stefkeB

As you can read on http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=218678 the set of MDA plugins, which have been free for some time, are not actively being developed anymore. However, instead of letting them die, they have become Open Source. This opens many opportunities.

Check here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mda-vst/ 

Check out http://www.wilbertberendsen.nl/cursus_lilypond which has a tutorial to use the Open Source notation editor Lilypond. You write code (simplified, but still, code) and it renders as clean scores. The tutorial is in Dutch.

I have joined the vi.be website at http://vi.be

It is our local equivalent of Myspace for bands, which allows you to discover and contact other musicians. If you're Flemish and you play music, it is a recommended community.

Apart from software, there is a wealth of possibilities for guitar sounds. From real amplifiers and stomp boxes till software plugins and combined software/hardware products.

Right now, I'm borrowing a Korg ToneWorks AX3000G from my brother, which is mostly a hardware guitar effects and amplifiers simulator. One machine with a nice range of sounds. Maybe I don't need to buy two or more amplifiers and effects at all.

I am re-installing everything. My Powerbook's drive died, so I had to start from scratch (and the partial backup I could recover). I've switched from Tiger to Leopard, but still have iLife '06 for PPC on that machine.

On the iMac, I have the more recent iLife '08 which is nice (especially iPhoto, which we used to reorganize most of our family snapshots). Garagaband seems to be improved somewhat, but not dramatically. I have not had the chance to try others.

Last week, because it was my birthday, I bought a new iMac. It is meant to replace my old Desktop PC from 2000, which did not serve for music for quite some time. While I am happy with the Powerbook, it's still my laptop for work and it's disk died recently. While it is recovering and a new battery is ordered, I had to replace my home computer too. Because of music and graphics I chose the iMac, which is reasonably priced and comes with iLife (including the nice Garageband).

I had a rehearsal/brainstorm with the "Reverse Violin Company", yesterday evening. We listened to eachothers tunes, looked at lyrics and gave suggestions. We also wanted to record a new song, based on a lyric I wrote. It was hard to find a suitable "genre", so we decided to try with drum loops to get into a particular groove. After a few rock oriented drum samples, we settled with a more electronic beat and then the creative energy got bigger.

If you look for a Linux distribution oriented towards multimedia, you can try one of the 7 distributions as discussed on http://www.junauza.com/2008/08/7-best-linux-distributions-for.html There are several interesting options for Open Source music creation applications, which include Ardour, Audacity, PureData, Rosegarden, CSound. I tried many of them, but not as extensive as Cubase or Ableton Live.

Check out http://www.whateveriswrongwithyou.com to download the new song from Marillion for free and participate in a video-contest. You could win £5000 along the way.

While playing on your own has its advantages, such as full creative freedom, no pressure and no arguments, I would like to start a band. So if you live near Leuven and like some of the things I created, please send something to my hotmail adress, using "stefkeB" as username.