Good Linux software to learn synths and sequencing

[handsomegenius]

Hey all,

I'm a lifelong musician - started off on piano as a kid, moved over to guitar as a teen, then goofed around in rock bands through most of my adulthood. For the last 20 years, playing music for me has just meant caveman power chord rock guitar and loud vocals.

I do really like electronic music though, and I've always wanted to dabble with it. It's always just been a bit too daunting.

With this pandemic lockdown though, I figure maybe it would be a good way to pass the time? The problem is, there are so many different programs, I don't know where to start.

I'm using KDE Neon on a cheap 1 year old HP laptop, and I have some noise canceling headphones. I realise this is hardly pro gear, but my priority atm is just to discover and learn rather than to actually put anything out. If it still interests me after the lockdown is over, maybe I'll throw money at it.

So I guess that means I'd be driving it around with keyboard and mouse. I have no interest in recording guitar or vocals at this point - I want to learn sequencing.

Electronic styles of music I have enjoyed include synthwave, drum and bass, psy trance, glitch hop and west coast gangster rap from the 90s.

What should a guy like me do next?

[bluebell]

1.) install jack
2.) figure out how to run it
3.) find out that Pulseaudio gets in the way
4.) solve it by disabling/deinstalling Pulseaudio or reconfiguring Pulseaudio to output via jack
5.) install Qtractor and some synth plugins like TAL Noize Mak3r or Yoshimi. Yoshimi is more complicated but has enough presets to behappy with.
6.) have fun

[jonetsu]

3.) find out that Pulseaudio gets in the way
4.) solve it by disabling/deinstalling Pulseaudio or reconfiguring Pulseaudio to output via jack

It's so easy to just have Pulseaudio work with jackd that any other solution seems over-complicated.

Installing the pulseaudio-module-jack package (Ubuntu). Adding the following lines to /etc/pulse/default.pa:

load-module module-jack-sink
load-module module-jack-source

Having a ~/.jackdrc file that will start jackd. If one already has jackd running good, simply copy/paste the command line that appears when doing a 'ps aux'. Otherwise you'll have to configure jack at least for telling it what's the audio interface is. Mine works with a 1010LT audio card:

/usr/bin/jackd --sync -P80 -ndefault -dalsa -dhw:M1010LT -r44100 -p512 -n8

[tavasti]

Easiest thing to start with is LMMS. It has plenty of great synths included, and has pretty much everything you need.

Point where that is not enough is when you want to start recording and mixing your guitar & vocals to your synths. In that point, you can switch to ardour, qtractor, muse sequencer or commercial stuff like Mixbus, Reaper or Bitwig. Or sure, you can continue to make synths with lmms, and record and mix recorded audio to that with other DAWs.

[Dread Knight]

Hello fellow KDE Neon user! \m/ Been doing some of that as well recently. LMMS is cool.
Some nice more recent/modern synths that are for linux and free/open source are
Helm https://tytel.org/helm and Geonkick https://github.com/iurie-sw/geonkick
Not sure, but I might have got them from the software center by adding the KxStudio repo https://kx.studio/Repositories

[sysrqer]

If you have lots of time then download VCV Rack and look up Omri Cohen on youtube.

[handsomegenius]

Thanks guys!

I installed LMMS from the .appimage, it seems to all just work with ALSA. There's not a lot of signal routing that I would do with my current setup, do I need to delve into JACK? I had a play with it on the raspberry pi ages ago and it seemed like it was super complicated but super powerful.

This software looks awesome. I got some super cheesy toms and kicks happening already.. this will be great to explore.

[tavasti]

I installed LMMS from the .appimage, it seems to all just work with ALSA. There's not a lot of signal routing that I would do with my current setup, do I need to delve into JACK? I had a play with it on the raspberry pi ages ago and it seemed like it was super complicated but super powerful.

This software looks awesome. I got some super cheesy toms and kicks happening already.. this will be great to explore.

You don't need to start messing with jack right now. If you some day grow out from lmms, then you most likely need jack, but for not you are ok to go. That is really great in lmms, you just install it and start composing, nothing more.