to use it: “Hey, let's put a Voice-Following line somewhere! Hey, where could I use feathered beams in this piece? OK, let's add another measure for that…”
… And before you ask: yes, the “because I can” approach is the wrong way of composing music. But what do you know, I'm just a geek.
Welcome to this fourteenth issue of the LilyPond Report!
[…] As always, you can post your comments at the bottom of the page, or even register and contribute to the LilyPond Report's next issues.
Greetings,
[…]
[OLPC situation]
[Lily for childrens: testimony]
[…]
[DIY Keyboard project, article from Andrew Wagner]
[…]
[Gilles' last snippet?]
[sub-beaming broken]
The LilyPond Report — Hello Reinhold, thanks for answering our questions today!
Reinhold Kainhofer — Likewise, nice to have a chat with you!
L.R. — Introducing you to our readers is not particularly easy, since you've been actively working on many various things within the LilyPond community… For instance, last week we've seen that you've just implemented native support for complex tempo indications (mixing text and metronome marks).
Reinhold — You are right, I am quite active, and not only for LilyPond. However, the things I have done in the last few days were not so much work, but simply got a lot of attention. Hmm, let me think; MusicXML import (musicxml2ly) was actually the first stuff that I worked on, in August 2007…
L.R. — Yes, the LilyPond Report has introduced this feature a couple weeks ago (has you once noticed, your name gets frequently mentioned in this column)…
Reinhold — I have also been contributing to the LilyPond Snippet Repository, of course, where I submitted 21 snippets so far. With John Mandereau, I've been investigating possible design improvements for the LilyPond website and online documentation; and I'm also a contributor or the Choral Public Domain Library.
L.R. — Indeed; by looking at the list of your scores, I understand you're involved in a choir?
Reinhold — Yes, I initially simply started using LilyPond to write scores for our choir (after having used abc2ps)… But then, some questions on the user mailing list intrigued me, in particular that strange incomprehensible language called Scheme… LilyPond is addictive, but it's also very complex; to be honest, I still have no real clue about the inner workings of LilyPond: when I try to implement something, I mainly take some existing code and try to adjust it to my situation (mainly by trial-and-error).
L.R. — This meets what I wrote last week: there's no real border between working with LilyPond and working on LilyPond…
Reinhold — Yes, invariably, you'll run into something that you need and that LilyPond does not do yet.
L.R. — … Or you end up constantly pushing Lily, looking for anything that it cannot do yet!
Reinhold — Yes and no. As I said, I started by writing scores for our choir, then we had a performance of Schubert's Stabat Mater, for which no orchestra material was available for sale (only for rent…). Thus, I decided to get an old (out-of-copyright) edition and write the orchestral parts with LilyPond. That's also how I got into the territory of orchestral scores; and that's one area where you are constantly pushing the edges of what LilyPond can do and what it can't.
L.R. — … Which led you to conceive your OrchestralLily package.
Reinhold — Yes, that mainly evolved from my orchestral scores, where I realized that for each instrument / group and for each movement I had to do the same definitions over and over again. And then I ran into other problems, so I put the solutions into that package too. Oh, this makes me think I should finalize version 0.03, which adds lots of new stuff over version 0.02. Docs are at http://kainhofer.com/orchestrallily/, and the latest version can be downloaded at http://repo.or.cz/w/orchestrallily.git.
L.R. — Er, this should have been my line actually… So, you're a singer?
Reinhold — Yes (mainly bass, but I can also sing baritone). I'm actually singing in 2-3 choirs: the choir of the St. Augustin church in Vienna (which is the church of the former emperor's palace in Vienna and where Sissy got married), where we have a choir mass (with a large orchestra) every Sunday; also the Chorvereinigung “Jung-Wien”, which is mainly specialized on classical Viennese Waltzes, Polkas, etc; but we also do other concerts like the Stabat Mater, or a musical concert this fall.
L.R. — These choirs must be huge, if they can afford such large performances…
Reinhold — The first one is mainly funded by the parish, but the second one needs to finance itself: by getting subsidies from the city (which is quite hard this year, since all the money goes to the soccer championship), but also charging for the concerts — being in Vienna is especially hard for musicians, because there is so much competition here.
L.R. — Judging by the (impressive) résumé on your website, you are specialized in many different areas: mathematics, physics, economics… Is it because it “just happened”, or are you genuinely interested in tons of things?
Reinhold — Yes, that's one of my problems: I take on so many things that I hardly have enough time. I'm interested in everything, so it happened automatically. For example, I studied Mathematics and physics, now I also took up some law studies, I'm taking solo singing lessons, try to improve LilyPond, and — because I might get bored during the weekends —
I'm also a referee for American Football.
L.R. — Oh, not to forget that you have a “normal” day job at the university of Vienna.
Reinhold — … Which is apparently not too stressy, since I find the time to talk with you during my work hours
L.R. — And what about computers? Did you start programming because of your studies… or are you just another computer geek?
Reinhold — I'm simply a computer geek for no particular reason. I never studied programming or took courses, I simply learned it myself. I started programming Windows applications using Borland Pascal and Visual Basic, when I was in high school (I was in boarding school, so I was allowed to use the school's computer root!). Then at university I got in touch with Mathematica and in 1999 I worked for Wolfam Reseach (first as a summer intern and then as a contractor), the creators of Mathematica.
L.R. — Interesting! Is Mathematica still one of your favorite languages? I remember that a few months ago Trevor Bača told us he had been using it to process music; have you ever tried to do so?
Reinhold — To be honest: I know that Mathematica can process music and I suspect that it can be quite efficient and easy, but I never looked at it. My favorite programming language depends on the problem. Either C++ (for writing efficient numerical applications), Mathematica (if I need to calculate something symbolically), Python/Perl for simple scripts, etc. Scheme (and the C++ that LilyPond is written in, which is basically just Scheme written in C++ Syntax) is definitely not one of my favorites
L.R. — So, long story short, you ended up becoming a Free Software user and developer…
Reinhold — During high school I got in touch with computers and started programming, but that was only for Windows. My first contacts with Linux were at the time I did the summer internship at Wolfram Research, as one of my roommates there was very fascinated by it. The irony: when I met him a few years ago, I was the Linux developer, while he had meanwhile switched to a Mac… I'm using Linux on my office machine (running Debian sid) as well as on my laptop (running kubuntu hardy) and my wireless router (running OpenWRT). I've been quite involved in the KDE project for several years, where I also was the maintainer / lead developer of KOrganizer. I simply lack the time and also the motivation to work on it any more; now I'm “only” a happy KDE user (and seeing what Wilbert did with lilykde is really a great please, since it shows how great that desktop can be).
L.R. — You seem to care about software freedom; has it something to do with the fact that you're a scientist, and specifically a scientist involved in _public_ research?
Reinhold — Coming from science, for me it is absolutely natural that the things I do can be used and are useful to others. That's basically the idea of open source. I'm not after the money (otherwise I wouldn't be at university, but probably in some investment bank), but I want to do something that I like and that helps others, too. As for public vs private research, I think that's basically a matter of philosophy. If you are in a private company, things tend to be closed, results are not shared with “competitors”, etc.; it's basically only about money and competitive advantages, but not about the people involved or the society as a whole. I don't know if people who like working there are not so interested in sharing their (sparetime) work with others in principle or if they get so used to these ideas as time passes.
L.R. — Yes; I couldn't help noticing that most, if not all, scientists I've met through LilyPond (Trevor Daniels, Torsten Anders, Peter Chubb and many others) were involved in public, government-funded facilities and/or universities. Now I won't jump to conclusions, since sometimes you don't really get to choose and life chooses for you… Let's talk music again. You do not seem to be into contemporary music at all, are you?
Reinhold — No, I'm mainly into classical choir music. I like contemporary music and listen to it, of course, but mostly I simply find it too shallow.
L.R. — Yet, given your background as a mathematician, you might be interested in Algorithmic Composition such as what Torsten Anders or Trevor Bača do…
Reinhold — Hehe, that's definitely an interesting area. To be honest, I'm currently thinking about switching my areas from financial and actuarial mathematics to computer science, in particular music information retrieval.
L.R. — Wow! Can you really do that? Wouldn't you lose your job or something?
Reinhold — Of course, I would have to give up my position as an assistant professor, but I already talked to one of the CS profs and I might get a position in a EU-funded research project (if that gets granted). The exact field, of course, depends on which project will be granted (in the next few weeks), but there are so many interesting issues in information retrieval…
L.R. — You seem to really have given it a thought indeed.
Reinhold — I would probably do this, because I realize more and more that financial mathematics is not what really interests me (economics was never so interesting, not the least because it's all about money, which has very low priority to me). Also, Mathematics is interesting, but then it always tries to be as abstract as possible, so I'm missing the real applications.
L.R. — Well, good luck for your plans, and for your future work with LilyPond; can you imagine yourself becoming a regular contributor/developer in a distant future?
Reinhold — Yes, absolutely. I'm quite motivated about LilyPond, although I'm seeing that it takes way too much of my time. Sometimes I'd rather write scores in LilyPond than fixing bugs that prevent me from writing the scores.
L.R. — Well, it's an addiction, as you noted… Thanks Reinhold; see you soon on the lists!
Reinhold — Thank you for the talk, too.
Thanks to Reinhold Kainhofer for this interview.
[…]
And this concludes the fourteenth issue of The LilyPond Report.
Cheers,
Valentin Villenave
by John Mandereau, pacovila, Valentin Villenave at March 01, 2010 10:38 AM
To this date there’s no function to delete a plug-in effect preset in Ardour. A feature request has been filed and you can follow the status here. In this case we will delete an obsolete duplicate that has been saved under the same name.
Open the file:
~/.ladspa/rdf/ardour-presets.n3
On my system the .ladspa dir is located in the user home dir. If you’re using a file browser make sure you enable the “show hidden files” function. Before you edit the file remember to keep a back up.
In the image below the highlighted part represents the duplicate preset.
When the highlighted part is removed the preset is also removed. Open Ardour and have a look.
This works for every preset and to find the desired preset to be removed, start by searching for the name of the preset (line including #hasLabel). Then select everything from two lines down (line including #hasSetting) up to the line below including next“#hasSetting” and delete selection.
We always wondered what happens to ancient pianos when the internals can no longer be kept in a playable condition. [Jean Philippe Roch] gutted his elderly upright and fit a Korg Triton inside. After the break you can watch a few videos including a slide show of the work log. [Jean] separates the Korg keyboard from its case and places it in the empty upright piano rank. He then mounts the Korg’s controls in the front panel and adds motorized control to reveal this hidden secret. The project is finished with speakers in the bottom portion of the upright and blue LED lighting effects.
The result is a pretty nice show-piece. It’s not as hacky as vocoding, but we really love the finished look.
Construction log
Case automation
Playing demonstration
[Thanks poisoMike]
This short, informal opinion column is about the LilyPond project: its team, its world, its community. It is not meant to be an exhaustive documentation resource. Reader comments are, of course, welcome (see at the bottom of this page).
Welcome to this seventeenth issue of the LilyPond Report!
Yay, the Report is back, with a new team! It has been said that two heads are better than one — does it apply to newsletters as well? Read on and let us know! In this issue we'll talk about websites and poetry, frogs and bugs, not to mention an extensive review of the Frescobaldi editor!
As always, you can post your comments at the bottom of the page, or even register and contribute to the LilyPond Report's next issues.
At last, the Report is back! Hopefully for long, since it is now being handled by two editors, namely yours truly and… (wait for it…) Graham Percival himself!
When he's not living without the Bunnies in Glasgow, Graham `I'll be gone in a month' Percival is still on board, grumpier as ever. As a result, you can expect the new Report to have a very different tone than it used to have in the past!
Our goal is to publish this newsletter on a bi-monthly basis (that is, every two months, not twice a month). Is it reasonably achievable? Well, it depends.
If we try and keep up with the mailing lists and the LilyPond community, then two months is just ridiculously too long: that amounts to four development releases, dozens of major decisions, hundreds of bug reports, thousands of (often interesting) discussions… On the other hand, if we manage to keep our heads above the water and only mention carefully selected items, then the Report might give an interesting perspective, less directly concerned with the community's everyday life.
But most of all, as I repeatedly said for the past couple of years, the Report needs your contributions! I know I haven't been quite reliable in running it, but it's somehow a pity that the first person who finally stepped up and offered to give me a hand is also the one who's desperately been trying to leave the LilyPond project for the past three years,
Nevertheless, as Graham said:
A very grumpy Report may or may not be funny; on the other hand, maybe if there's 1 or 2 very grumpy reports, people will get motivated to write something, if only to make it more enthusiastic!
Cheers,
Valentin.
The new LilyPond website is nearing completion. If you haven't taken a look at it yet, try reading it now!
(Note that the translation infrastructure is not yet completed for the new website.)
If you have any design suggestions, it's not too late to make changes — get in touch with us.
The current stable release is 2.12.3-2; all normal users should be engraving with this version. We have no plans on making any more 2.12 releases.
The current unstable release is 2.13.14. This version has 14 known Critical issues, with probably twice that number of unknown critical problems. We do not recommend that normal users engrave with it.
A common question in open-source projects is "when will the next stable version be released?"; the typical answer is "when it's ready". LilyPond is no exception: 2.14 will be out when the number of Critical issues reaches 0, and stays at 0 for two weeks. When will that happen? Well, it will happen when these issues are resolved. Items are resolved by contributors working on them. The more work people do, the quicker issues get resolved.
Unfortunately, most of the current Critical issues require attention from experienced developers; any helpful users trying to jump in right now would only delay matters. However, issue 989 (ensure that no information is only in the regtests) could benefit from helpful users.
What does this entail? Well, you need to look at all the lilypond
syntax inside a regression test (a short piece of testing code).
Then you need to check that this syntax is included in the
documentation. In most cases, you can just use your general
knowledge of lilypond — the docs obviously explains
cis'4., so you don't need to literally find each
portion of that syntax in the docs. However, if the regtest uses
little-known syntax or new features, the documentation might not
reflect this. We have a large number of regtests, so it would be
great if we could divide them between 5-10 people!
(Please feel free to contact Valentin if you're interested.)
— Graham.
The Frogs are ordinary LilyPond users who have chosen to get involved in their favorite software's development. Fixing bugs, implementing new features, documenting the source code: there's a lot to be done, but most importantly: this is a chance for everyone to learn more about LilyPond, about Free Software, about programming… and to have fun. If you're curious about any of it, then the word is: Join the Frogs!
In the past several months, most Frog activity has been concerned with guitars.
Back in 2009, our Italian contributor (and Free Software activist) Federico Bruni noted on his blog how fast LilyPond's support for tablatures was improving:
Now also the modern musician who needs tablature will be able to use LilyPond easily and enjoy the good-looking of TabStaff. I guess this will open the doors of LilyPond to many new users. […] Marc Hohl, an expert user of the LilyPond community, committed himself to creating a configuration file which allowed any tablature user to get the desired output without being forced to tweak the source file each time. Since the last spring he has submitted his changes to the users' testing and expert developers' assessment, until a great result was achieved.
I do thank a lot Marc Hohl for the great work and the patience shown in answering the questions and requests from users, who often ask for the most weird things
.
By the way, there is now a specific mailing list for tablature users: http://lists.lilynet.net/tablatures/
And yet, the situation has improved again since this blog post: for instance, hammeron and pulloff are now supported as well, and bends implementation is on its way, thanks to the huge amount of work provided by Marc.
Ian Hulin has also fixed an old (and quite annoying) bug about tuplet brackets.
More importantly, the Frogs have spent a lot of time discussing LilyPond architecture, debugging techniques, improving the Contributor's Guide, and generally laying the foundation for future contributors. Judging from the number of posts that I don't understand, the Frogs are definitely learning advanced parts of LilyPond programming!
— Graham.
Feeling lighthearted again, I decided that the time had come for something I hd been meaning to do for a long time already: give Frescobaldi a proper review!
Frescobaldi is a LilyPond-oriented text editor for KDE4. It has originally been intended as a plugin for the Kate editor, for KDE3 then for KDE4 when it became widely used. Frescobaldi is now developed as an independent program, albeit deeply integrated into the KDE desktop environment. It has its own website, in English and Dutch; Frescobaldi itself is well localized, and supports no less than ten languages!
Much like LilyPondTool, the other easy-LilyPond-editing environment of choice, Frescobaldi is essentially a one-man work. Wilbert Berendsen is a well-known contributor of our project, and is responsible for the Dutch LilyPond community. Wilbert is also an organist, teacher, editor, composer, conductor, performer (if I understand well, he'll be giving a concert in a few days). His website is quite interesting, and contains some scores and recordings; I particularly like this short piece by Louis Vierne.
Unlike LilyPondTool, where many features and graphical widgets had to be implemented (almost) from scratch, Frescobaldi uses the KDE libraries, glued together in Python using PyKDE. As a result, it has a very nice, professional look (did I mention how fond I am of KDE4 ?).
This is particularly visible when comparing, for instance, Frescobaldi:
… with the Kate editor:
As you can see, the text-editing part looks basically the same.
From what I can tell, Frescobaldi is relatively well-known in the KDE community (with an 85% rating!); as a result it is available in most major distributions and you may not have to compile it from source (which is, by the way, not a particularly pleasant experience for any KDE app, as it requires installing hundreds of megabytes of -devel packages, plus cmake and the like).
Interestingly, the Frescobaldi packagers for my distribution (Funda Wang & Frederik Himpe) didn't specify LilyPond as a dependency, and that was a smart move: this leaves me free to download and install whatever LilyPond version I want, be it the stable, development branch, or even a home-compiled git source.
A couple of clicks is all it took for me to find myself with Frescobaldi installed, and listed in my menu under "Sound&Video" (go figure). The very last version (1.0.2) had been released just a few days ago, and yet my distribution's repository had already been updated.
By default, Frescobaldi opens with a very minimal text area. When you're used to KDE, your first reaction will probably be to look at the vertical tabs on the left and right borders, that actually are retractable panels.
The left panel gives access to a number of articulation marks:
On the right, you may notice a "LilyPond" button. Clicking on it immediately opens two things : a terminal emulator at the bottom, and a PDF-preview panel on the right. KDE's PDF engine is used here (like in the Okular reader), whereas LilyPondTool has to rely on the JPedal library, that Bertalan had to debug on his own. One minor downside though: there aren't any buttons/icons/toolbars in Frescobaldi's PDF-preview panel (let alone LilyPondTool-exclusive features such as PDF ruler or reverse point-and-click), so you better have a scrollwheel if you want to zoom it…
Unlike in jEdit/LilyPondTool, you do not have to save your source code first (and carefully give it a .ly extension). Frescobaldi is obviously meant to work "out of the box", and does indeed a great job at it: similarly, I did not have to manually specify the full path to the LilyPond binary.
At the bottom of the window, a few tabs (that I missed at first) allow you to open a terminal (just like in Dolphin,, KDE's file manager), consult the log (if any), and… record music using Rumor!
Unfortunately, I did not have the necessary tools to properly test this feature. But its interface sure looks attractive.
The right panel contains another tab: that's the online documentation browser. Where LilyPondTool embeds its own copy of the docs (with a very useful documentation browser that includes a search function), Frescobaldi, once again, takes advantage of the KDE libraries by embedding a web browser (the same engine as Konqueror).
This might come as a disadvantage though, as you will need an active connection to be able to browse the docs. On the plus side, this ensures that you will always have access to the latest docs build. But then again, there's still room for improvement: the browser points to the stable Documentation by default (which might be fine), but surprisingly enough, users are not offered with an option to change the URL (for example to use the latest development documentation, or an offline doc-build instead).
Another annoyance, that Frescobaldi is certainly not to blame for, is that the language detection didn't work, so foreign users may have to use the documentation and website in English by default.
Frescobaldi itself comes with its own offline handbook, like LilyPondTool (though Frescobaldi's may be a little more newbie-oriented).
As we've seen, Frescobaldi relies on KDE's Katepart component, and therefore has a smooth and pleasant look-and-feel when it comes to source-code editing. Blocks folding/nesting is beautifully indicated with a color gradient:
Unlike in LilyPondTool, not only { ... } blocks are indented, but ... >> blocks as well:
Context-sensitive autocompletion and highlighting is well supported: here are a few examples…
UPDATE — In LilyPondTool the autompletion is actually more fine-grained, since it will only show the possible properties in an override. However, syntax-highlighting looks better in Frescobaldi for now.
Scheme syntax-highlighting is simpler, but better-handled than in LilyPondTool (where, for instance, Scheme keywords aren't highlighted only in Scheme blocks). Still, I somehow prefer LilyPondTool's indenting and folding when it comes to Scheme code (but it's probably a matter of habit — and taste: Kate's brownish coloring of Scheme isn't very pleasant).
Like LilyPondTool, Frescobaldi features customizable code expansions:
Frescobaldi includes a Score Creation Wizard, that very much resembles LilyPondTool's… but with a twist.
The first window looks exactly like LilyPondTool's… but if you look closely you'll notice that the preview "image" (that is precisely not an image, in Frescobaldi's case) is better centered… and even localized! How nice.
The usual list of instruments (aka "let's pretend we're Sibelius for a while"). Where LilyPondTool sports a three-pane interface, Fresco only uses two (with submenus), and adds specific options on the left.
Here's the twist: once you have chosen your options, you are presented with a preview of your settings! I have to confess that at this point, my jaw dropped and the only thing I could say for a while was :
woooooooow…
We already mentioned the "Insertion" panel that allows to quickly add articulations to your music. This certainly looks nice, but one could argue that having to use the mouse to add articulations is hardly quicker than using the keyboard. Most users would probably prefer to assign keyboard shortcuts to these functions. LilyPondTool has also such buttons, but in a drop-down submenus, which is less convenient but preferable from a screen-real-estate point of view.
In this "quick insertion" panel, I was surprised not to find a way to quickly add slurs, phrasing slurs, or manual beams. This seems way more useful than adding \rheel or \lheel indications — but perhaps it's because the author is an organist 
Finally, let's note that this feature is not context-sensitive. It is smart enough to leave rests alone and deal with compound durations such as cis2*5/8, but doesn't identify comments or \lyricmode blocks, nor does it take the notenames language into account.
There are a couple of nice and convenient unique tools. For instance, in the "Pitch" submenu, an option allows you to change the language used throughout your source code. Nothing extraordinary, but it's welcome nevertheless.
Another one, possibly my favorite: a well thought-out wizard allows you to easily create blank staff paper!
Once again, there's even a preview:
Such features make Frescobaldi not just a nice toy to play with, but a considerate editor that has obviously been designed by someone who actually writes music. Wilbert has cleverly used all the power and flexibility of KDE4, and that amounts to a very slick software with an irresistible "wow" effect. I did have seen some screenshots on the website, I had even contributed to Frescobaldi translation, and as someone who's generally used to testing bleeding-edge software, I really wasn't expecting to be impressed. Yet here I am.
One can but regret that this beautiful software actually targets a very narrow range of users: people who run KDE4 (that's between a third and a half of all GNU/Linux users). For these users, Frescobaldi is a treat already; for example, I could perfectly imagine a classroom full of Free-Software-driven laptops running Frescobaldi. Unfortunately it's a far cry from supporting people who need such software most: that is, Microsoft Windows hostages users.
KDE4 is known to be theoretically portable to this system, so one could imagine building Frescobaldi for Windows. Unfortunately things are a bit complex: from QT4 that run natively without a glitch on Windows (SMPlayer), to KDE4-tied apps that require hundreds of megabytes of dependencies (Amarok), I'm afraid we're not there yet.
One last word about Frescobaldi compared to jEdit/LilyPondTool. As you may have noted, I've been familiar for a long time with this later environment. Does this review of Frescobaldi make me want to switch? Well, although I do have considered it at some point, I think I am going to stay faithful to my ugly/bloated/Java editor of choice.
Not because of the numerous features it has, which Frescobaldi does not (reverse point-and-click, real-time syntax parsing, virtual piano, MIDI player, offline docs, PDF ruler, etc.) — I have hardly ever used these features, and do not see the need for them.
Not because it's multi-platform: from now on I won't bother running anything else than KDE4 GNU/Linux. Not even because I designed its new icons
But more for a sentimental reason: LilyPondTool and I go way back, and I have seen its progress, I have seen Java become Free, I have seen Bertalan add new features one after another, fixing bugs, in a much less developer-friendly context than what KDE4 provides. I have taught generations of students how to install and use it, I've even made video tutorials about it.
Just like the old laptop I'm using to write this review: it's ugly, tired, I've changed almost every parts of it myself over the years. But while I can appreciate a beautiful and powerful computer whenever I see one, it's the story behind it that counts. That being said, I hope this review will give some readers the curiosity to give Frescobaldi a try, and, who knows, perhaps they'll make their own story with it — and if you do, please do tell us: we all love stories!
— Valentin.
Our favorite bug report from these two months came from Roman Stawski:
This short polyphony employs A trivial customised Voice but the lyrics ignore the first note in the score — that's not the behaviour of choice.
As it happens, it turned out to be another instance of an existing issue. But the creative poem was definitely appreciated!
— Graham.
… Aaand this concludes the seventeenth issue of The LilyPond Report.
The next instalment will be published on Saturday, May 2010 the 3rd.
Cheers,
Graham Percival & Valentin Villenave.
by Graham Percival, Valentin Villenave at February 28, 2010 04:29 PM
The monome meme continues to spread virally through your music gear. With some custom code (made freely available) and a little assistance from the free Arduino platform, Philly-based hacker Wil Lindsay has converted the $50 Bliptronic 5000 device from ThinkGeek into a monome. That gives you full compatibility with the community-made patches that support the real thing, for a song.
If you’re handy with this sort of thing, you can follow the code and basic build instructions provided and mod your Bliptronic yourself. If not, you have two choices – the first half dozen early adopters can pay Wil to hack and test their Bliptronic for a fee to raise money for a PCB, and then once that happens, anyone who wants an all-in-one, more fully-documented kit will be able to choose that route instead.
Bliptronome V2 : tests, kits, and code released
It occurs to me that someone might be able to do something different with that source, as well.
The way I’d still recommend assembling a monome if you can’t get in on one of the official products or kits would be the Arduinome, which is best-documented at FlipMU’s Arduinome site. But I like that the Bliptronic is now an option, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if some monome owners pick one up for the heck of it. I’ll send an update if Wil is successful with that kit.
Once upon a time I posted a hack-tip about getting the Flash plugin unblocked while your music player ran. The article was a gross restatement of an experience I had while learning BDD while listening to Wu-Tang. (In hind sight it would have been much simpler to just stop Amarok as it’s waay to difficult to hear rap music over top of tech jargon.) Fast forward several years and I find myself revisiting some of the same issues I spoke about back when. I tried to explain how Linux sound systems and audio processing worked. I was guessing at most of it and using my imagination tainted by my current experiences to draw a rough analogy. Today I’m beginning to get deep into audio signal processing/compression and so on and I sometimes need to work from home while much of my work is on the office Linux workstation. This presents some obvious challenges, the biggest one being playback of audio when programs run remotely. I’m posting today because I’m getting close to a possible solution that I haven’t found yet.
Let me describe a rather a-typical scenario so that you can appreciate how deep I’m getting into sound. You’re working from a MacbookPro, and you’ve logged into a remote Linux workstation using VNC. You need to test two mobile apps that stream sound from a remote service which you’ve prototyped on your Linux station. One app runs on Blackberry while the other runs on the iPhone. (I’m slightly over-complicating my typical situation but its not far from true.) One of the obvious challenges are getting audio from the Blackberry Simulator to play under Wine running on the Mac. I hit that snag about a month ago. The other big challenge is running test programs on the remote system that you would normally use its connected speakers to validate. Because you’ve logged in with VNC its easy to forget the disconnect or divide between you and what would be the audio output. (The speakers are happily blaring in the office while you sit miles away at home wondering why you can’t hear anything.)
Couple these challenges with the fact that you’re an AS/400 developer pretending to be a java guy that acts like he knows how to write J2ME and ObjC iPhone software all the while struggling to grok C/C++. Its not that you don’t know the C languages it’s just that you’ve spent most of your career avoiding it for the obvious complexity in favor of higher level languages like Python/Ruby/Groovy. Now all of the docs for these audio tools scream “./configure” this and “make” that while badgering you with “.o”, “.so” and/or “.a” dependencies that have been “make”-ed for completely opposite architecture. You need to learn the build tools of the arcane and use the language of the deceased to resurrect ideas that have been locked away in some deb repo for several years. Sounds a LOT like Linux, doesn’t it?
This is all a bit of old news by now....
QuteCsound 0.4.6 is ready! This version includes many fixes, additions
and useful improvements. Upgrading to this version is highly
recommended.
QuteCsound is a simple frontend for Csound featuring a highlighting
editor with autocomplete, interactive widgets and integrated help. It
can open files created in MacCsound, and aims to be a simple yet
powerful and complete development environment for Csound.
QuteCsound 0.4.6 has been tested on Windows, OS X, Linux and Solaris,
by PipeMan (PipeManMusic@gmail.com) at February 24, 2010 11:28 AM
by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at February 24, 2010 02:04 AM
In recent versions PulseAudio integrates the numerous mixer elements ALSA exposes into one single powerful slider which tries to make the best of the granularity and range of the hardware and extends that in software so that we can provide an equally powerful slider on all systems. That means if your hardware only supports a limited volume range (many integrated USB speakers for example cannot be completely muted with the hardware volume slider), limited granularity (some hardware sliders only have 8 steps or so), or no per-channel volumes (many sound cards have a single slider that covers all channels), then PulseAudio tries its best to make use of the next hardware volume slider in the pipeline to compensate for that, and so on, finally falling back to software for everything that cannot be done in hardware. This is explained in more detail here.
Now this algorithm depends on that we know the actual attenuation factors (factors like that are usually written in units of dB which is why I will call this the "dB data" from now on) of the hardware volume controls. Thankfully ALSA includes that information in its driver interfaces. However for some hardware this data is not reliable. For example, one of my own cards (a Terratec Aureon 5.1 MkII USB) contains invalid dB data in its USB descriptor and ALSA passes that on to PulseAudio. The effect of that is that the PulseAudio volume control behaves very weirdly for this card, in a way that the volume "jumps" and changes in unexpected ways (or doesn't change at all in some ranges!) when you slowly move the slider, or that the volume is completely muted over large ranges of the slider where it should not be. Also this breaks the flat volume logic in PulseAudo, to the result that playing one stream (let's say a music stream) and then adding a second one (let's say an event sound) might incorrectly attenuate the first one (i.e. whenever you play an event sound the music changes in volume).
Incorrect dB data is not a new problem. However PulseAudio is the first application that actually depends on the correctness of this data. Previously the dB info was shown as auxiliary information in some volume controls, and only noticed and understood by very few, technical people. It was not used for further calculations.
Now, the reasons I am writing this blog posting are firstly to inform you about this type of bug and the results it has on the logic PulseAudio implements, and secondly (and more importantly) to point you to this little Wiki page I wrote that explains how to verify if this is indeed a problem on your card (in case you are experiencing any of the symptoms mentioned above) and secondly what to do to improve the situation, and how to get correct dB data that can be included as quirk in your driver.
Thank you for your attention.
Of course, you must build from the git repository to experience recent developments.
Here is what is happening in git:
Shuffle: Stereo Expander. Simply put, this is a 4-band EQ that shuffles left/right channels in such a way that you can make it sound like the sound is present in the room instead of sound like it is coming from speakers. Old acoustics tricks dug out of interesting articles applied to a Rakarrack module.
Arpie: Arpeggiated delay. See Help page for more information.
Exciter: Harmonics exciter from swh-plugins.
DistBand: Multi-band distortion. Swiss Army Knife of distortion.
Expander: Flexible enough to be used as a Noise Gate, string swell, or expander. See description in Help page for more information.
Synthfilter: Not yet updated in Help. A different type of view of the Analog Phaser effect revealed a basic structure supporting high-order filters with adjustable number of filter stages…most of the work was already done, so thanks again to Paul Nasca for this piece of code from the original ZynAddSubFX Phaser. Starting with a phaser (as opposed to wah-wah or EQ) was inspired by a phaser circuit modification suggested by Mark Hammer, a frequent forum poster at diystompboxes.com/smfforum. This modification allowed two phase stages to be converted to low-pass stages with a switch in an analog phaser. This is the type of effect marketed as a “phase-wah”. Of course, converting all of these phase stages to low pass stages makes this circuit look an aweful lot like what is found inside the old Korg Delta DL-50 synthesizer. Converting a normal OTA phaser into a synth filter would be a relatively ugly hack in the circuit bending world, but a simple excercise in software bending, and with a more elegant final product. With a little bit of experimentation, I had a filter sounding much like something found in an analog synthesizer. Thinking back to an analog envelope filter I once built, I determined high pass filter stages would also be of great utility. The final result: A very flexible filter module able to accomplish many flavors of low pass, band pass and high pass filter shapes. Possibilities range anywhere from simple wah-wah sounds to definite mushy filters from synthland. You can operate up to 12 high-pass and 12 low pass stages simultaneously. At present, the user is protected from resonance near instability. If you are a synth filter lover and want to be able to make your filter unstable, then it is a very minor adjustment to the source code if you wish to internally amp up the feedback range to allow this. Finally, the SynthFilter comes with wet/dry mix so you can accomplish interesting phase-wah sounds.
Between the ring modulator, Expander, Arpie and Synthfilter, one could make a good blind-test argument that your guitar is actually a synthesizer.
Of course, all of these FX are not limited to guitars. Somebody may wish to do something really bizarre like using the Sythfilter with a synthesizer 
We hope any of you who read this will pull the recent git repo and take a test drive. Many of the new FX may appear to be better suited to experimental or the general electronic/synth music genres, but each can be adjusted to settings that are useful in many genres. My imagination sees some of the sounds in funk, alternative/rock, metal interludes, pop, and so on. Much of it sounds good with Acoustic guitar.
Please help us know more about Csound usage by taking the time to fill out two short questionnaires:
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Results will be posted in a few days to allow time to collect responses.
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steven
This guitar pedal can record, playback, and modify samples. [Colin Merkel], also know for his work on electronic door locks, built this to replicate some guitar effects he heard in recordings. By tapping the button at the bottom with your foot the device begins recording. Another tap stops the recording and starts the loop. That’s where the rest of the controls take over, with settings to adjust the speed of playback, volume, and the type of playback looping. The video after the break gives a great demonstration of these features.
[Colin] built this around a PIC 18F877A with a 256k RAM chip to store the sample. There’s a bunch of other components that go into this and we’re dumbfounded that he built it on protoboard. This would be a multi-breadboard prototype for us and we wouldn’t think twice about laying out and etching our own PCB. He admits that the point-to-point soldering stretched his skills to the limit but he doesn’t say how many hours it took to get the circuit up and running. This is a great addition to the cool guitar pedals we’ve seen here.
I’ve created some presets of the effects I usually use on vocal in Ardour, distributing them here as screenshots. Presets aren’t something that should be treated as perfect settings for your needs but could be a place to start. As the saturation is highly dependent on the signal level of your tracks, adjustment of treshold for compressor and blend/dry/wet for reverb/delay effects is the first move to be carried out.
To get a reference to the processed examples, first take a look at the raw unedited vocal track.
Your browser does not support the audio tag.
unedited.oggSC4 mono: Vocals with presence
I wouldn’t have thought of using this high ratio of compression on a vocal track. But, by letting the attack off a bit, allowing the early amplitude peak to pass trough uncompressed it actually keeps some of the natural sound.
Your browser does not support the audio tag.
presence.oggTry out:
For more natural sound:
For more presence:
SC4 mono: Light compression
These settings gives more dynamic sounding vocals compared to the earlier preset. I’m adjusting the treshold only to touch the loudest parts of the track, leaving the main part unaffected.
Your browser does not support the audio tag.
lightcompression.oggTry out:
For more uniform compression:
For more presence:
Delayorama: Short Vocal Delay
The delay effect can be used as a trick to add some fatness to the vocals. The delay range should be set to somewhere between 0,08 – 0,15 (s) and the saturation of the effect should barely be hearable in the mix.
Your browser does not support the audio tag.
Reverb
Here’s a collection of reverb presets that I find suitable on vocals.
C* JVRev: Short reverb
Your browser does not support the audio tag.
shortreverb.oggC* JVRev: Long reverb
GVerb: Long tail
by PipeMan (PipeManMusic@gmail.com) at February 23, 2010 11:26 AM
Two quick news bulletins . . .
My new start at Uvumi has gone pretty well, so far — looks like I’m #1, #3, and #5 in the “Instrumental” Charts today!
Also, for the past two weeks, statistics haven’t been working at Jamendo. They got repaired sometime this past weekend.
The numbers are staggering. As of today, I’ve had — grand total for six albums — 6,050 downloads and 61,481 plays!
Having survived that depressing month of January 2010, and having made it through FAWM 2010, it looks like it’s time for me to start some serious work on my seventh album. I’ve got plenty of material. The goal now is to make it the best it can be.
Stay tuned.
Yesterday, I set up my artist account at Uvumi:
I found this site back in January. Over the next few months, I’ll be releasing more music there — hopefully this is the start of something new and great
When I first mentioned Uvumi (on The Day Before FAWM), I did get a few responses from people who thought I was abandoning my other sites. No, I’m not.
Speaking of FAWM, I’m going to remix and rerecord some of the songs from FAWM 2010 (No Robots Allowed) for my seventh Jamendo album. Most of the songs from this years FAWM, in fact, are practically ready for release. Nevertheless, on a few, there are mistakes I can hear all too clearly. These will be completely remade.
Now, with these two sites in full operation, why am I also starting up on Uvumi?
Well, Uvumi is just the beginning.
The crisis that happened early this year will not be repeated. When I thought the one place I’ve hosted my music was about to close, I did feel as if a part of my world was burning down. If you read “The End (?)“, you know history split in two at that point — in another universe, I gave up, erased this blog, and left everything behind me. That’s how discouraged I was.
It can’t happen again.
The more the merrier.
Literally.
OK, the story of how I got to Uvumi is a strange one. It starts at FAWM, in a discussion thread, goes through another site which WAS great, but betrayed all of its users and became idiotic, then goes to another site for refugees from that disaster. Everyone was looking for a new place to call home.
And many of them found it. Want to know the most compelling features of Uvumi? It’s new, it’s flexible, and it’s growing. The management team (led by Marshall Stokes) is not interested in music for any other reason than creating the best online music community.
This they have proven again and again, over the past month, as refugees from That Other Site (which I refuse to mention) poured in. This sudden growth could have been viewed as a problem; instead, it was welcomed as an opportunity.
However, all this growth came at a price. Before, they were not big enough to have to worry about server loads and storage space; now they are. The team took a reasoned approach — introducing ads, but not the annoying in-your-face kind. In fact they invited community discussion of the entire process!
So, having found a new home, I decided to do a bit to help it along. I’ve never advertised before. First time for everything, I guess! Below you’ll see my first two ads, that are currently running in the side boxes on Uvumi. (You have to click past the ‘Read More’ barrier, below.)
I did follow the design principles for these ads. The originals are rather large, and in color. The ad version fits the assigned space (298 x 268) and is grayscale.
I introduced my new avatar a while back — it appears on all my music sites. You can see a small version here:
The plasma bass clef has been with me from the beginning. The new element is The Pattern of Amber (well, sort of). See, I’m a big fan of Roger Zelazny’s Amber series, and the inspiration for the Pattern of Amber was actually the Labyrinth of Chartres. Therefore, in a way — this is the original Pattern!
A while back, I hand-coded the labyrinth in SVG. Since then, it’s become an element in many of my graphics. (It appears at the bottom of No Robots Allowed, for instance.)
Design #1 incorporates the Pattern and the bass clef . . . in, um . . . In Unexpected Places.
OK, Ad #2 might be a puzzle to some of you, unless you know about a 1970s TV series called Space: 1999. There was one episode, “Black Sun“, that always stuck in my mind — what, 35 years after I first saw it? I even recorded a song called “Through the Dark Sun” (which appears on my “lost” album, apocrypha).
The design of the Black Sun in that episode is something I’ve remembered all my life. For various reasons (album art that never quite came together), I created my own version. Never had a use for it until now!
Horizontal panoramas are so 2009 -- which is why I now give you the vertical panorama:
Now if I wasn't too stupid to hold my camera steady shooting upwards, this could actually have been a really good picture.
While tracking down some surround sound related bugs I was missing a speaker setup and testing utility. So I decided to do something about it and I present you gnome-speaker-setup:
The tool should be very robust and even deal with the weirdest channel mappings. OTOH the artwork is not really good and appropriate. But I hope it still shows some resemblance to other UIs of this type. If you are an artist wand want to contribute better artwork make sure to go through the Gnome Art Requests page, and more specifically this particular request.
This (or something like it) will hopefully and eventually end up in some way or another in gnome-media. Until that day comes I'll maintain this tool independently.
To compile this you need a recent Vala and libcanberra 0.23.
After the release of In Unexpected Places on Jamendo last September, I made a page here on WordPress where I collected together all of my printable album art. These are PDF files which you can download and print to make a proper CD label. Also, it serves as an informal discography; I now have six official Jamendo albums, as well as four that only exist on SoundClick (three years of FAWM and one “lost” album).
Well, I’m doing the same thing for my most recent effort, the 14 songs of FAWM 2010. Now, I’ve already presented the original album cover. Today I’m adding the back cover and bundling the whole thing in a printable file.
First, here’s the back cover. This is an image that, to me, says a lot about my FAWM experience this year — the enemy I battled was not time, but the weather. As I mentioned in the liner notes to “Walking Through Daydreams“, on February 6th, we got hammered by a huge winter storm. The photo below was taken on our morning dog walk. I thought it was the perfect backdrop for the songs of FAWM 2010.
Back cover and track listing for "No Robots Allowed (FAWM 2010)" by Bruce H. McCosar. Click the image above to enlarge.
And although I will index it on the Printable Album Art page as well, here is the link for the PDF file:
Open Source Musician Podcast
Episode 32 - Guitar mayhem
Title:
Banter:
Software Releases:
Audio Releases:
Tips:
Gear:
Announcements:
builds and sells pre-installed Linux computers. The distros they install on the computers are Ubuntu, Mandriva, Opensuse, Fedora, Sabayon and Linux Mint. Frostbite will install and configure systems with Orca so that they are useable out of the box for blind users.
Rants/Calling BS:
Tech Segment:
Listener Feedback:
Contact Info:
Podcast Out! Song: OSMP-C64 Theme from Runar Sundby
Buy stock in hot glue, this project corners the market on the stuff. [Leafcutter John] uses the hot goop as his water-proofer of choice when building an underwater microphone (also known as a hydrophone). By installing a couple of piezo elements on one lid of a tin can he is able to record some amazingly clear audio. This is aided by a pre-amp inside the metal enclosure. By cleaning off the clear coating from the inside of these steel can parts, he was able to solder the seams to keep the water out. In the end, coins are added for ballast and any remaining space is completely filled with hot glue.
He’s got a handful of example recordings on his project page. Here’s an what a running faucet sounds like from under water:
What sounds like a sex-toy is actually the reason these musicians haven’t been practicing. Marv is the MIDI actuated robotic vibraphone built by [Tim O'Keefe], [Michael McIntyre], and [Brock Roland]. Every key has a solenoid positioned below it. The beauty here is that other than four small holes used for mounting, the vibraphone hasn’t been altered at all. The solenoids are positioned on the outside edges of the instrument but there’s also a hidden secret. A set of dampers have been installed between the two ranks of keys. These are used to stop dampen ringing keys after the note should have stopped.
These guys have exhibited some beautiful craftsmanship. Check out the videos after the break and if you have the chance, see Marv in person at BarBot 2010. If you do attend that robot extravaganza don’t miss your chance to enjoy a breast-pump actuated cocktail.
Flight of the Bumblebee performance
Damper testing
[via Laughing Squid]
by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at February 17, 2010 06:21 PM
The first project of 12 year old musician by Ubuntu Studio
by PipeMan (PipeManMusic@gmail.com) at February 16, 2010 11:34 AM
The Body, The Circuit, The Computer and The Voice: robot cowboy from STEIM Amsterdam on Vimeo.
If you want to look for some of the roots of live electronic musical performance, STEIM is one place to start. Founded in 1969 by a group of Dutch composers (Misha Mengelberg, Louis Andriessen, Peter Schat, Dick Raaymakers, Jan van Vlijmen, Reinbert de Leeuw, and Konrad Boehmer), and led by the late “founding father” Michel Waisvisz, it has remained an important hub for inventing music technologies. It was one of the first places that gave an indication that these kind of experiments could extend beyond academic labs into grassroots DIY movements and DJ/VJ club culture alike.
Amsterdam has been looking to do a Handmade Music series for a while, and this Wednesday we kick it off. There’s a huge lineup, so I’m packing two video cameras and one audio recorder into my luggage today before flying out.
You can check out the whole lineup on the STEIM blog, for a sense of what the Dutch DIY community is up to:
Feb 17 2010: Hotpot Lab #2 – Handmade Music Amsterdam
The event is Wednesday night; doors open at 20:00 and it’s free. See the STEIM concerts page.
I’ll also be doing an informal “State of the Union” address on the state of DIY tech, where things might go, and where people may get involved – and most importantly, what we can do to make these developments musically productive. One of the things that came out of comments last week is that we need better documentation. If people want to get involved in a broader community, outside even our traditional music community, DIY platforms for software and hardware must first be better documented, more usable, and more accessible.
Anyway, I’m thrilled to have a chance to bridge New Amsterdam (NYC) with Old Amsterdam, and start that conversation by listening and learning from a great group of people. Stay tuned.
We’ll have some guest posts through the week while I’m traveling, as well, and I’ll be back on home soil next week.
More software is speaking timecode, opening up control of digital sound to real, physical vinyl on turntables. The latest addition: Time TunnelXL is a pair of externals that decodes Native Instruments’ Traktor Scratch vinyl and scratches not only sound, but visuals or anything you can make in the open development environment Max.
Right now, it supports Max/MSP (and thus Max for Live) on the Mac, but support for Linux and Windows and the open-source Pure Data as well as Max are planned.
I’m actually hopeful a lot of these efforts can support Pd, too. Pd does some things more effectively than Max, just as Max does some things more effectively than Pd, and by supporting Linux, you can have a flexible computer rig running on an OS you can optimize and tune. It brings virtual vinyl full circle, too: the first commercial product ran on BeOS and Linux before Windows or Mac.
Of course, Max support and Max for Live can help DJs and turntablists invent their own live performance rigs in the Ableton environment, too.
Project site:
Time Tunnel XL @ komika.org
by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at February 15, 2010 07:29 AM
by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at February 15, 2010 06:40 AM
I made it! Song 14 of FAWM 2010, “The Last Star Before Daybreak” — 14 songs in 14 days!
You can hear the song on the FAWM site or on SoundClick.
And so it ends — this is my 14th song of FAWM 2010. I’ve come a long way. That’s how this track came to be known as “The Last Star Before Daybreak.”
Since FAWM began, I’ve had a grand total of TWO days at work. If there’s any theme to these songs other than my “no robots allowed” rule, it’s the constant battle I fought against the weather.
You might think all the snow days were helpful — and they were. However, shoveling snow and ice, walking the dogs in the few open areas, dealing with extreme cold and power outages . . . it has been a struggle at times. For instance I’ve injured my right wrist, to the point I stopped playing conga drums for these songs, and never got around to doing any slap bass.
So this is it, the last star before daybreak. On Tuesday, the world returns to normal . . . hopefully. I’ll be back at work. I’ll be checking out people’s FAWM creations in the evenings.
I’m not the same as I was at the beginning of February. Back then, it was a time of uncertainty. Night, if you will — a dimness of confidence. In the past 14 days, I’ve played music like never before, and feel like I’ve actually learned a lot in the process.
I owe FAWM a debt of gratitude. This is my third year at it, but I feel like this has been the best one so far.
Anyway, the music:
Breedlove classical guitar. Roland digital piano. Breedlove acoustic bass. Waldorf Blofeld synth, high in the background.
Since my goal for this FAWM was to reclaim rhythm from the machines, I played with time here a bit — the guitar is in 12 (4 units of 3), the piano opening and closing parts are in 4 over 12, and the middle piano part is 6 over 12 (sounding as 6 on 4).
This song was composed and performed using natural rhythm only — without a metronome, click track, or drum machine. “No Robots Allowed” is my theme, and here are the rules I’m following:
For those of you reading this blog, I’ll have more to say in the coming days — it’s been quite a ride.
Almost there! Song #14 from FAWM 2010 is “Strange Lights in the Sky.” You can listen to it on the FAWM site or on SoundClick. Here are the liner notes:
Alright, now I have my own genre: UFO-rock. Here’s my 13th song of FAWM 2010.
First of all, I don’t believe in UFOs, so don’t ask. However, this song takes the point of view of ‘what if’ — what if I’m wrong? What if those lights over Phoenix back in 1997 were the real thing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights
When I was little, my Dad used to read books on subjects such as these — UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, and so on. It’s something I grew up hearing about. Sort of explains why I know about strange things like this, a coin from 17th century France with a ‘UFO’ on it:
http://www.nicap.org/ancient/coin.htm
About the music: the first thing I recorded was the drum track, played via MIDI. The bass line came next. From there, I added the synths and the guitar part.
The key of this song is unusual — it starts in DbmMaj7 (the jazz version of Db minor). Hence that ‘otherworldly’ sound. After the third chorus, it modulates up to DmMaj7, then returns to DbmMaj7 for the ‘rip out’ ending.
This song was composed and performed using natural rhythm only — without a metronome, click track, or drum machine. “No Robots Allowed” is my theme, and here are the rules I’m following:
Only one more song to go! Tomorrow could be the big day.
Song #12 of FAWM 2010 is up — “Rain Just Keeps Coming Down.” You can listen to it on the FAWM site or on SoundClick. Here are the liner notes:
I think I’m finally getting the hang of this. For song #12 of FAWM 2010, here’s a groovin’ instrumental featuring Fender P-Bass, Hammond Organ, and Fender Telecaster.
The drums? MIDI, played ‘live’ through my keyboard. By my ‘robot rules’ (see below), I’m having to do all percussion manually.
But I’ve learned a lot doing this. Here’s one thing: if you’re playing an instrument, trying to keep everyone in time (as I do with bass), probably the most important thing in the entire world is this:
PICK UP NOTES.
Yes, those notes that precede (and slide right into) the groove. Without those important audible cues, and without a metronome or click track, it’s almost impossible for everyone to hit “1″ at the same time. (And ‘everyone’, in this case, is me, trying to play along with the track later.)
This bass line features a nice set of pick up notes, and it made this one of the easiest songs to play and record.
I do like the sound of the Telecaster on this one. It gives me the obligatory buzz and 60 cycle hum occasionally, but for chord melodies, it is unmatched — that crystal clear, ‘jangly’ tone that works so well against bass & organ.
Also, in case this is the first time you’ve read it, listen carefully to the Hammond part — I don’t know what the technical term for this is, but I often set the left hand part (the lower manual) to notes that sound *higher* than the right hand part. You can hear the left hand part as a very subtle, high ‘pad’ sound, coloring the main chord tones.
This song was composed and performed using natural rhythm only — without a metronome, click track, or drum machine. “No Robots Allowed” is my theme, and here are the rules I’m following:
Two more to go! So far, “No Robots Allowed” is turning out to be a pretty good experiment. Certainly I feel a lot more confident of my rhythm skills.
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