Greets From the Gulf Coast, US

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a.d.
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Greets From the Gulf Coast, US

Post by a.d. »

Hello:
I've been reading these forums for a few years and decided to register. I was introduced to Linux in the late nineties and have been a musician for longer. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute a bit back.

I'm primarily a guitarist and singer, often of the heavier and more progressive side of music. I tend abbreviate my style as punk. I've lived most of my life on the US East Coast and very much enjoy playing and attending shows. There's a lot of overlap in ideology with the D.I.Y. punk scene and Linux. More recently I've moved to a rural area and find myself indoors due to the pandemic. While I still have opportunities to work with others, I don't yet feel safe doing so.

At the patient urging of a friend, I've embraced using a computer to continue working on music. I use Debian 10 with the real time kernel for recording, and Fedora 33 for most of my editing and drum programming. I primarily use Reaper as my DAW with the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 interface. I wasn't able to make EZdrummer 2 work in any meaningful manner in Linux however I happened to stumble upon the amazing DrumGizmo.

I have been using DrumGizmo with JamePeters Tchackpoum drumkit: viewtopic.php?f=55&t=21233. Web searches show there are many who aim to get EZdrummer 2 working in Linux with varying degrees of success. I'd urge them to try DrumGizmo. I'm quite surprised the software isn't more widely known.

While I'm pretty happy with my progress using Linux for audio, I still have much to learn.

Cheers!
Basslint
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Re: Greets From the Gulf Coast, US

Post by Basslint »

Welcome aboard :D Glad to hear your feedback on Drumgizmo, it's somewhat of an underrated program given what and how it does!
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a.d.
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Re: Greets From the Gulf Coast, US

Post by a.d. »

Hi Basslint:
DrumGizmo is quite good, especially with a bit of tweaking. It seems there are a lot of music tutorials on sites like YouTube, but not many results return for DrumGizmo. When I get a bit of free time I'll aim to fix that.

Cheers!
Basslint
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Re: Greets From the Gulf Coast, US

Post by Basslint »

a.d. wrote: Thu Nov 26, 2020 2:45 pm Hi Basslint:
DrumGizmo is quite good, especially with a bit of tweaking. It seems there are a lot of music tutorials on sites like YouTube, but not many results return for DrumGizmo. When I get a bit of free time I'll aim to fix that.

Cheers!
Amazing! :D
The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common. [Acts 4:32]

Please donate time (even bug reports) or money to libre software 🎁

Jam on openSUSE + GeekosDAW!
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sunrat
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Re: Greets From the Gulf Coast, US

Post by sunrat »

Welcome a.d. I was a lurker for a long time and also only recently signed up here.
Just wondering why you use different distros for recording and editing/programming. Doesn't that complicate things? I would have thought the same programs are available for both Debian and Fedora.
Thanks for linking that thread on the Drum Gizmo kit. I'm still learning about programming those things and it gave me some fresh insight. 8)
a.d.
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Re: Greets From the Gulf Coast, US

Post by a.d. »

Hi @sunrat. I spend most of my time on Fedora. My only real nit about Fedora is the lack of a low-latency or real time kernel. Hopefully when complete real time functionality gets merged upstream there will not be a need for any of us to run different kernels: https://lwn.net/Articles/830660/. I'm pretty comfortable with Linux, so this workflow allows me to have a dedicated laptop for recording while I can tweak things at any later point on my daily driver.

As for drum programming, I found this video very helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Redbfoz7hz0. The video uses Superior Drummer however DrumGizmo/Tchackpoum works beautifully and sounds more natural by default. The video briefly covers "humanizing" in the piano roll, which I highly recommend for more natural velocity and timing settings. If your drums are too perfect it's easy to enter "Uncanny Valley".

Much of my time writing drums is spent emulating real drummers. Most drummers I've worked with tend not to hit as hard when playing very fast, and tend to hit cymbals and snares hard during accents. The little things make a difference.
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Re: Greets From the Gulf Coast, US

Post by Basslint »

a.d. wrote: Fri Nov 27, 2020 4:13 pm Hi @sunrat. I spend most of my time on Fedora. My only real nit about Fedora is the lack of a low-latency or real time kernel. Hopefully when complete real time functionality gets merged upstream there will not be a need for any of us to run different kernels: https://lwn.net/Articles/830660/. I'm pretty comfortable with Linux, so this workflow allows me to have a dedicated laptop for recording while I can tweak things at any later point on my daily driver.

As for drum programming, I found this video very helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Redbfoz7hz0. The video uses Superior Drummer however DrumGizmo/Tchackpoum works beautifully and sounds more natural by default. The video briefly covers "humanizing" in the piano roll, which I highly recommend for more natural velocity and timing settings. If your drums are too perfect it's easy to enter "Uncanny Valley".

Much of my time writing drums is spent emulating real drummers. Most drummers I've worked with tend not to hit as hard when playing very fast, and tend to hit cymbals and snares hard during accents. The little things make a difference.
On GeekosDAW (openSUSE-based, openSUSE 15.2 is a stable RPM-based distro) there is a realtime kernel, if you are interested.
The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common. [Acts 4:32]

Please donate time (even bug reports) or money to libre software 🎁

Jam on openSUSE + GeekosDAW!
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