stefkeB

Light poppy electronic piece. Some drums and blings and beeps, with delay effect. And a soft pad melody.

Electronic atmosphere piece. Improvised and if I can remember correctly, played on the computer keyboard. Did I mention I like large pad sounds? And filtered drums?

Inspired by painting the windows of my house during the recent holidays, I wrote a new song. It is mostly in 7/4, but there is a middle section in 4/4. I use Ableton 6, which does not support changing time signatures, so I had to make sure that the third sections started correctly. I think it worked out fine.I'm currently inventing all kinds of songs in my head, using non-standard time signatures. I have to practice, though, to ensure I play them correct.

The worst thing happened. I had ordered an external Lacie drive, two months ago. When it finally arrived, I started making a backup of my laptop and while the system was copying, it hang. I had to force it to shut down and discovered that the internal hard drive could not be found anymore! So I ended up with only a partial backup without pictures, desktop, music and movies folders, but luckily with the few recordings I made last week, during my holiday. And the original data, on the laptop drive is gone forever.

During the yearly family reunion, I played one of my own songs. My father-in-law asked me an hour before we were leaving the house to take my guitar. About five minutes before I should play, I decided on the song. It was "oP Het Dak" and was slightly improvised on-the-spot. The family liked it.

At http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sound_samples you can access a huge (8.5 Gb) library of different samples, accompanied with free resources (e.g. tutorials). Read the license before you apply them into your music making.

Playing with Mental Ray in a recent release of Autodesk VIZ. The Arch & Design shaders provide means to have rounded edges. This combined with a convincing water and glass shader makes a simple scene much more visually interesting. Took a while to render, though.

Having a laptop-homestudio has its advantages, but also its disadvantages.

It is portable, you can move it anywhere. You can even record for a reasonable amount of time without any power socket in sight. However, you have to set it up, unpack and connect all cables. I usually don't unpack the whole thing (keyboard, microphone and guitars), but the audio-interface and the headphone are always required.

An article at http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/kokkini-zita-audio-software-fons-adr... explains the development of a realistic organ synthesizer and also the usage of convolution reverb (using room characteristics to improve the realism of a reverberation effect).

A picture of my current Home Studio. It consist of a laptop with an audio-interface, a microphone and a headphone, a controller keyboard with a sustain pedal and two guitars. The curtains should help dampening the reverb somehow. Well, this is just my living room, without any specific alterations. As long as the kids are asleep and the washing machine is not getting ready for lift off, I can make some decent recordings with this setup. The laptop makes little noise, which helps the microphone recordings.