![]() ![]() Back in the days even some computers implemented it, like the Atari ST, which is why the ST along with software like Cubase became a pretty common guest in smaller but also professional music studios. It is a pretty simple and straight forward serial interface. In former times MIDI set a standard for interfacing electronic musical instruments, like keyboards, synthesizers, effect generators etc. So I looked, like I already did a number of times before, for so called MIDI master keyboards. in Debian Linux, installation is as simple as this: sudo apt install lmms MIDI Keyboards – AKAI MPK ![]() You can, but you have to manually change parameters like velocity for each note / sound and your PC keyboard is also pretty limited for playing whole chords. This is pretty complicated to achieve with just keyboard and mouse. how hard you play a sound – softer or hard and powerful. And you may also want to play around with expression, i.e. Sometimes you just want to explore sounds or how notes sound together. Using mouse and keyboard you can do pretty much everything, there is no inherent limitation, but there is a practical one. For me who I do not know anything about music theory a perfect way to start exploration just by trial and error! And while trying and playing I’d recommend to use headphones or you can quickly super annoy your roomie □ And you get pretty instant feedback, which I also like a lot! You can have the drum pattern or melody playing in a loop all the time and add or remove notes etc. Just by clicking you will quickly figure it out. The editor for the drum/baseline as well as the melody scores are pretty intuitive and visual. LMMS comes with a broad variety of synthesizers kind of built in and can support even more using so called VST plugins. It has become more a software than a hardware problem. Now with LMMS many things seem to become more accessible for me, finally! As for the synthesizer I do not need super expensive gear anymore, I can use my laptop! The digital sound processing is comparably easy and any kind of decent CPU can handle this easily today. I never learned how to play the piano so those 50, 60 or more white and black keys were mostly a mystery to me – and honestly also kind of scary, so many of them! But the sounds these produced really got me hooked! Quite a dilemma. ![]() At that time, the late 1980s and early 1990s, way out of my financial reach – and also beyond my musical capabilities. Years back I marveled at synthesizers like the classic Yamaha DX7 or Korg M1. It integrates audio generation and mixing capabilities with synthesizers, effects and means to edit sequences for base and drum as well as melody. LMMS is a cross platform (Linux, Windows, Mac) so called DAW – Digital Audio Workstation. In that article the author also mentions a program I was not yet aware of: LMMS Some weeks ago I then came across a post on Hackaday’s blog that really resonated with me: Are Hackers Being Let Down In Education? In school and whenever I was about to learn something about music I felt exactly like the author describes it – in many cases it did not make sense to me and I also felt unable to ask the right questions. The new Pipewire audio system has the potential to solve this problem, let’s see. You can work around that with tools like pasuspender but then while using Sonic Pi and Jack you can not get any other common audio from your system. And since Jack is mutually exclusive with Pulse Audio, which is the most common audio framework for other use cases, this becomes a bit of a problem. Jack is a pretty common requirement for a lot of music software but not what you usually find on your Linux laptop or workstation. ![]() But it still did not work for me.Ī smaller annoyance for me with Sonic Pi is also that it requires Jack. Sonic Pi and the behind the scenes working Supercollider synthesizer are awesome! I would really recommend trying these out. My problem was that I know coding, right, but for being able to code something at least I need to have a pretty good idea of the goal or outcome. I knew that I can understand coding, so maybe this was my way? Turned out, also not so much. changing the music while the code is being evaluated and plaid! That seemed very promising so I tried that. Maybe three years ago I learned about Sonic Pi, a system running on a Raspberry Pi to program music, even capable of live coding, i.e. I still own some guitar (acoustic concert and western as well as an e-guitar with ampl) and over the years tried again and again but it never really worked for me. Over 30 years ago I started a bit with the guitar and indeed had some fun with it! But it cost a lot of time for me to practice and I never really mastered it. I love music! And for year I feel the craving for being able to make my own music, but have not found the right means for it, yet. ![]()
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