Which instrument are you btw?
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ha!
Ok so you’re running the dry signal line in and were planning on using VSTs and plugins for amp and pedals? Is that the problem or just the recording?
I haven’t fully let on how much I Believe In this thread and am Totally All About people setting free and/or sharing the song in their heart and Other Corny Shit but this should give you an idea:
Instruments are fine it’s the recording. Tried to do a quick capture with Audacity but it’s stuck on ALSA, won’t recognize JACK. Opened Reaper, switch to JACK it crashes. LMMS couldn’t see the device either. Ardour couldn’t get off the ground for some other weird Linux reason. Didn’t try Bitwig because I only have a demo installed. Starting to remember why I never fucked around with this too much before.
These guys are saying to route PulseAudio and ALSA as JACK modules so it can all work together. There’s a package for that called pulseaudio-module-jack that wasn’t easy to get. Had to add some repos first, but then it wouldn’t install because there was a weird version conflict with one of the dependencies (libpulse0). Forum bros say it’s just an artifact, that the versions are functionally the same–solution is hard override and force the version it wants. Did that and then had no audio whatsoever. Restarted and couldn’t boot into desktop; somehow Gnome got erased in the process so I spent most of the day getting back to a usable system.
They say if you just fresh install Ubuntu Studio all of this works right out of the box. Also reportedly the most stable DAW experience once it’s set up correctly. At this rate I’ll be back in the year 2049 to let everyone know how it turned out.
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If you have no clue what I’m talking about just imagine this: getting audio routed properly on Linux is like a virtual Eurorack with millions of lines of code as the modules, and then more code as the patch cables. And some of the components in the rack aren’t compatible with others or cause weird glitches and crashes for reasons unknown.
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I was about to say the only thing I know about Linux is that the name ‘Ubuntu’ used to make my friend giggle like 15 years ago.
Am mostly grunching the thread so apologies. I’m a mediocre player of the drums, but since having a child the room where my kit was is a bedroom and I’ve not done much.
Our apartment isn’t going to get bigger so I’ve been vaguely thinking I should get some sort of hand drum and learn playing that instead, but I have no knowledge of them whatsoever. I do like Indian classical music in a casual sort of way, so I obviously dream of becoming a genius on the tabla in later life.
But, let’s try and walk first, does anyone have any advice about what might be sensible to start on, and / or what to look for in buying something?
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Surprisingly good product. It’s actually what I used for the recording posted a few posts back.
Edit: meant to reply to you, @pyatnitski
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Tablas are difficult.
https://www.reddit.com/r/drums/comments/7m8tj5/how_hard_is_it_to_play_the_tabla/
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Yeah, I guess my dreams of stardom in India were always a long shot. I’m not averse to taking lessons but I can’t claim any particular skill so I’ll put finding a teacher first on the list for that one, if anything.
I think I’ve looked at aerodrums before. Issues were firstly being wary of them as nonsense, but a review here seems reliable. The other is that I’d have to get a windows or macos machine to run them on, it seems (or dual boot etc). I had a quick google about running them on linux, but it seemed unlikely.
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My old roommate had a pair and you need to build up muscles in your hands just to make the sounds at all and then practice a ton at making them sound good tonally. It’s much different than hand drumming a djembe or something. Also, Indian music time signatures are pretty complex but that’s probably a good thing to learn anyway. There is a Twitch streamer that plays tablas to modern music requests and he is awesome but I can’t figure out his name right now.
I mentioned someone comment about aerodrums on a different Twitch stream that you are losing out on the strike/rebound feel of playing drums which is kind of important to learn. I’ve never really looked into them.
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Are you dead set on acoustic percussion or would you consider going electronic? If you bought something like an MPC or even some MIDI pad controller you could start finger drumming and/or programming immediately, and the possibilities there are virtually endless. I’ve been finger drumming on this Kurzweil because the keys are so nice and responsive.
My roommate in college was a percussionist and had congas, djembes, bodhrans, etc. that he was banging around on all the time. Obviously nothing can beat the sound and feel of a real instrument but they’re also sort of limited and monotonous after a while.
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It’s just Ubuntu optimized for audio and video production. A lot of the software is already installed and the packages/dependencies are already set up. In Linux, JACK is the low-latency hi-fi server needed for pro audio, but stock Ubuntu ships with PulseAudio mainly for like browsers and shit. On Windows I’d switch over to ASIO4ALL to get low latency.
What you’re saying would be pretty sick though–a bootable OS that’s just a DAW and has no other distractions or overhead. For instance, I have KODI installed as a media server and can use that within the normal OS, but I can also boot directly into KODI. Maybe that option exists for one of DAWS, not sure.
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“Sign up so we can track you” blows but I used a throw-away account on Spotify for the walrus threads and don’t regret it. On desktop, you can listen to unlimited free music with no distractions if running an ad blocker.
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I’m too lazy to change gauges on a floating trem so I just tune down a step or two instead. Stevie Ray played 0.013 gauge bridge cables with high action (tuned down a half step). Brutal setup for blues which is why he had to super glue his finger tips.
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Thanks everyone, this definitely helped me think through what I actually wanted. I realise that what excited me about the idea was going back to acoustic drums and actually hitting things that directly made the noise, which was the fairly simple reason I liked playing the drums in the first place.
Just spent a while on the youtubes and have a line on a guy who restores and sells djembe about half an hour’s drive away that looks interesting. I think I’d be glad of the aerodrums so I can still ‘play’ a kit if I want to, but that might come later when I can also be arsed to sort out the technical side.
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