Captain's log #10
Yesterday I reached my objective of making some new noise. The passage
is still shaky, but, well, the journey from point A to point B has
already been blazed.
After a first part of the night doing all I could to save my relationship with Hydrogen, to no avail, I finally decided to move to Drumgizmo.
That thing rocks. The moment I got the first sound, and I saw several levels on the screen going up at the same time (because of the mic bleed simulation), I felt a thrill similar to the first time I used software EQ in real time (Ardour 2, 2010, if I remember correctly). The only thing that doesn't convince me much as of now is that humanization is only an on-off control, not a knob as in Hydrogen. But the sound is gorgeous, and I can further humanize things to my liking manually if I have to.
The objections to my enthusiasm are two pronged; on one side the aforementioned fear of a final lack of consistency in the album; I'm hoping that there's enough unifying factor in the fact that all songs are played with the same equipment, by the same guy, and other than drums with pretty much the same software. What in no way I'm inclined to do is going back yet again over these songs and redo the drums. If it has to be a frankenstein album, then so be it, the next one will come out better.
The other but is technical; I'm using Ardour's builtin Midi editor, a tool that would be terrific if it were more robust; having all your editing needs served in one single program -given that Drumgizmo is an LV2 plugin-, with an editor that is much more likable to me than Hydrogen's or Rosegarden's, and in which you get a quick start because of all your hours of previous Ardour training... However, short after starting with the drums for "Now you're talking", I discovered some of the weird behaviors I had heard comments about (garbled rendering, deleted notes that come back from the dead, copy pastes that paste nothing...) So the final neural cycles of my day went to investigate an alternative; I found I don't think I can easily decipher the tutorials that appeared before me, so what I'm going to do is trying to do a whole song with Ardour's editor, to see if I can and how bad the errors are, and I'll climb that mountain at some other time.
So the menu for today is drumming fun, it seems, with a pinch of UI frustration, maybe?
Today is my entry #10. I'm going to extend until #16, let's say as a homage to Iggy Pop's "Sweet sixteen".
---------------
Correction to a previous entry: Deadcross' line goes "Dance like nobody is LOOKING" (so it later rhymes with "cooking").
After a first part of the night doing all I could to save my relationship with Hydrogen, to no avail, I finally decided to move to Drumgizmo.
That thing rocks. The moment I got the first sound, and I saw several levels on the screen going up at the same time (because of the mic bleed simulation), I felt a thrill similar to the first time I used software EQ in real time (Ardour 2, 2010, if I remember correctly). The only thing that doesn't convince me much as of now is that humanization is only an on-off control, not a knob as in Hydrogen. But the sound is gorgeous, and I can further humanize things to my liking manually if I have to.
The objections to my enthusiasm are two pronged; on one side the aforementioned fear of a final lack of consistency in the album; I'm hoping that there's enough unifying factor in the fact that all songs are played with the same equipment, by the same guy, and other than drums with pretty much the same software. What in no way I'm inclined to do is going back yet again over these songs and redo the drums. If it has to be a frankenstein album, then so be it, the next one will come out better.
The other but is technical; I'm using Ardour's builtin Midi editor, a tool that would be terrific if it were more robust; having all your editing needs served in one single program -given that Drumgizmo is an LV2 plugin-, with an editor that is much more likable to me than Hydrogen's or Rosegarden's, and in which you get a quick start because of all your hours of previous Ardour training... However, short after starting with the drums for "Now you're talking", I discovered some of the weird behaviors I had heard comments about (garbled rendering, deleted notes that come back from the dead, copy pastes that paste nothing...) So the final neural cycles of my day went to investigate an alternative; I found I don't think I can easily decipher the tutorials that appeared before me, so what I'm going to do is trying to do a whole song with Ardour's editor, to see if I can and how bad the errors are, and I'll climb that mountain at some other time.
So the menu for today is drumming fun, it seems, with a pinch of UI frustration, maybe?
Today is my entry #10. I'm going to extend until #16, let's say as a homage to Iggy Pop's "Sweet sixteen".
---------------
Correction to a previous entry: Deadcross' line goes "Dance like nobody is LOOKING" (so it later rhymes with "cooking").
