Brian’s Bedroom

Hi Guys,

I know it’s been a long time but life has been really hectic for me over the past years. Upon feeling guilty for not updating this site as much as I could, I decided to upload a song I wrote and recorded using Ubuntu Studio about a year ago. Granted, it may not be very good, but before you slate me, please note that it was for practice purposes and I intend to rerecord it when I am ready. With that said, here it is:

Gentle but not Fragile v1

Hopefully, this song can inspire many home recording enthusiast to-bes to pick up those dusty instruments and create some wonderful music with the many free software packages available.

This song was recorded in Ubuntu Studio using:

• JACK audio connections manager – To get sound in and out and whenever it needed to go in the computer.
• Ardour – To playback and record the multiple instrument tracks used so that one musician could become a whole band.
• Hydrogen – The awesome drum machine using the kit that I created called Brian_Tama_Superstar.
• Audacity – for mastering and converting the WAV file to an MP3.

Enjoy and please feel free to share your songs with the rest of us aspiring musos.

Later,

Brian

Hi guys,

I have recently stumbled upon an excellent series of books/ebooks that explain how to get the most out of your home recording studio. It’s written in an interesting and down-to-earth manner, however the author, Brandon Drury, doesn’t leave out any of the gory details. The details are particularly gory because this book collection is known as The Killer Home Recording System.

If you click on the advert below, you will be able to get the first book in this series (Killer Home Recording – Setting Up) for free. From this you will be able to tell if you like the author’s style and info. Then when you’re ready to get more advanced, you can purchase the other books in the series that interest you.

With book titles like the ones listed below,  this series is definitely worth investigating for any home recording enthusiast.

• Murderous Mixing
• Audio Engineering
• Acoustic Guitar
• Electric Guitar
• Vocals
• Bass
• Drums

The “Amen Break” is a 6 second drum beat which was originally played by Gregory Sylvester Coleman in the song “Amen Brother” by “The Winstons” in 1969. It is probably the most popular drumbeat in the world because it is used (and some would say “over-used”) in many forms of Hip-hop, Jungle, Rock, Drum and Bass and Breakcore music. The history behind this beat is quite extensive and interesting and is well summarised on Wikipedia at the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break

For your interest, this is the original sampled beat: AmenBreakOriginal.mp3 (110 KB) – I’m sure it sounds familiar, even if you’re not into that sort of music.

Since this is such an interesting and useful beat, I decided to make a Hydrogen song/beat template out of it. This can be useful for DJs, drummers or people who just want to have fun with Hydrogen. This is can be downloaded from the links below:

Amen Break Hydrogen song: AmenBreakHydrogen.h2song (100 KB)

Note: These songs require the GMkit which comes standard with Hydrogen, otherwise available for free download from here.

Demo of the Hydrogen song: AmenBreakHydrogen.mp3 (167 KB)

Note: This mp3 demo is recorded straight from Hydrogen it’s sound can obviously be improved with the use of effects and EQ. But I’ll leave that up to you guys, ’cause that’s where you can have some real fun.

Enjoy!

We have officially started a forum on Brian’s Bedroom. You can get to the forum from the page tab at the top of the screen or by following this link: http://briansbedroom.org/forum/

The aim is to setup a global area where we can all have our say about anything related to home recording and using Linux audio software to enjoy music. I will definitely keep an eye on things, so feel free to ask questions and the answers will come.

I need some suggestions for a good layout of categories, so please tell what you think in the Suggestions and Comments section of the forum.

There’s been a lot of activity on the Ubuntu Studio Users list these last few days revolving around the future direction of Ubuntu Studio. Most importantly, the guys are looking for developers, testers and documentations writers to help out with the project. If you want to get involved in this great project, check out the Ubuntu Studio Launchpad Page or go to the wiki.

The future of the distro in general is being discussed as well, so if you want to have your say, you can join the discussion by signing up at the Ubuntu Studio Users list.