Tag: ardour

The Fat Man’s Blues “Hey Baby!”

Hey Babe! (Fat Man Blues)

Too Fat to Share the Bed? The Fat Man’s Blues “Hey Baby!” is out now!

The Fat Man’s Blues “Hey Baby!” now available on Drooble, SoundCloud and BandCamp (download available for €0.75 at BandCamp).

They say every instrument has it’s own song and we can’t agree more. After buying a new, budget but great sounding, Les Paul guitar this song erupted out of it! The Fat Man’s Blues – the man that loves burgers more than his lady.

A fun rock-song with heavy distorted guitars and a catchy hook. Listen for free at Drooble, SoundCloud and BandCamp. Like it? You can download it from BandCamp for only 75 cents.

About the Song

This song was recorded at The LofStudio. We used a free drum backing track, the Harley Benton MM 84A SB Deluxe Bass, Ibanez AS53-TF Hollow Body guitar and a brand new addition to the studio, a Donner DLP-124S (Les Paul). Vocals recorded using the MXL770 Studio Condenser. The basic recording was done using Ardour and final mixing and production with Mixbus.

This song will be part of the new album we’ve been working on for some time now. So far we haven’t had enough time to record all the songs because there were so many other (recording) projects going on at the LoftStudio and a busy work schedule.

A review of the great and very affordable Donner DLP-124S is in the making. We’ll post that later.

Lyrics “Hey Baby!”

Hey Baby (The Fat Man’s Blues)
All rights ©2021 reserved, R. Brinkman/Solid Rock Blues Band

Hey Babe!
Get out of my way
Hey Babe!
Why you say you’re gonna stay

Hey Babe!
There ain’t no room for you
My bed’s to narrow and my body to fat

Hey Babe!
didn’t I make myself clear
Hey Babe!
There ain’t no room, for you overhere

Hey Babe!
get out of my bed
I know you love me but I love my burgers too much

Hey Babe!
Get out of my room
My bed’s to narrow and my body to fat

Hey Babe!
Why don’t you leave me alone
Hey Babe!
It ain’t our love that’s blown up…
It’s me!

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Don’t Say We’re Over!

Slow rocksong, lovesick, broken heart. Male vocals. Heavy guitars. Don’t Say We’re Over. The new single by the Solid Rock Blues Band has been released today on SoundCloud and BandCamp.

Free streaming at BandCamp as well as on SoundCloud. If you’d like to download it, you can buy the single at BandCamp.
It’s yours  for only USD $0.79

The single was recorded at our home-studio and written and performed by Rudy using a Digitech Trio for Drums & Bass, Gretsch Electromatic, Harley Benton Telecaster and Fender Starcaster Stratocaster, so yeah you guessed it: lot’s of guitar on this track! There’s clearly heavy blues influence but it sure ain’t your standard 12-bar blues song. It’s more a slow rock or perhaps blues rock song.

VIDEO

ABOUT THE RECORDING

Details about the recording, for those interested:

  • Drums, Bass: Digitech Trio
  • Gretsch Electromatic & Stratocaster effects: Mooer effects pedal (review)
  • Telecaster: JoYo “American” sound (Fender Amp simulation)
  • DAW: Ardour
  • Interface: Behringer UMC404HD
  • Vocal mic: MXL770

Want to read more about the studio? Just check out the Studio-page.

 

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New tracks available at SoundCloud!

SoundCloud has decided to stick to it’s old policy so our music still is and will be available trough SoundCloud. Today two new tracks were added – fresh mixes and 100% original songs! Two completely different tracks: one song leaning towards hard rock and the other is ‘christian rock’.

— update: tracks moved to the new released album “Solar Powered Love”

Let’s start with the Christian song, it’s not the average gospel song. Of course it’s a song about a christian theme in fact about Jesus but I think the music won’t fit in the standard ‘gospel songs’ you know. Writing the lyrics took a lot more time than expected despite it’s simplicity.

Both songs have an original approach and chord progression. For the songs two different vocal mics were used and both were recorded using a different DAW. The first one was recorded using a MXL770 vocal mic and Mixbus as a DAW. The second one was recorded using an AKG C900 with Ardour as a DAW.

Guitars: Hondo H-175 (vintage) guitar for rhythm, Harley Benton Telecaster for lead guitar and Harley Benton bass.
Drums:  AVL Drums (plugin)

The Mad Men’s Show

Well the fires in Australia triggered this; that is: environmental damage. Done by lunatics who deny this world is going down hill fast. The power of crazy guys at the top also inspired it. So it all got mixed up in this song. And in the end the “master of slaves” shows his face. Hope you like it as much as I did writing, recording and mixing it.

Guitars: Harley Benton Telecaster for rhythm, Gretsch g5420t for lead guitar, Washburn WD-42S (acoustic) and Harley Benton bass.
Drums:  AVL Drums (plugin).

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Lay Lady Lay – Classic Bob Dylan song

Bob Dylan has been an inspiration to me and many, many, other musicians for decades. His music has been sung and recorded by thousands of singers and bands and inspired many people to start a career in music and write songs. So far he’s also the only artist who ever won a nobel prize!

For me, Dylan has been an inspiration ever since I picked up a copy of “Shot of Love” at a sale. I was only 13 years old and had read a review of this album in a Christian magazine. They were raving about it but, as I later found out, most fans didn’t like Dylan’s “gospel years” at all. This has changed btw. Even Rolling Stone Magazine is now raving about it, after he rereleased the music from this period including a lot of live recordings. Anyway – I bought the album and started digging back. I ended up buying almost all his albums, visiting his concerts (Groningen, Rotterdam) over the years that followed. And still do.

Dylan is a master of words. Many of his songs are pure poetry but also show the raw side of life. Hurricane, anyone? And also in this song. Lay Lady Lay. It sounds so lovely, but listen to the words! I always loved it. I also recorded it. It is with some restraint that I post it. This is, for now, as it is and it is a work in progress btw. Some changes in the drums need to be done (by another percussionist). But I’d like to post it now. Hope you like it!

Drums, Bass, Guitars & Vocals: Rudy, Solid Rock Blues Band
DAW: Ardour

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AVL Drumkits with Mixbus5 and Ardour

Recording Drums using Harrison Mixbus5 or Ardour with AVLDrums, a free LV2 plugin for Linux Audio Workstations (DAW) offering professional drumtracks.

Mixbus5 & AVL Drums (LV2 plugin). A video by the LoftStudio, Home Recording Studio Project and home of the Solid Rock Blues Band, the One Man Band Studio project. AVL Drumkits offer you professional sounding drums for Mixbus and Ardour. Manual editing, playing drums trough a midi-keyboard or even a midi-drumkit.

In this video I show you how you could use AVL Drums to record drums – live drums using a midi-keyboard or manual editing a drum track. The midi-keyboard was bought years ago at the ALDI supermarkets for less than 120 euro. It has pretty nice sounds available, as well as good midi out. Allowing you to use it to record professional sounding midi tracks, including drums!

AVL Drums offers two different drum kits with several velocities, mic placements (in Ardour) and a lot of instrument/kit pieces available. I record drums using a cheap midi-keyboard running trough my Behringer UMC404HD.

Video by the ZolderStudio (LoftStudio), https://www.zolderstudio.nl

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New Studio! Videotour of the new Home Recording Studio

The ZolderStudio (LoftStudio) has moved! As you might have noticed we were moving to a new location because we’ve bought a new house. Well, that is.. to us it’s new. But it was build around 1880. So it’s got a long history already. Anyway — we’ve started moving into the new house and rebuilding the studio.

After putting in the stuff we already had we’ve added a carpet, some new cables, additional acoustic treatment like DIY Acoustic Panels (see this video about the making and installation of the panels) and finally, yesterday, put in the foam acoustic panels on the walls.

The acoustic panels, btw, were very cheap to create. We paid less than 20 euro’s for them (hint: pre-made painters canvas). The acoustic foam was ordered online from Geek.

 DIY Budget Home Recording Studio

In essence, my home recording setup is a computer with a (Linux) DAW (Ardour, Mixbus5).

Recording at home shouldn’t have to be very expensive. Hook up a mic, trough an audio interface or use an USB condenser mic, and you’re ready to go. But once you get started with recording, there’s no turning back. So I bought a lot of addtional stuff over the years. Lot’s was also given to me as a gift, like the SoundTech ST162 16-channel mixer.

This really still is a budget home studio. Even though some people who visit me think it has cost a fortune to collect all this gear and to create it. There’s a lot of “DIY” stuff in the studio and, as written above, lot’s of stuff comes from very cheap, online, shops and stores in the Netherlands like the Action (there are many of them now all over Europe).

PICTURES & VIDEO

 

YouTube video (open in new window)

So, we’re “ready to rock” again!

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Acoustic Studio Sessions – Knocking on Heaven’s Door

What better way to celebrate using a new studio than recording a classic, acoustic, folk song? The ZolderStudio (LoftStudio) has moved! So I did some test recordings and one of them is Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”. And I did not only record the song, I made a video of the recording session.

It’s just a simple “one-take recording” using my MXL770 for vocals, a t.Bone EM700 for the guitar and I’ve used the Behringer UMC404HD as an interface. The DAW I’ve used was Ardour (Linux).

MOVING TO A NEW STUDIO
I’ve also made a short video about the move to the new studio. A full studio tour will be made as soon as the studio is setup completely. I’m still waiting for acoustic foam, ordered a floor carpet and there are now new monitor speakers too. So subscribe to the channel to receive updates!

Please visit the Youtube Channel and subscribe here.

 

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Stepping up the game: Harrison Mixbus

A professional DAW for home recording doesn’t have to cost an arm and leg. First of all, there are many free solutions or nearly-free solutions. Like Ardour. It’s free (open source) software, if you’re using an older version that is. Like Ardour 4.x.

Last week Harrison Mixbus was offering Mixbus5 for a deep discount and I just couldn’t resists. Still use Ardour for older projects but Mixbus is just an awesome product!

Harrison Mixbus is a digital audio workstation (DAW) available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Mixbus provides a modern DAW model incorporating a “traditional” analog mixing workflow. It includes built in analog modeled processing, based on Harrison’s 32-series and MR-series analog music consoles. Mixbus is based on Ardour, the open source DAW, but is sold and marketed commercially by Harrison Audio Consoles (Wikipedia).

Installation took some time, you really do need to do this “step by step” following the (online) manual and I had some “problems” importing old projects from Ardour sessions (I thought it was compatible, but it isn’t 100% compatible with my Ardour 4.x version). But after about 30 minutes I was already doing my first (test)recording.

Mixbus5 looks a lot like Ardour (no surprise here!) but it’s more advanced. It’s also more demanding (CPU. Memory, Disk). Despite that, I got it workin smoothly on “light” ITX-computer using an Intel® Quad-Core Processor (J1900, 2 GHz) with 8GB RAM. On this machine I’m running Linux Mint as the OS.

FEATURES
Mixbus comes with a ton of features, plugins and the special offer included some additional plugins!

 

NEW STUDIO
We will be moving soon to another house and there I will be having a bigger (lof)studio. Apart from a bigger room, I most certainly will need bigger monitor screens for this.. in fact, I will need/want two screens 🙂 This is just too much vor only one (small) screen.

NOTE!
I installed Mixbus5 on my desktop computer first for testing but it didn’t run smoothly on my SATA HDD. The disk simply can’t keep up. Mind you, it’s a fast Seagate disk, but SATA just can’t handle it too well.

My dedicated “DAW-computer” (the ITX) has an SSD disk and it runs smoothly. I did have time-outs sometimes, so I’ve installed a little utillity on my Linux ITX computer to prevent it from going in to “sleep” mode and have more performance (full cpu-usage). This fixed the time-outs.

FREE DEMO
You can download a free demo at Harrison’s website
https://harrisonconsoles.com/site/mixbus.html

____________

I was planning to have some fun with it this weekend and perhaps create a short video about it but.. i fell ill and on top of that the power supply one of the hosting-servers died on me.. So had to go the the data center and fix that. I will post an update later!

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Summertime – Free Download!

What happens if you let someone who’s got great mixing skills as well is the writer of a good vocal plugin mix your track “just for the fun of it”? Recently we were recording a new song and our friend Jay H. from JHudStudio created an alternative mix. We liked it so much that we have decided to publish this mix instead of our own!

Jay H. is the author of the Vocal King plugin, and some other (free) plugins for Windows DAW’s. He put some good time and effort in our song and (re)mixed and produced it based on the original, unedited, stem-exports from our Ardour DAW. This resulted in an original, creative, mix of our song and we were so very pleased with it!

The song is now available as a free download at SoundCloud. We hope you like it. Feel free to share!

The mood of the song, as well as the style, is probably a “60’s” or “70’s” feel, in the vain of Bob Dylan, The Byrds and so on. Drums were created using Ditigtech TRIO, Bass, guitars and vocals by Rudy. Recorded using Ardour (Linux). Mixed & produced by Jay H. from JayHudStudio.

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How to Install Ardour with Jack Audio on Linux Mint and Ubuntu

Installing Ardour, the Digital Audio Workstation, on Linux Mint or Ubuntu isn’t too difficult if you follow the steps shown in these tutorial videos.

Before you jump right in and start installing Ardour, you will need to download and install Jack Audio Server. Search for qJack or Jacl on your installer and install it. After that, configure it as it is shown at the website. You can edit the configuration files using a text editor like NANO from the command line or a graphical text editor. Please do apply them as you are told over here:

http://jackaudio.org/faq/linux_rt_config.html

After that, take a look at this video:

 

It’s slightly outdated since they use an older version of Jack but you will find the settings in qJack when you go to Setup → Settings → Advanced.

There’s a good reason to follow these steps because it will help you to install and configure realtime audio (and you will need this!) in a correct manner. The Realtime Audio will even turn a system with an onboard sound card into a good mixing and editing machine. For recording, I use a dedicated machine with KXStudio/Ardour with a 4-channel USB interface (Behringer U-PHORIA UMC404HD). But you might even be able to use a standard soundcard for recording (I have not tested this!).

Now you can install Ardour. And that’s easy! Open your software installer, type in [ Ardour ] in the search field (no brackets) and install it!

In the video below I will show the above mentioned steps.

 

 

– Audio (voice over) recorded using Ardour 4.0
– Video recorded with “record my desktop” and edited with kdenlive.

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