Brian’s Bedroom

Why do guitarists put drumsticks on the dash of their cars?

… So they can park in the Handicapped spot!

Lame, I know - but I kind of started a theme here with these drum beat templates and I didn’t want to let you down. So seriously now… I’ve been working on another beat template which uses Jazz and Blues rhythms. But I tried something new this time - I noticed that in my beat templates a lot of the beats had similar characteristics and it made things really bulky. So with this template, I’ve made patterns for both the right and left hands as well as for the right foot (i.e. the kick drum). This means that you are able to make many different beats by just playing any R-hand, L-hand and R-foot combination simultaneously. Follow the links below to download these new templates:

The actual template: BriansBeatsJAZZ.h2song.zip (4 kB)

Note: These songs require the YamahaVintageKit available for download from here.

A MP3 sample of the template: JAZZBeatsExample.mp3 (556 kB)

I thought that would be pretty cool, but check it out and let me know what you think by leaving a comment… if you prefer the older style of beat templates, I would be happy to make it like that again.

Other posts you might find interesting:

Rock Hydrogen Drum Beat Templates
Funk Hydrogen Drum Beat Templates
Pimp my Hydrogen Beats
Making a Roll Sound Realistic
Sunday Bloody Sunday Hydrogen Beat

Sorry I haven’t been writing posts in a while, things have been really hectic on my side. However, my guilty conscience has got the better of me so here I am.

For my wedding in December, my wife decided to walk down the aisle to the song Everything by Lifehouse. If you know the song, you will realise that it takes about 2 minutes to get to the chorus which is the part we wanted to hear. With the chapel being a total of 10 meters long, it means my poor wife would have to walk at a snail’s pace of 5 meters a minute (or 83.3 mm a second) whilst all of the audience die of boredom…Sorry, I’m an Engineer :-).

My point is that the song was too long and I had to shorten it. So I dusted off my computer and started my creation. First I had to get the song off the CD. I did this by inserting the CD with Ubuntu Studio running and up popped a cool little program known as Sound Juicer. All you have to do is tick the tracks you want and click on extract. But wait, before you click extract, quickly go to preferences and change the output format to: CD Quality, Lossless (FLAC Audio). This means that when your song is extracted it will be of the highest quality possible.

Cool, so we have the song extracted, now we can start editing it. Start up Audacity and open the .flac file you just extracted from the CD. Basically what I wanted to do was shift the second verse so that it started after the second bar of the intro (As seen in the figure below).

The red arrow shows how the second verse will be moved to just after the intro.

This is quite easy to do. Simply select the area between the two points you want to join and press the Delete button on your keyboard. I recommend that you zoom in to make the selection of the area more precise. Note that you should try to split the song between notes, that way you won’t hearing a clipping sound when the switch is played backed.

If you do hear a clipping sound at the point where the two pieces meet - don’t panic, there is a solution. You can zoom in very close to the area where the two points meet and correct the wave by drawing it in. Let me show you… In the figure below you can see that I have zoomed in to the waveform so closely that I can see the step where the two parts of the song meet badly. This step is what causes the clipping sound.

When zoomed in closely, the connection between the two waves is clearly mismatched. This step causes a clipping sound when the song is played back.

Using the draw tool, which is shown in the picture below, I can simply draw over the step and make it smoother until the clipping noise goes away.

The draw tool

Below is a picture showing where the one channel has been corrected with the draw tool. Don’t forget to correct both channels if you’re working with stereo.

The wave on the top has been smoothed out with the draw tool to stop the clipping noise.

Below I have attached a short .mp3 clip of the edited intro just to show you how it sounds. Take a listen and try to find the point at which the two parts meet.

EverythingEditedIntro.mp3

Other posts you might find interesting:

How to Capture Audio from Video
Beginner’s Guide to Ubuntu Audio Recording
My Favourite Linux Audio Effects
Hydrogen Drum Machine Basics
Microphone Review: Shure’s SM57

Hey guys,

We are currently transporting our blog from Blogger to Wordpress. This means that some of these posts will have incorrect links. We are in process of correcting this, so please bear with us. You can either browse this site with a bit of patience or check out the original site in Blogger: http://briansbedroom.blogspot.com/

Thanks,

The Brian’s Bedroom Team

Hey guys,

Sorry I have been neglecting Brian’s Bedroom for a while. There is, however, a valid reason for this: I’m getting married in a week and a half. So, unfortunately there will be no posts until next year. But don’t fear, I have a lot of things planned for next year which should improve the whole Brian’s Bedroom experience.

If you’re looking for stuff to read though, try some of my older posts like:

• Sound mixing tips
• Recording Articles
• Mastering Articles
• Ardour Articles
• Hydrogen Articles
• Room Acoustics Articles

Have a fantastic Christmas and see you next year,
Brian

I’ve found two great videos on using the Nintendo Wii’s Wiimote to control audio programs in Ubuntu Studio (or any linux distro). The first is posted at msound.org
Drumming With WiiMote, Hydrogen and Itouch. The second is the prototype done by the Ardour development team using the WiiMote to control Ardour.

Drumming With a WiiMote in Hydrogen

See the original post at msound.org:
Drumming With WiiMote, Hydrogen and Itouch

If you can’t access YouTube or don’t have flash, becks from msound.org has connected his WiiMote as a midi controller to the hydrogen using a PERL script that can be downloaded from here. He’s also using the Apple Ipod Touch in a similar fashion. Lastly, he shows that fancy tools don’t increase your drumming ability :)

Using a WiiMote in Ardour

See the original Ardour post: Prototype Wiimote Control For Ardour Added.

In this video, James Bond from the Ardour Dev team connects the WiiMote up to Ardour through the options menu (You’ll need to follow the instructions here). Features available are:

• Button A starts and stops the transport (play and stop).
• D-Pad left/right moves the play head left and right.
• D-Pad up/down scrolls through tracks (vertically).
• Plus and minus buttons zoom in and out.
• Button 1 enables recording on a track (arms the track).
• Button 2 enables recording on the session (you can then press A to start recording).
• Button B deletes the last recording if you fluffed it (Don’t ever press the B Button, 007).
• Home resets the play head to the beginning of the track (or the selected marker).

Unfortunately, you’ll need some Linux experience to get your WiiMote working with these programs. You’ll also need Bluetooth on your PC. Hopefully we’ll see the Ardour support in the next release.