September 2016

"Half Clocked"

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"Half Clocked" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]

More modular synth sounds, assembled into a tune in Linux Ardour 5.3.
For this one I tried to build a techno-style track from the ground up. Kick, snare, and hihat sounds are individually concocted using white noise, FM, sine/square waves, envelopes, a mixer module, and a compressor (the last of which makes the beats audibly more dynamic).
The melodies are chords emanating from individual modules (analog and sampler).
The "clocked" refers to Tiptop Audio's Clocked Delays cartridge for their ZDSP module. The white noise snares get a fair bit of that treatment here. Also used was a sample-and-hold module to change the filter settings on the main tune that runs throughout.
The only "cheats" are kicks and static-y sounds borrowed from the tune "Eight Gates," crafted with the Octatrack.

charles westerman page reconstituted

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Believe it or not web browsers didn't always zoom images. You could enlarge text but the photo or animation remained whatever size it was. When browsers started zooming picture content, initially the Windows and Netscape style browser used "nearest neighbor" resizing, so the creator of an HTML page could make pixel art by taking a 10 x 30 pixel gif and resizing it in HTML to "100%." (Or 300 x 900, or what have you.)
The Safari-style browser treated all images like photos that needed to be smoothed by anti-aliasing out the pixels. This sucked for your pixel art, but eventually all the browsers imitated Apple so it became a moot point.
Sometime in the mid to late '00s Charles Westerman made a page that worked well as pixel art but ran afoul of the Apple "smooth" model. In 2009 this still seemed worth griping about. The page is down in its original location so I am reposting it here. (Kind of like net art reconstruction as practiced by "art and technology" websites.)
Using an online image editing site that still uses nearest neighbor, I made an animated GIF [3.2 MB .gif] at 1000 pixels that approximates what Westerman's page looked like on Internet Explorer and Firefox before they switched over to Steve Jobs smooth jazz.

Taibbi defends Clinton for his bosses

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Matt Taibbi writes for Rolling Stone, which favors returning the Clintons to power. Normally Taibbi speaks his mind in spite of this bias but his bosses must have been delighted with a recent column trashing Trump.
In a campaign speech in New Hampshire, Trump itemized some of the dubious Clinton Foundation activity that upsets people on both sides of the political aisle but has been under-reported until recently:

--Ridiculously huge speaking fees paid to Bill Clinton by companies that had business before Hillary's State Department;

--Clinton Foundation moves to give foundation donors suspicious reconstruction contracts in Haiti and a seat on an intelligence advisory board;

--Clinton Foundation machinations on behalf of a Russian uranium company;

and other examples of shady ethics that have been well documented by the center-left. Taibbi mentions these points but rewrites them so they fit a comical narrative about how Trump is a bad speaker when he reads from prepared remarks. Taibbi blows right past the substance and makes this a "process" story, which is one of the main flaws of conventional, DC-based election coverage.

"Gamma Surfer," "SIDGuts Sequence"

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"Gamma Surfer" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]

"SIDGuts Sequence" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]

Back to music-making on Linux. These tunes were produced using the digital audio workstation Ardour. Its midi-looping bug still hasn't been fixed -- I complained and was told I was being redundant, that's what the bug tracker is for and this is already a known issue. Yeah but it's been a known issue for over six months, how are you supposed to know what users think is a priority to fix if we don't speak up and ... oh, never mind.
One thing about Linux is the developers aren't part of a corporate empire that employs help desk personnel to pretend to care about customer concerns, so the developers handle their own forum traffic and are mucho crabby from dealing directly with humanity at its neediest.
Anyway, because they won't or can't fix the known bug, I decided as a workaround to use the sequencer on my modular synth to write the melodies, and use Ardour's MIDI clock to keep everything in sync so the synth notes could be recorded and edited in the workstation as audio. This worked well, and Ardour's latency compensation eliminated the slight lag in recording time. But then Ardour was crashing like mad during the editing process. I don't even dare mention this on the forum -- the developer would just heave a sigh and refer me to the "how to report crashes" page. Am hoping that the upgrade to 5.3 (done after these tunes) will fix some of that.
So the sounds here are mostly recordings of modular synth patches, with some added percussion from softsynths and snippets from Ableton where I transgressed on my all-Linux-and-modular premise.

Update: Just finished another tune using Ardour 5.3 and it was extremely stable. Whatever was causing crashes in the previous version has apparently been remedied.

Update, Oct. 1: The MIDI looping bug was fixed in Ardour version 5.4.

Update, March 2018: Problems with MIDI looping continue to occur in Ardour. Paul says in the Ardour forums, "MIDI looping will be an area of intense focus for the 6.0 release. It is known to work incorrectly in all existing releases, at least in cases where note boundaries coincide with the loop boundaries (it does work in other situations)."