[00:00.000 --> 00:11.240]  Okay, then we continue with music with the next talk which is become a rock star using
[00:11.240 --> 00:12.240]  free and open source software.
[00:12.240 --> 00:13.240]  Please welcome Lorenzo.
[00:13.240 --> 00:14.240]  Thank you.
[00:14.240 --> 00:15.240]  Thank you very much.
[00:15.240 --> 00:23.760]  And it's going to be a hard job following up a guided broad, a synthesizer and an amplifier.
[00:23.760 --> 00:27.760]  I didn't bring anything to the table, so you'll just have to endure me talking about it.
[00:27.760 --> 00:29.240]  I hope it's fine anyway.
[00:29.240 --> 00:33.040]  And first of all, this is my first talk in open media, and I already feel like a fraud
[00:33.040 --> 00:36.600]  because clickbait alert, I'm not a rock star at all.
[00:36.600 --> 00:39.240]  I mean, this is an email that I got from Spotify last month.
[00:39.240 --> 00:41.080]  I got two listeners last month.
[00:41.080 --> 00:42.280]  One of those was me.
[00:42.280 --> 00:45.960]  So I think on average, you need a bit more than that.
[00:45.960 --> 00:48.360]  We actually call the rock star, but it doesn't really matter.
[00:48.360 --> 00:53.200]  I had a lot of fun in the past few years just playing with music and open source, I mean,
[00:53.200 --> 00:57.680]  and I had to use this for something rather than just show them around the home.
[00:57.680 --> 01:01.120]  And for a living, of course, I don't do any music at all.
[01:01.120 --> 01:04.680]  I'm just a hobbyist musician, and that's what I'm going to be talking about today.
[01:04.680 --> 01:09.000]  In the real world, I am a WebRTC developer, for instance, involved in some of the things
[01:09.000 --> 01:11.560]  that Dan mentioned in this previous talk.
[01:11.560 --> 01:17.440]  I love a lot hard rock, metal, orchestral music, symphonic music, when they work together
[01:17.440 --> 01:18.440]  as well.
[01:18.440 --> 01:21.800]  And this is something that I've been trying to do in my own music as well.
[01:21.800 --> 01:24.240]  And here you can find some links if you want to get in touch.
[01:24.240 --> 01:28.280]  For instance, you can get in touch on mastodon, a couple of links to my music as well, and
[01:28.280 --> 01:29.880]  so on and so forth.
[01:29.880 --> 01:33.880]  And this is just a very basic and completely out of order table of content.
[01:33.880 --> 01:37.920]  So I talk about a few different things, and I will not follow this order because I will
[01:37.920 --> 01:43.080]  mostly follow the order by which I learned how to do things with music and Linux in the
[01:43.080 --> 01:44.080]  first place.
[01:44.080 --> 01:50.240]  So how I tried to dip my toes into a few different things, and how I eventually learned how to
[01:50.240 --> 01:53.160]  do some more complex things in the process.
[01:53.160 --> 01:58.040]  And of course, it will be a very, if you pass the term, a very dumb presentation because
[01:58.040 --> 01:59.640]  I will only scratch the surface.
[01:59.640 --> 02:06.120]  I'll try to introduce several different concepts, and really just to tickle your interest enough
[02:06.120 --> 02:09.120]  so that maybe you have your own guitar getting dusted.
[02:09.120 --> 02:13.120]  You don't know how to get it started with, for instance, using your laptop to do some
[02:13.120 --> 02:17.360]  music, and maybe this presentation will tickle your interest and you start doing something.
[02:17.360 --> 02:21.240]  And besides, there is a very good chance that I'll say something dumb as well, or maybe
[02:21.240 --> 02:22.240]  something incorrect.
[02:22.240 --> 02:24.200]  So if I do, please bear with me.
[02:24.200 --> 02:28.280]  It's really a high-level presentation and something that's really meant as an introduction,
[02:28.280 --> 02:32.200]  not really something that goes very much in detail.
[02:32.200 --> 02:37.440]  And when I first started learning about all these, I was really surprised by how mature,
[02:37.440 --> 02:42.160]  for instance, Linux and the audio ecosystems was to actually do music production on those
[02:42.160 --> 02:47.880]  machines because you always assumed the world around was Linux is not good enough to do
[02:47.880 --> 02:48.880]  real-time music.
[02:48.880 --> 02:52.880]  You have to use Windows or MacOS or whatever, and I disagree with that because especially
[02:52.880 --> 02:57.600]  when I started with Jack at the time, I found a very interesting ecosystem to do things.
[02:57.600 --> 03:02.840]  And especially, I really loved the port-based approach that allowed you not to use monolithic
[03:02.840 --> 03:07.240]  applications to do things, but you have different applications that you can just connect arbitrarily
[03:07.240 --> 03:13.760]  any way you want, possibly use the same source to connect to multiple applications, implement
[03:13.760 --> 03:18.840]  very complex workflows, and all in real-time and very low latency, which was really amazing.
[03:18.840 --> 03:24.240]  And the fact that you can have all these different applications talking to each other means that
[03:24.240 --> 03:29.640]  you also often have a lot of different applications implementing more or less the same requirements.
[03:29.640 --> 03:34.600]  So you will have different synthesizers or different ways of implementing effects for
[03:34.600 --> 03:36.240]  your guitars and so on.
[03:36.240 --> 03:40.960]  And often, they don't really need to be a substitution for one or the other.
[03:40.960 --> 03:45.240]  Maybe for one genre, it's better to use some applications, for some others, it's better
[03:45.240 --> 03:46.240]  using others.
[03:46.240 --> 03:51.480]  It's really up to your preference and how you like to work with music, and some tools
[03:51.480 --> 03:55.840]  may make sense more than others in that sense.
[03:55.840 --> 04:00.800]  And it's probably useless to make this distinction right now because we just had a very interesting
[04:00.800 --> 04:05.000]  presentation by Ernst, who explained a bit what MIDI signals are.
[04:05.000 --> 04:11.160]  So when we talk about music production, especially on Linux and Jack, you do have to know basically
[04:11.160 --> 04:16.000]  that you have audio signals, so a sound that has already been processed, recorded or something
[04:16.000 --> 04:18.080]  away from of some sort.
[04:18.080 --> 04:22.800]  And MIDI signals that just carry information that is then used to produce sounds.
[04:22.800 --> 04:26.760]  And so of course, these two can go through very different workflows.
[04:26.760 --> 04:32.480]  Different applications can handle just one or both or maybe none at all.
[04:32.480 --> 04:36.360]  What's really important though is, again, how you can actually have different applications
[04:36.360 --> 04:38.400]  that you connect arbitrarily on your own way.
[04:38.400 --> 04:42.680]  That was at the very basis of how Jack was conceived at the very beginning.
[04:42.680 --> 04:49.000]  And Jack a few years ago was really the way to do very low latency audio on Linux systems.
[04:49.000 --> 04:53.160]  The downside of that, it was that it was a bit complex to set up and manage.
[04:53.160 --> 04:57.640]  And luckily, and we've seen a presentation by WIM this morning, PipeWare has made this
[04:57.640 --> 04:58.640]  so much simpler.
[04:58.640 --> 05:00.720]  So I was a bit skeptical at the beginning.
[05:00.720 --> 05:05.480]  I just jumped the bag on a couple of weeks ago.
[05:05.480 --> 05:11.240]  And basically, PipeWare comes with an implementation of Jack that basically hides all the complex.
[05:11.240 --> 05:15.360]  I mean, the applications think they're still using Jack, but in practice you're using
[05:15.360 --> 05:20.160]  PipeWare instead, which means that you can start using also applications that were not
[05:20.160 --> 05:25.800]  specifically conceived for Jack purposes and work on them together while you work on music
[05:25.800 --> 05:27.600]  production of some sort.
[05:27.600 --> 05:31.560]  And all of these small boxes that you see over there are basically different processes.
[05:31.560 --> 05:36.360]  And you see that some of them have inputs, some of them have outputs, either one or both
[05:36.360 --> 05:37.800]  these sort of things.
[05:37.800 --> 05:41.920]  And this is what allows you to basically just arbitrarily connect different applications
[05:41.920 --> 05:47.440]  to each other to, again, create more complex workflows that you can get out of what a single
[05:47.440 --> 05:48.680]  application can do.
[05:48.680 --> 05:51.320]  And I'll show a couple of practical examples in a minute.
[05:51.320 --> 05:56.040]  So let's assume that you have that whole guitar getting dusted home and now you want
[05:56.040 --> 05:57.040]  to get some noise.
[05:57.040 --> 05:59.640]  You want to connect it to your laptop and do something.
[05:59.640 --> 06:04.560]  So what you don't do is, of course, just plug it in the microphone slot because that
[06:04.560 --> 06:06.080]  will cause problems.
[06:06.080 --> 06:08.760]  What you need is some sort of an audio interface instead.
[06:08.760 --> 06:14.400]  So something like an external sound card that has some inputs that do accept your instrument
[06:14.400 --> 06:15.680]  instead.
[06:15.680 --> 06:21.400]  And often these interfaces come with USB interfaces and so are very easy to plug.
[06:21.400 --> 06:25.080]  Your reprinting system will very likely recognize them out of the box.
[06:25.080 --> 06:27.280]  And they will be available as a system capture.
[06:27.280 --> 06:30.480]  And so as one of these boxes that we saw over there.
[06:30.480 --> 06:34.240]  So something that you can connect to something else.
[06:34.240 --> 06:37.560]  And the one that I have at home, and spoiler alert, it didn't come with the cat.
[06:37.560 --> 06:40.960]  The cat came with something else.
[06:40.960 --> 06:47.120]  I personally bought this Focusrite Scarlett Solo because it's quite inexpensive.
[06:47.120 --> 06:52.800]  It's very common among hobbyists because it already provides decent enough quality for
[06:52.800 --> 06:53.920]  recording at home.
[06:53.920 --> 06:56.960]  It's very flexible and I really like it a lot.
[06:56.960 --> 07:00.880]  And basically the one that I bought basically comes with two separate inputs.
[07:00.880 --> 07:05.320]  So it has a USB interface which recognizes an external USB sound card by the operating
[07:05.320 --> 07:06.720]  system.
[07:06.720 --> 07:09.800]  And mine in particular, I think later versions changed this a bit.
[07:09.800 --> 07:15.040]  But it comes with one input that is XLR, the typical cable that you use for microphones
[07:15.040 --> 07:16.200]  for instance.
[07:16.200 --> 07:20.760]  And another one is the cable, the typical guitar jack slot.
[07:20.760 --> 07:25.160]  And since it's two different inputs, when you connect it to the operating system, the
[07:25.160 --> 07:29.120]  box that you see, which may have this name or an entirely different name depending on
[07:29.120 --> 07:33.920]  what you're using, shows two different channels, which means that depending on where you're
[07:33.920 --> 07:38.720]  actually plugging what you want to plug, it will come out of one of those two different
[07:38.720 --> 07:42.920]  channels for what you want to do, which opens the door to a lot of different things that
[07:42.920 --> 07:43.920]  you can do.
[07:43.920 --> 07:49.040]  Because for instance, I could plug my guitar directly into this external sound card.
[07:49.040 --> 07:52.080]  In this case, I'm plugging it into the jack slot.
[07:52.080 --> 07:56.280]  That's capture number two, which means that I can then use this capture number two to
[07:56.280 --> 07:57.280]  do something.
[07:57.280 --> 08:02.320]  And the best thing that I can do is just connect it to the playback system so that I hear what
[08:02.320 --> 08:05.840]  I'm playing just unencoded.
[08:05.840 --> 08:11.240]  So I don't hear any effects, it's just the raw sound of the guitar, but it's something
[08:11.240 --> 08:12.240]  that I can do.
[08:12.240 --> 08:15.680]  Of course, I can do something more interesting and we'll show an example later.
[08:15.680 --> 08:19.720]  Or maybe you have a very good amplifier at home and a very good microphone.
[08:19.720 --> 08:26.200]  You put the microphone in front of the amplifier, you connect it to the first slot.
[08:26.200 --> 08:31.560]  And what you get when you're on your laptop is an already distorted, for instance, sound
[08:31.560 --> 08:34.440]  of your guitar out of your amplifier.
[08:34.440 --> 08:38.120]  Or maybe you can use them both at the same time, which is what I do often for classical
[08:38.120 --> 08:45.000]  and acoustic guitars, for instance, where I attach both the pickup of the guitar, whether
[08:45.000 --> 08:47.280]  it's integrated or added.
[08:47.280 --> 08:51.360]  And I put the microphone in front of the guitar just so that I capture different frequencies,
[08:51.360 --> 08:52.360]  different sounds.
[08:52.360 --> 08:56.720]  Together, they give me a more full sound than what they would give me individually.
[08:56.720 --> 09:00.960]  I mean, again, it's just very simple examples that show you that before you couldn't do
[09:00.960 --> 09:05.880]  anything with an external sound card like this, now you have ways to put your instrument
[09:05.880 --> 09:11.160]  and get it part of a workflow in your own laptop and do something cool.
[09:11.160 --> 09:14.160]  And one cool thing that you could do, for instance, is just launch Guitarix.
[09:14.160 --> 09:20.600]  Guitarix is a very complex and effective guitar simulator, basically.
[09:20.600 --> 09:25.240]  So it has different beats that you can, it's very configurable, so you can create your
[09:25.240 --> 09:30.640]  own configuration, you can choose the different beats, what you want, how you want your amplifier
[09:30.640 --> 09:31.640]  to look like.
[09:31.640 --> 09:34.720]  I'm really stupid in that sense, so I never really tried to do it myself.
[09:34.720 --> 09:37.880]  I work a lot with presets shared by the community.
[09:37.880 --> 09:42.120]  But if you are savvy enough, you can just do things on your own to create, to really
[09:42.120 --> 09:48.000]  shape your own sound so that the guitar sounds exactly how you want it to sound like.
[09:48.000 --> 09:52.560]  And when you launch Guitarix, it basically spawns two different boxes, as far as jack
[09:52.560 --> 09:58.800]  or slash pipe, again, when I'm seeing jack, you can assume I'm also just implying pipe
[09:58.800 --> 10:01.880]  or usage as a consequence.
[10:01.880 --> 10:05.880]  Basically it comes with two different boxes, one as an amplifier and one for effects.
[10:05.880 --> 10:11.680]  And then it means that since we had the jack in my Scarlett Focusrite was capture number
[10:11.680 --> 10:16.120]  two, I connect that to the amplifier, I connect the amplifier to the effects, I connect the
[10:16.120 --> 10:21.560]  effects to whatever I want, playback, something that records it, it's really that simple.
[10:21.560 --> 10:28.400]  So you have already created a workflow out of that beat that you manage to capture thanks
[10:28.400 --> 10:30.760]  to the external audio interface.
[10:30.760 --> 10:34.400]  Another application that I love a lot as a guitar player is Racka Rack.
[10:34.400 --> 10:40.080]  I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly or not, which is not a guitar amplifier simulator
[10:40.080 --> 10:45.400]  as Guitarix is, it's basically a pedal board simulator instead.
[10:45.400 --> 10:49.680]  So it has a lot of different effects that you can use and combine.
[10:49.680 --> 10:52.680]  It also comes with a lot of different presets.
[10:52.680 --> 10:56.800]  I particularly love the clean sounds that you can get out of Racka Rack.
[10:56.800 --> 10:58.120]  And again, similar approach.
[10:58.120 --> 11:03.600]  You connect whatever capture you add your guitar on to Racka Rack and then the output
[11:03.600 --> 11:09.640]  of that, so the processed sound of the guitar, it's something that you can end up using.
[11:09.640 --> 11:14.960]  You can do something more complex or, in some cases, also damned by just possibly using
[11:14.960 --> 11:19.160]  both Guitarix and Racka Rack at the same time, so putting them one after the other.
[11:19.160 --> 11:23.360]  This is a very simple example and probably doesn't make sense to have the effects box
[11:23.360 --> 11:29.360]  in between there, but this is a similar approach is what I use, for instance, myself in one
[11:29.360 --> 11:33.720]  of the songs because I add an effect that I like in Guitarix, but I also need a sustainer
[11:33.720 --> 11:35.320]  effect in Racka Rack as well.
[11:35.320 --> 11:38.720]  So I basically just chain them in my workflow.
[11:38.720 --> 11:43.400]  I plug my guitar in the sound card, that Guitarix distorted and then Racka Rack do some more
[11:43.400 --> 11:47.560]  things with the sound before I actually used it for something.
[11:47.560 --> 11:51.840]  And again, this is just very simple examples that are meant to show you how easy it is
[11:51.840 --> 11:57.240]  to create a workflow using different applications out of sounds that you have access to, to
[11:57.240 --> 12:00.240]  do some interesting and really cool things.
[12:00.240 --> 12:05.720]  And so let's assume that basically now we managed to get a decent sound.
[12:05.720 --> 12:10.560]  Now we just want to record something because we want to either write a song or whatever.
[12:10.560 --> 12:14.400]  And of course, if you want to do something very simple, so just record the sounds and
[12:14.400 --> 12:20.320]  then use them somewhere else, you can use any tool that is actually able of consuming
[12:20.320 --> 12:21.320]  these sources.
[12:21.320 --> 12:25.560]  And so Audacity or Gstreamer come to mind, but there's so many more.
[12:25.560 --> 12:31.280]  If you want to do something more complex, maybe work to write a song no matter how complex
[12:31.280 --> 12:35.680]  it is, you'll want to work within some sort of a project instead.
[12:35.680 --> 12:40.200]  So maybe in an application that is capable of handling multiple tracks at the same time
[12:40.200 --> 12:45.120]  and that maybe can add different filters to all these tracks that you're having.
[12:45.120 --> 12:50.520]  So because you need a compressor on one or maybe reverb on some tracks or you need equalization
[12:50.520 --> 12:52.400]  or something like this.
[12:52.400 --> 12:56.280]  And this is the kind of application that you use a digital audio workstation for.
[12:56.280 --> 12:59.200]  And DAV is a short term for that.
[12:59.200 --> 13:03.560]  And mostly because these kind of applications are specifically conceived to do exactly that.
[13:03.560 --> 13:10.040]  So possibly record things in real time or use existing assets, edit and produce, although
[13:10.040 --> 13:15.400]  these are different audio files in different ways, they often support media as well.
[13:15.400 --> 13:20.000]  And especially most of them have a modular nature that allows you to use existing models
[13:20.000 --> 13:27.120]  that are part of the open source ecosystem to add different effects to any of those tracks,
[13:27.120 --> 13:31.200]  either as a whole, for instance, a filter that applies to multiple tracks at the same
[13:31.200 --> 13:33.880]  time or just one of them and so on and so forth.
[13:33.880 --> 13:40.000]  Because you may want equalization, compression, I mean whatever is part of the usual audio
[13:40.000 --> 13:44.240]  editing process in a regular music studio, if you want, it's something that a digital
[13:44.240 --> 13:46.600]  audio workstation can provide for you.
[13:46.600 --> 13:50.520]  So if you've ever heard, for instance, of Pro Tools and stuff like this, this is exactly
[13:50.520 --> 13:54.680]  what a digital audio workstation can do for you.
[13:54.680 --> 14:00.200]  And the one that I personally use is called Ardour, which is a very powerful component.
[14:00.200 --> 14:03.320]  I personally use this because it was the first one I stumbled upon.
[14:03.320 --> 14:07.240]  I fell in love with it at the time and I just kept on learning.
[14:07.240 --> 14:10.360]  But again, there are more than that you can use out there.
[14:10.360 --> 14:15.480]  There's Qtractor, there's Reaper, which is not open source, but it's also very used in
[14:15.480 --> 14:19.560]  the open source applications as well.
[14:19.560 --> 14:24.160]  And one thing that you'll notice when you start using an application like this is that
[14:24.160 --> 14:29.520]  the box is in that graph that I showed, for instance, on Jack or Piper, is going to explode
[14:29.520 --> 14:33.720]  because a digital audio workstation is going to handle a lot of tracks and those tracks
[14:33.720 --> 14:36.240]  are going to be connected to a lot of things.
[14:36.240 --> 14:39.560]  And so you'll see a huge amount of connections out there.
[14:39.560 --> 14:44.120]  And luckily for you, you don't really have to create those connections on your own because
[14:44.120 --> 14:46.080]  otherwise you will go crazy.
[14:46.080 --> 14:50.840]  Often it's the digital audio workstation that does this for you and there are easier ways
[14:50.840 --> 14:57.200]  to change those connections if you need to from the user interfaces of all those applications.
[14:57.200 --> 15:02.000]  And most importantly, this shows that no matter how monolithic now this application can look
[15:02.000 --> 15:06.560]  like, it's still able to communicate with all those external applications that we mentioned.
[15:06.560 --> 15:11.120]  So you can still have, for instance, an outdoor session open, a guitar rig session open, you
[15:11.120 --> 15:16.400]  connect your guitar to guitar rigs and then you connect your guitar rigs to that in order
[15:16.400 --> 15:20.880]  for it to record it, or maybe you have guitar rigs as a plug-in so that you just record
[15:20.880 --> 15:25.080]  the clean sound and then you have it processed in different ways any time that you needed
[15:25.080 --> 15:27.760]  these sort of things.
[15:27.760 --> 15:31.400]  And so let's assume that we have now bass and guitars.
[15:31.400 --> 15:35.280]  I am assuming that bass and guitars, you can process them pretty much the same way.
[15:35.280 --> 15:39.400]  I'm sure that there are bass players that will disagree with me, but the concept is
[15:39.400 --> 15:40.400]  like this.
[15:40.400 --> 15:46.360]  Let's say that you now need drums and let's assume that you're like me, I'm a WebRTC developer,
[15:46.360 --> 15:50.200]  I have no friends, so I don't have any drummer friend either.
[15:50.200 --> 15:55.040]  So I have to create a virtual one instead, so something that plays drums for me because
[15:55.040 --> 15:57.400]  I am at home doing nothing.
[15:57.400 --> 16:02.720]  And which means that this is the very first good example of a virtual instrument.
[16:02.720 --> 16:07.960]  So I need to write the drum parts somehow and then I need to sequence them somehow,
[16:07.960 --> 16:12.120]  which means that the drum parts will be the instructions so what I want to be played and
[16:12.120 --> 16:15.680]  then something will actually translate them to a kick sound, there's an air sound, these
[16:15.680 --> 16:17.400]  sort of things.
[16:17.400 --> 16:21.840]  And of course you can just play, write the MIDI manually or use something like Melrose
[16:21.840 --> 16:23.080]  as we've seen.
[16:23.080 --> 16:27.120]  What I found out that is for drums, it's much easier to work with a pattern bass instead,
[16:27.120 --> 16:32.440]  mostly because of the rhythmic nature of the instrument and the fact that you can often
[16:32.440 --> 16:37.680]  do some repetitions, maybe some variations and then just play a bit with those instead.
[16:37.680 --> 16:43.480]  And personally I like hydrogen a lot in that sense, because it allows you to create multiple
[16:43.480 --> 16:49.200]  patterns for instance, it has all the different parts of a drum, you can say within the context
[16:49.200 --> 16:54.840]  of a measure, play this, this, this, this and this point, a kick here and here and here,
[16:54.840 --> 16:59.160]  you create different patterns, you specify the sequence of those patterns or even some
[16:59.160 --> 17:04.480]  patterns in parallel if you use some patterns just to create variations, these sort of things.
[17:04.480 --> 17:09.800]  And then you basically hydrogen plays drums for you out of what you just wrote basically.
[17:09.800 --> 17:14.840]  And while hydrogen comes with its own sounds, which is really cool, I personally just use
[17:14.840 --> 17:18.760]  hydrogen to write the parts but then use drum gizmo to actually render them mostly because
[17:18.760 --> 17:24.800]  drum gizmo is probably the most advanced drum renderer that is out there because it's basically
[17:24.800 --> 17:31.680]  a lot of drum keys that were captured and recorded by professional drummers, they created samples
[17:31.680 --> 17:39.040]  and then using drum gizmo you can replay them also using, I mean, I'm not even going to try and
[17:39.040 --> 17:43.920]  explain how drum gizmo works because it's very complex but it's suffices to say that it has so
[17:43.920 --> 17:49.000]  many channels that it's the best way to actually get drum sounds out there and also work with them
[17:49.000 --> 17:55.400]  in within the mixing process, which means that from a jack perspective, I just use hydrogen to
[17:56.120 --> 18:01.880]  generate the drum parts and then I connect the MIDI output of hydrogen to drum gizmo and then
[18:01.880 --> 18:07.240]  whatever drum gizmo generates I use within the context of my own application. That's basically
[18:07.240 --> 18:13.160]  how it works. And now that we dipped our toe in the MIDI world, what can we do with other instruments
[18:13.160 --> 18:18.840]  because maybe we want a keyboard background, a pad or a piano solo or even a full orchestra
[18:18.840 --> 18:25.720]  behind our music. And again, this is what MIDI is for because basically we don't have access to a
[18:25.720 --> 18:32.440]  whole orchestra because I don't have 30,000 euros to pay a lot of players. So what I do is I just
[18:32.440 --> 18:36.840]  sketch and write the notes for all the different instruments that are involved and then those
[18:36.840 --> 18:41.480]  notes, that information will be translated to actual sounds. So something will be played by
[18:41.480 --> 18:46.920]  something that simulates strings, something else will simulate a trumpet, these sort of things.
[18:46.920 --> 18:51.400]  And of course, these notes can come from different places. It can come from an hardware keyboard,
[18:51.400 --> 18:56.360]  as we saw in the previous presentation with Melrose or it can come from something that you wrote,
[18:56.360 --> 19:01.960]  for instance, using Melrose or other approaches. And I am not a keyboard player, but I did buy
[19:01.960 --> 19:07.720]  this small tiny thing over here that again is just plug and play. You plug it in there, it becomes a
[19:07.720 --> 19:13.240]  MIDI input that you can use for different things. And once you have it, you can have a lot of
[19:13.240 --> 19:18.360]  different ways of rendering MIDI sounds. Soundphones are historically the oldest and easiest way to
[19:18.360 --> 19:24.280]  do that. And Q-Synth, thanks to FluidSynth, is one of the most popular ways to actually play them.
[19:24.280 --> 19:29.960]  So you download a soundphone from somewhere that contains all the sounds that are associated
[19:29.960 --> 19:35.320]  to different instruments. And then, for instance, you just connect your keyboard to FluidSynth
[19:35.320 --> 19:41.240]  using the MIDI part and that is, that eventually gets generated to actual sounds that you can
[19:41.240 --> 19:46.120]  then use for something else. If you don't want to use soundphones, maybe you want to use a
[19:46.120 --> 19:50.440]  synthesizer instead. There's plenty of those as well. I use Yoshimi a lot, but there's also
[19:50.440 --> 19:56.760]  Xena, that's, uh, Xena, so by effects, so very complex name, but they are basically, they share
[19:56.760 --> 20:00.680]  a lot of code because Yoshimi was actually a fork of death. There is Surge, which is also
[20:00.680 --> 20:05.640]  another excellent synthesizer. So in that case, there is no sound bank they start from. They
[20:05.640 --> 20:10.360]  actually generate the sound depending on what you want to do. And again, I'm, I'm dumb, so I never
[20:10.360 --> 20:16.680]  aim at creating my own synthesized sounds, but if you are more, if you know more about that, it's
[20:16.680 --> 20:20.920]  something that you can do. And again, it works pretty much the same way. You can connect your
[20:20.920 --> 20:26.200]  keyboard to Yoshimi and Yoshimi. You can connect the sound to that as well. And in this example,
[20:26.200 --> 20:30.520]  I also wanted to highlight the fact that, again, you can connect the same source to multiple
[20:30.520 --> 20:35.800]  things. So in this example, I'm connecting my keyboard to both Yoshimi and that sound from
[20:35.800 --> 20:40.520]  the application that I showed before. So that's whatever I play sounds both like a synthesizer
[20:40.520 --> 20:47.480]  and a piano at the same time. Oh yeah, I'm, I'm, okay, I'm just, I'll just fly over the last slide.
[20:47.480 --> 20:53.240]  So for sound files are also very interesting to do the same thing. You can use Windows VSTs
[20:53.240 --> 20:58.680]  over there as well via Lean VST, for instance. If you want to write music, you can use Lilipon,
[20:58.680 --> 21:03.800]  Melrose, MuScore, which I personally like a lot. If you don't know music notation, you can use
[21:03.800 --> 21:08.920]  piano rolls. And if you want to read, to then publish this, you can, there's a lot of places
[21:08.920 --> 21:13.160]  where you can publish your music. But what I really encourage to do, however you publish your music,
[21:13.160 --> 21:17.800]  make sure that you engage the community in order to exchange information. So for instance, I,
[21:17.800 --> 21:22.840]  I use, I use a lot of Linux musicians and the main author of Linux musicians is there as well. He
[21:22.840 --> 21:27.400]  asked me to tell you there's a lot of stickers that you can get from here if you want. It's an
[21:27.400 --> 21:31.720]  excellent place to get in touch with other musicians working, you know, in the open space so that
[21:31.720 --> 21:36.280]  you exchange ideas. You publish a piece, they give you advice. It's, it's an excellent place to learn.
[21:36.280 --> 21:40.840]  You may want to add video like I did with my Viking Metal cover of All You Want for Christmas
[21:42.120 --> 21:47.400]  by Mariah Carey. And that's a fun watch if you want to see it. I thought about about, I,
[21:47.400 --> 21:52.040]  I thought also a bit about WebRTC used for musicians as well, which in a previous presentation that
[21:52.040 --> 21:57.080]  you may want to look at. And then that's basically it. These are again my contacts if you want to,
[21:57.080 --> 22:02.840]  to have a look at that. Unfortunately, I, I didn't speak fast enough, so.
[22:02.840 --> 22:13.240]  I, I.
[22:16.680 --> 22:17.240]  Oh, thank you.
[22:22.200 --> 22:23.240]  Yeah.
[22:23.240 --> 22:35.000]  Yeah. Basically, I personally use, oh, sorry. Yeah. The question was,
[22:35.000 --> 22:40.440]  does PipeWire also have the, the way of showing those different boxes that you can connect in
[22:40.440 --> 22:47.320]  order to create a workflow? I personally still use QJack control, which was a front end specifically
[22:47.320 --> 22:52.840]  conceived for Jack mostly because PipeWire implements Jack as well. And so QJack controls
[22:52.840 --> 22:58.120]  allows you to, to create the same connections from the Jack perspective, but there are some
[22:58.120 --> 23:02.680]  applications that are specifically conceived for PipeWire as well. It's, it really works the
[23:02.680 --> 23:07.000]  same way. You have, you have these different boxes and you can connect them any way that you want.
[23:09.720 --> 23:14.280]  No, no, it's, you can script it if you want, but you cannot definitely use a GUI. I always use a
[23:14.280 --> 23:31.320]  GUI because otherwise you go crazy. Any other question? I'm sorry.
[23:33.640 --> 23:38.520]  Yeah. The, the one that I use, since I work a lot with metal, the one that I prefer is called
[23:38.520 --> 23:43.640]  Mould Your Kids, which yeah, I personally love that one a lot, but there are a lot of excellent
[23:43.640 --> 23:49.800]  tools out there. So thank you. Which one? Sorry.
[23:52.600 --> 23:59.720]  Yabridge. No, for Windows VSTs, the one that I use the most are some free, free VSTs by Spitfire
[23:59.720 --> 24:05.480]  Audio, the Spitfire Labs Audio. They have a lot of free different VSTs that are very interesting
[24:05.480 --> 24:08.200]  and experimental sounds. And those are the ones that I like the most.
[24:08.200 --> 24:16.920]  Yeah, there are different ways. So Lean VST is the one that I found to be the easiest, but you
[24:16.920 --> 24:25.080]  can use DSSI, VOS, for instance, is another way to do that. But there are different approaches.
[24:25.080 --> 24:29.880]  Personally, the one that worked consistently for me was Lean VST. That's just why I use that.
[24:29.880 --> 24:37.960]  Sorry. If I install PipeWire, can I get rid of Pulse Audio?
[24:37.960 --> 24:42.200]  Yeah, no, because PipeWire is basically a replacement for both Pulse Audio and Jack,
[24:42.200 --> 24:44.760]  even though it's compliant with both of them. So you can just...
[24:48.200 --> 24:52.120]  Yeah, exactly. While you record your guitar, which is something that you couldn't do before. And
[24:52.120 --> 24:57.560]  besides, PipeWire also does an excellent thing. For instance, with just playing Jack, I couldn't
[24:57.560 --> 25:03.080]  attach two different audio interfaces to my computer. I had to choose one or use Zeta to add
[25:03.080 --> 25:08.200]  another. Instead, with PipeWire, I can plug as many as I want, and they all appear, which is great.
[25:09.160 --> 25:10.280]  I think I have to...
[25:12.280 --> 25:12.760]  Thank you.
[25:12.760 --> 25:14.280]  Do you have time for a question afterwards?
[25:14.280 --> 25:15.240]  Yeah, absolutely. Just...
[25:16.120 --> 25:18.280]  Yeah, yeah, I'll come outside in a second, sure.
[25:18.280 --> 25:28.280]  Nice to meet you, Lorenzo. Nice to meet you, Lorenzo. Nice to meet you, too.
[25:28.280 --> 25:52.280]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[25:52.280 --> 26:02.280]  I'll just come outside in a second, because I think I have to wait for him. Sorry.