Music Tools
In order to achieve the best output quality for our electronic music masterworks, we are going to use the following tools:
Operative System: GNU/Linux
Choose the Linux distribution you want. If you are just a curious Windows user, and wish to know why you will quickly fall in love with the penguin 
remember that there are many Linux distributions that allow you to try Linux without changing your computer at all. Moreover, you will find tons of Linux resources for beginners surfing the web. Some are listed here:
A beginners guide to Linux for those with little or no computer experience.
From the music creation point of view, I’ve wrote a review based on my own experience on several Linux distributions.
- Jack Audio Connection Kit is the ” jack” that allow us “connect” a wide range of devices from and to our computer. In our case, it will make possible the simultaneous use of several audio programs, but you may use it for connect your computer to one analog synthesizer, for example, among other things
GUI Interface
JACK Audio Connection Kit – Qt GUI Interface
- For composition, instruments creation, playing our “piano” (the computer keyboard) and recording we will use ZynAddSubFX, a realtime software synthesizer for Linux.
Software synthesizer
ZynAddSubFX
- We will use Audacity for basic audio operations like import and export -from and to- audio formats like WAV, Ogg and MP3.
Audio editors
Audacity
- ReZound, an advanced audio editor for operations like mixing, overlapping, remasterization, filter, normalize, change tempo and pitch, etc. One important feature of this program is its capability for playing music from previously recorded audio files while you manipulate the software synthesizer ZynAddSubFX. You will need this feature if you are going to create multi-instruments tracks. This capability is activated by Jack Audio Connection.
ReZound
- Hydrogen is a software synthesizer which is able to be used either by itself, emulating a drum machine based on patterns, or via an external MIDI keyboard/sequencer software. Hydrogen compiles on Linux/x86 and MAC OSX, although the latter is still experimental.
Drum machines
Hydrogen
- Jackbeat is a free multi-platform audio sequencer, for musicians and sound artists: Drummachine interface with animations for easy and playful editing
Jackbeat
- Rosegarden is a powerful audio, MIDI and score editing and sequencing environment for musicians. Rosegarden is an easy-to-learn, attractive application that runs on Linux, ideal for composers, musicians, music students, and small studio or home recording environments. In our tutorials and guides, we are going to use Rosegarden in combination with ZynAddSubFx, to create and play arpeggios using a customized multi-instrument kit.
Audio and MIDI sequencers
Rosegarden
- A mul tichannel digital audio workstation that runs on Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. We are going to use Ardour for multitrack editing and FX creation with LADSPA and many more plugins
Digital Workstations
Ardour
Tags: Audacity, electronic music creation, Hydrogen, JACK Audio Connection Kit, ReZound, Tools, ZynAddSubFX
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 2:41 am and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
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