Linux Audio

Hey, your welcome Atta. :D

We all need encouragement from time to time. Sound like you had some evaluation of your playing and recording. Good stuff! It makes you a better player!

It's funny that for most western people, including myself, playing anything that is not in 4/4 did not seem to come naturally. It took me years to be able to just feel the groove in odd time signatures. But rest assured, it does eventually happen with enough practice. I eventually got to a point where I would start hearing song ideas in odd time signatures and sometimes not have any idea what its time signature was. Turns out its because when you hear songs ideas that change time signature every few bars, it's difficult to count it all out. In those cases it's just better to play it by feel.

Can't wait to hear your song though. Keep working at it! :D

Yeah, I'm going to have to do some more thinking about this computer that failed. And what is worth sinking money into. It occurred to me that I could probably buy an inexpensive motherboard with a Intel Atom in it and some new RAM that probably wouldn't be much more that the cost to fix this current board. I've got some thinking and more research to do.

Peace & Love

Hi LtL.

Thanks for the encouragement, it's really appreciated.

I'm definitely learning a lot as I go through the process. For one thing, the recording (take after take after take) has prompted me to take a fresh look at how I normally play and make adjustments so that I can actually get a decent track laid down. Since I usually play and sing alone, my MO guitar-wise is to fill in any 'empty' space with as much music as I can. It's sort of like trying to play both rhythm and lead at the same time, with significant compromises made in both parts. It sounds good enough when I'm just playing casually, but that way of playing really doesn't lend itself too well to recording, since it's difficult and there are so many opportunities to screw up. So I'm sort of splitting things up in a way that's better suited to recording: plain old, straight-forward strumming rhythm on one track, and any embellishments will go on another.

That re-evaluation is mercifully paying off: I have a decent track that just needs a couple of punched in corrections, and I think I'll be happy enough with it.

I also changed the song I wanted to record. The one I was working on yesterday is in 3/4, which always seems to mess with me. I couldn't tell you why, but recovering from little rhythmic errors is harder for me in 3/4. If the song's in 4/4, I can slip up and recover by the next beat, but in 3/4 it's like I stay tripped up for a whole measure. Probably an indication that playing bass is not in my future. :)

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That's a real bummer about your computer. I've never had that happen to me, but I'd be cautious about having the capacitors replaced. At the very least, you'll want to know for certain that there's no other unseen damage to the board before paying someone to fix the obvious problem. Either way, I hope it doesn't set you back too much.

Hello Atta, :)

I know exactly what you are talking about as afar the recording displaying all the little inaccuracies in your playing. And it being difficult to get though four minutes of recording with no mistakes. Keep at it though. From my experience, it makes you a much better player from the process of listening to how you played. And then going back to re-record the track to correct all the mistakes. This has been one of the blessing for me from collaborating here at Indaba. As I previously had almost no recording experience. And I remember years ago band mates and colleges telling me that it is good to listen to recordings of yourself. And I never really understood why until I started collaborating here. I have to say though, as far as trying to record my own original bass lines that my experience is somewhat similar to yours. Three to four minutes seems like forever to be completely focused on a repetitive bass line and get it completely right with no accompaniment besides a click track. I suspect that is why I've excelled more at adding to an existing session. I've yet to been able to record anything solid enough to put out there as my own session as far as just a bass line.

“I suppose that the embarrassment of having to listen to myself sound like crap is just part of the process of getting back into the swing of things. I'll have another go at it tomorrow.”

It is, but don't be too hard on yourself. If you keep at it, that embarrassment will shortly turn into pride and satisfaction of having turned out a perfect track of original music! :D

That's great that your Linux install works perfectly. And so little latency! That's awesome!

On a different note...
My secondary computer that runs Ubuntu 8.04 exclusively has died the death of cheap Taiwan made capacitors. The first ever of my three computers I've ever owned that has died this way, and it's not even the oldest. All of the fifteen to twenty of the largest size capacitors on the motherboard are all bulging out on top with what looks like various amounts of brown and white stuff on top of them. I found this out last week when I powered it on and all the LED lights on the case and peripherals would come on solid while the motherboard speakers just emits a buzzing noise and does not boot. So now I'm having to have to find out if it is less expensive to pay a local electronics technician to replace the capacitors on this motherboard. Or buy a used motherboard from Ebay. I had a glance at Ebay already and it appears that the socket 370 motherboards available are all OEM boards out of HP computers for about $20 USD with shipping. I'd really rather not use an OEM board though, particularly from HP. As they have a habit of sometimes being unstable and having BIOS bugs that they never fix. Of course the replacement motherboard could end up having the same problem. :P

I was planning on turning this computer into my IPCop router once I upgrade my primary computer. As my current IPCop computer is my first PC I've ever owned, which is an AMD K6-2 450Mhz. It runs fine and has enough CPU power for now. But if the system requirements for the next version of IPCop increase, I may need a faster computer to run it.

Any of you people here ever have a computer that failed from poorly designed leaking or exploding capacitors? It's supposedly quite common. Almost all the major motherboard manufacturers have used bad capacitors at one time or another, or still are. Including the companies that make PC's for the major OEM's. Dell had a rash of bad motherboards due to this, I understand that HP has also.

Some links:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/lea...

http://www.tecnopolis.ca/tecnopolis/leakycaps.html

http://news.cnet.com/PCs-plagued-by-bad-capacit...

Peace & Love

Ugh. Nothing but frustration today.

Most of my recent recording has been just casual, spur of the moment sketches-- little notes to myself so I don't forget a melody or chord progression or vocal. But it's been a while since I actually sat down to do any 'serious' recording, and it's made me realize that I really need to play and practice more. And it's also driven home that four minutes is an eternity when you're rusty and playing solo.

I suppose that the embarrassment of having to listen to myself sound like crap is just part of the process of getting back into the swing of things. I'll have another go at it tomorrow.

On a subject in line with the purpose of this group: My Linux installation has behaved wonderfully for me today. I may have been frustrated by my own personal issues, but the system has been dead-on perfect, delivering line-in and direct-in recording, reference beats from Hydrogen, effects from Creox, recording in both Ardour and Audacity, and doing it all at <1.5 msec latency without a single xrun beyond the typical blips you see when starting up an application.

Hello Atta, :)

Damn! That was one hell of a deal for that amp! Yeah, a lot of musicians are not technically minded enough to repair or maintain their equipment. Are you sure you're not a bass player? LOL The bass guitarist is often stereo typed as the technically minded musicians. And it often holds up.

Well, it sounds like Fender doesn't pay attention to quality control in their imported line. And it makes me suspect that they use this to their advantage to get people to buy their more expensive American line. As a number of high quality luthiers have an imported line to offer a lower cost alternative to their locally made instruments. It's just how much the company wants to invest in quality control in the manufacturing.

I suppose that shouldn't surprise me that your Ovation needs the right string to sound good. That's cool that you experimented till you found what worked for you. The quest for good tone! Once you start, you never stop! LOL I've never been a fan of bronze strings on acoustic guitars as they often sound too dull to me. But the Ovation is certainly a different case with it's unusual design and use of what I assume to be a synthetic material for the back of the body.

As long as your not getting any obvious sound issues from the tube in your amp, there is really no reason to replace it. Mine starts to crackle intermittently as it goes bad, and it gets more frequent and worse over time. I've heard people say you should re-tube your amp once a year. But I think that is bull! In a well designed tube amp, the tubes should last for many years.

That's a neat idea to build your own tube amp! It's certainly simple enough in it's circuitry to build at home with inexpensive simple tools. Not like trying to build your own computer motherboard or something. LOL I'm actually not a huge fan of tube amps for bass guitars. It's not as necessary for good tone. And is much more expensive to purchase, and also to replace the tubes when they fail as there is more in them. Plus they can't put out the amount of wattage that modern solid state amps can. Modern basses with a low B need lot's of wattage headroom in the amp to accurately push those really low notes at decent volumes. If you think back a number of years, GK used to make all solid state amp heads in the models 400RB and 800RB that are still classics for sweet bass guitar tone. And this was back before all this tube emulation circuitry had gotten good.

Peace & Love