Frescobaldi - a Lilypond front end

This editor works nicely for managing lilypond editing.You have to know lilypond notation. But it provides the syntax highlighted editor and buttons for compiling and playing the piece.

Installing under Ubuntu Linux was a snap using the Synaptic package manager.

If you use lilypond notation, this will make your life easier.

12-string Christmas Tunes

dadgadjohn has a nice one; Scottish lilt and all capoed up.

Lilypond - parallel music

Lilypond remains my preferred method for generating scores. It has tons of features, most of which I don't need, but I overlooked this one that goes back at least to version 2.8 - an easy way to notate multiple voices.

\parallelMusic #'(sopA bassA) {
\time 12/8

\partial 8 r8 |
\partial 8 e,8~ |

b'8 e'~e' e' b'~b' b bes a g b4|
e,4 e4. e,4. r4. e,8~ |

b'8 e'~e' e' b'~b' g e g d b,4|
e,4 e4. e,4. r4. a,8~ |
}

I haven't mixed this with tab generation yet; this feels like a much more natural way to notate multi-voice guitar music.

More Lightnin'

I think a Lightnin' Hopkins album was the first blues record I ever purchased. The collection of songs, unavailable now, remains one of the strongest blues statements I have ever heard. I must admit to stealing a lot of the licks in those songs.

This summer I found a 5 CD set of his Dallas recordings from 1946 to 1952. Most of the tunes from that old album were in this set, and it's been enjoyable listening to these pieces again. He is a powerful artist and poet. Some of his pieces send chills down my spine: Mr. Tom Moore's Farm and Penitentiary Blues in particular.


I've been working on some classical type pieces incorporating some of his themes. Below is the score of the exposition of a fugue based on Short Haired Woman.

The fugue, a work in progress, is posted at soundclick. Check it out. Then consider listening to some more of the original master. It will do your soul good.

Karmic Ubuntu

The latest Linux distributed by Ubuntu - 9.10 was released a few days ago, and like an idiot that never learns caution, I upgraded. It was so easy...just click the upgrade button...too hard to resist.

But after a day or two trying to get sound working correctly, I've back ported to the previous version. Support for M-Audio Delta and Audiophile card is broken, at least for my setup, in the new distro. Some people have gotten things working, but their fixes don't work for me, and even if they did, the mods to config files seem to go beyond what a simple music person should have to do. It's a shame that the sound support seems to be worse. Sound problems were the reason I switched to Ubuntu from Fedora.

No big deal; this working version will be supported by upgrades until October, 2010. They should have pulseaudio working by then, I imagine.

Update:
It seems other people are having various problems with the latest. I'm grateful that my /home directory is a separate partition. It's pretty easy changing distros without losing anything. All you need to do during the install is not to take the automatic partition scheme; instead specify that you want to install on the formatted "/" partition. And specifically tell the install program where your "/home" is located, and not to format that location.

Long time, no write

Hey, I'm still alive. An odd uphill bicycle crash delayed the guitar playing recovery, but a bike / music buddy, Mike McMillen and I have been trading CD's of old blues players. Between us we've purchased, among lots of other stuff, nine albums of Lightnin' Hopkins. I highly recommend anyone into blues who hasn't heard him to get some of his work. His earliest (and some of his best, I think) recordings are from the 40's, but he became a bit more well known and recorded in the later part of the 20th century. Here's are some compelling youtube samples of Lightnin':

Lonesome Road, 1960

One of the comments says it all: "the slickest man to ever live."


Mojo Hand, 1962

An interesting bit of improv at the end.



Shotgun blues, 1950 - no video but the music was when he was in his prime.

Now that all the upfront is done...

I'll go snooze.

The whole operating system distro switch was to get a working system to implement an idea I got listening to Steven Reich's violin phases.

Now that everything works, I don't have much energy to do anything about it.

Oh well, maybe tomorrow.

Or go bike riding.

Hello ma 'buntu, so long fedora!

OK, I've been pretty faithful to Fedora for a long time, from the tail end of my career as techie, then boss of techies, and finally clueless boss of smart-asses. I liked Fedora: cutting-edge, always willing to test the margins.

You get in this mode and life-force things that just shouldn't be allowed, creep into your narrow focus. You find yourself struggling more with the software. It used to be fun figuring it out at 2am while the web site was crashing and the boss was calling (techie's have their own kind of fun). Life was good when you slept and dreamt through the solution to a coding problem.

Now that I've become normal, at least for a musician, I like to use the machine to compose, to play, to record and edit. And it is here, I fear, that Fedora and I must part. Fedora 9 worked okay, and had a promise of an ALSA sound system with unified drivers that would make it all run perfectly. Help was on the way!

Fedora 10 worked a little worse as we moved into feuding sound systems. Pulse seemed to be taking over, but often didn't play nice with ALSA. OSS, the old system, seems to be making a comeback. Give us a break! You needed special stuff to get YouTube to play sound. You needed to get used to skipping to listen to Amorak pulse. Luckily Audacity seemed to work OK.

Fedora 11 just hit town. Oh crap! YouTube only plays sound when Pulse is removed and ALSA is the main engine. ALSA seems to sort of work ok with Amarok. Audacity is a disaster: it starts and stops randomly. Trying to do track on track lasts for 6 tenths of a second. It's repeatable - you can look it up on the forum. Plug ins work every other time. In between times, they corrupt the file.

Time to try the distro that announces itself with tropical drums. We all have rhythm.

This is my third day on Ubuntu and it's been a happy three days. Everything works. Lots of it work better than you expect it to. For example, the third party NVidia drivers were suggested after the install when I wanted to check the Display. They downloaded, installed, and set up moderate screen effects. These screen effects are really nice. Just subtle little touches.

I had some crashes bringing over KMail. I suspect that the Kmail support files are out of sync with the older version in Ubuntu. No problem, I switched to Evolution which is already supported by default and functions almost exactly the same. I googled a clunky way to migrate old email, and it took only a few minutes.

Audacity works fine, plug ins and all. No skipping.

VMWare server was a pain with Fedora because they change the kernel every time the temperature changes a few degrees (I know, I know, it's cutting edge). VMWare needs to be rebuilt whenever this happens. So far Ubuntu's had only been one change since the distro was built.

All in all, this as been the third day and I'm really pleased with the distro. Except for Kmail, it works at least as good and I'm pleasantly surprised once in a while at some of the neat extra features. I've heard about Ubuntu a long time. Glad I got a chance to use it.

Musings while not playing

The giant finger still hurts - but on the bright side I get to listen up to lots of new music.
My friend Mike, the musician who owns Sunshine Cycles and who turned me on to Nick Drake, lent me Alexi Murdoch's Time Without Consequence, eerily like Nick Drake, but really good in his own right. Listened once, will listen again. I like the dissonance in the simple arrangements. Mike knows music, particularly odd pop music, and is forever turning me on the the saddest truck driving drunk dog lost ballads, sobered up British instrumentalists, Scottish and Irish pop - just great stuff. I try to reciprocate, but he's usually heard them. Bob Marley is my latest offering - I got some CD's to replace the LP's still in pristine condition: Burnin' and Natty Dread. A combo of less precise hearing, and a no more Single A tube amps or custom dipole speakers takes some impact from the music.

Another new cyclist on the Saturday power rides is musician Dr. Gary Robinson, We got around to talking Bach, the Art of the Fugue, Well Tempered Clavier, etc.

Mike plays Bass, one of his son's is a dynamite bass player. Gary plays, of all things, a xylophone. I wonder what some of the canons of Der Kunst Der Fugue would sound like arranged for those instruments - of course including a 12-string

I've always liked Glenn Gould's versions of Sebastian Bach. He turned me on to Freidrich Gulda. Amazing difference. They have the same hyper-realistic separation of voices, but Gulda's has much more musical dynamics and phrasing and some tempo changes that verge on precious. It's hard to listen to Gould now. I've got some more Gulda / Bach coming.

Here's from one of the customer comments:

The disc contains these works:

* English Suite No.2 in A minor, BWV 807 (Studio D-Radio Berlin, 30.10 1966) AAA Mono

* Italian Concerto in F, BWV 971 (Studio DeutschlandRadio Berlin-Lankwitz, 10.11. 1970) AAA Stereo

* Toccata in C minor, BWV 911 (live Trieste 14.3. 1955; Private recording by Friedrich Gulda) AAA Mono

* English Suite No.3 in G minor, BWV 808 (Sender Freies Berlin (SFB)-Studio Berlin, 27.10. 1969) AAA Stereo

* Capriccio in B flat, BWV 992 "On the departure of a dear brother" (live Uppsala, Sweden, 5.4. 1959; Private recording by Friedrich Gulda) AAA Mono

* Prelude and Fugue (by Friedrich Gulda) (live Philharmonie Berlin, 24.10. 1969, DeutschlandRadio) AAA Stereo


The sound quality is generally very good to excellent. The playing is superb. I'm no Bach aficionado so I cannot compare his performances to other pianist, but I'm a great fan of Gulda and very happy with this disc.

The album comes with an essay by Gulda's son Paul who mentions that most of Gulda's live performances were recorded and that a box of some 90 tapes remains, which, hopefully, means that we can look forward to more records by this outstanding artist.

Total Playing Time: [1:11:48]

I'll be seeing a hand specialist soon. In the meantime, this post is brought to you by the letters Huperzine and Galantimine. Like a fool I mixed them, and they opened up my mind. Now people just get uglier and I have no sense of time.

Fedora 11

I just upgraded from Fedora 10 to 11. As usual the upgrade did not go well and I've spent a few days banging my head against the wall trying to get nvidia drivers loaded (It only works in single user, non-x display-mode without them), then getting sound to fully work.

Without going into details, because everyone has a slightly different system, I think next time I will change my strategy and do a clean install into the non-home partition. But before I do the install, I will list out all the packages that I've added by running:

sudo yum list > existing.packages

This will create a file that looks kind of like this:

xterm.i586 242-3.fc11 installed
xulrunner.i586 1.9.1-0.20.beta4.fc11 installed
xulrunner-devel.i586 1.9.1-0.20.beta4.fc11 installed
xvidcore.i586 1.2.1-2.fc11 installed
y4mscaler.i586 9.0-8.fc11 installed
yelp.i586 2.26.0-3.fc11 installed
yp-tools.i586 2.9-6.fc11 installed
ypbind.i586 3:1.20.4-19.fc11 installed
yum.noarch 3.2.23-3.fc11 installed
yum-metadata-parser.i586 1.1.2-12.fc11 installed
yum-utils.noarch 1.1.22-1.fc11 installed
zd1211-firmware.noarch 1.4-2 installed
zenity.i586 2.26.0-1.fc11 installed
zip.i586 2.31-7.fc11 installed
zita-convolver.i586 1.0.0-2.fc11 installed
zlib.i586 1.2.3-22.fc11 installed
zlib-devel.i586 1.2.3-22.fc11 installed
Available Packages
0xFFFF.i586 0.3.9-3.fc11 fedora
AGReader.i586 1.2-5.fc11 updates
AcetoneISO.i586 6.7-6.fc11 fedora
AcetoneISO2.i586 2.0.3-1.fc11 fedora
Ajaxterm.noarch 0.10-8.fc11 fedora
AllegroOGG.i586 1.0.3-5.fc11 fedora
AllegroOGG-devel.i586 1.0.3-5.fc11 fedora
BackupPC.noarch 3.1.0-5.fc11 fedora
BasiliskII.i586 1.0-0.20060501.3.fc11.1 rpmfusion-free

Finally write a perl script that will parse the yum output so the installed items in the left column can be used as input to a 'yum install' command.

Arthritis?

Almost looks like my forefinger, doesn't it? Too bad, but it's my left pinkie. My doctor says the tendon on the bottom is shortening, so it hooks when you look from the side.

I haven't played in a week. And I want to finish Three Pieces in the Shape of Erik Satie. Pieces one and two sound good, but two pieces don't make it with Erik Satie.

Riding with Louie

Just got back from a ride with Louie Sanchez. The Wednesday night right with Mike was rained out, and tonight Mike and many others are heading down to Donaldson Center for a Time Trial. I hate Time Trials. A Time Trial is 20 to 25 minutes of pain that a body should not endure voluntarily. Imagine tensing one muscle in your leg for more that a few minutes. Multiply that muscle by a dozen. I've seen guys bent like rigid crowbars after a time trial that had to be lifted off their bike.

So that left Louie and me to comb the area around Paris Mountain for places to hurt ourselves. I was lucky to have him, because he is a rider that loves to hammer for extended periods, head down, riding the lactic pain train. I sat sheltered in the pocket of calmness right behind him, enjoying the 30 miles per hour express.

Cycling is weird for me. A ride is something to look forward to with anticipation; when it is over you kind of 'gloat' over a good ride. You did good, you didn't get dropped, you beat someone up a problem of a hill, you got through hairy turns without leaving skin on the road. Good rides, with good companions, are more often than not, 'epic' in my mind. I can remember details of them years later.

The thing the makes a ride epic is, of course, the ride itself. In the ride you do things you cannot do on your own. You go faster, longer, harder. Your heart monitor is showing that the heart is contracting much faster than during your training rides, yet you aren't breathing hard! Sometimes you dig down deeper that ever, and it isn't enough, and you find the distance open up to the person in front of you. This is desolation. This also is epic.

There is no music in this post, just some observations about a very interesting part of my life.

RIP John King

Mr. King resurrected a guitar technique from the time of Bach to play a piece that was almost certainly never before tried on a ukulele, Bach’s Partita No. 3, and went on to play other difficult classical works with dazzling mastery.
...
The foundation of Mr. King’s achievement was reviving a Baroque guitar technique and applying it to the ukulele. The technique involves playing each succeeding note in a melodic line on a different string. The ukulele — which is tuned so that the four strings go not from the lowest to the highest note but instead run G, C, E, A — turns out to be great for doing this. (An illustration of ukulele tuning can be found at theuke.com.) The result is a bell-like quality of sound in which individual notes over-ring one another, producing an effect that some compare to a harp or harpsichord.

from NY Times Obituary, By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: April 27, 2009

The Necessary becomes Magic

I've written about the Bach Lute prelude BWV999 before. It is a really nice piece, suitable for beginners yet has depth that suited Segovia and many other masters.
I have been playing it almost every day that I pick up the guitar, often more than once. It is a perfect warm up exercise. In the past, I used it for speed. Lately I play it more slowly, eliciting as nice a plucky tone as one can get from a 12-string.

Today I'd like to concentrate on one of the early difficulties in this piece, measure 15. As you can see below, it requires holding the lowest f while barring the top 3 courses of the 5th fret. This is difficult on a classical guitar, very difficult on a 12-string guitar, and now, for me with arthritis or something in my left hand, almost impossible.

One day a light went on behind my eyes - why not let the octave strings do the work?!

A little work, and I came up with this:


Much easier.

New Internet Connection

The S.O. and I decided to upgrade our connection to teh Internets, so we ordered some giant T3 tubes. Like everything in life, there is both good and bad in the new high speed connections.

First, the Good:

Uploading and downloading is just incredibly fast. You can pirate music that won't be released until next year. And you can probably download more pørn than actually exists on the internets!

The tubes, shown here, go from the street into the attic:






This firewall protects against nasty viruses. The filters are based on a viratic-gravity algorithm.




On the other hand, this laptop connection might seem a little unwieldy, but the increase in speed is worth it:




And best of all, I can record my 12-string directly into the tubes using this Martin soundhole fiber optic connection:

Track Stand revisions

I've revised the Track Stand piece during the past few days - making it sound more like a 12-string piece, sometimes by adding arpeggios, sometimes by taking advantage of the octave courses. In this example, you can see the bass theme repeated in each of the 4 measures. In this original fingering for measure 16. The two 'f's in the bass required some quick moving from up around the 8th fret down to 1st position, and it was hard to do without breaking up this bass theme.

But because of the octave courses, I can get the same 'a' note to ring in 1st position, 3rd course; I just have to make sure to strum with the thumb. Here's the revision:




It's rare, but sometimes the 12-string is easier.

Making Movies

Since all you folks are into video now, here's a tip on how to get those 12-strings sounding good on YouTube. This article will explain how to record your sound separately and join it with your video using MPlayer and Mencoder .


The Hardware

The microphone in your camera is probably not music quality. It's made to pick up speech - so it has a peaky, treble emphasized response curve. Get a decent mic and preamplifier and sound card . In terms of bang for the buck the mic trumps the preamp and sound card . For 12-string jangle you'll like an instrument mic, sometimes called a "Pencil" mic because of the shape. They have quicker transient response than large capsule mics. Your treble courses will like this.

The cheapest good mic for a 12-string is probably a MXL-603, although I'm basing that on research, not listening. I use Oktava MK-12's from the SoundRoom . They are hand tested and the advice from "the tubes" is that the quality is better there than elsewhere. There are also some Chinese Oktavas . They are cheaper. But your mics are going to last a long time, some spend some bucks on guaranteed good ones. The SoundRoom will give you some mechanically sound mics with good solder joints and response curves. You can get matched capsules. I sometimes use omni caps, sometimes cardioid . I haven't decided. These charts might help you decide. If you're rich, buy a Neumann instrument mic. I love the sound of a guitar recorded with a Neumann . Crystal clear, no boom. Someday when I'm rich, I'll buy a couple of KM-184's.


Doing the Video

Start the audio recording using your favorite recording software. I use ecasound software, but you probably already know how to do this with your particular recording software. Next, start the camera rolling. Before you begin playing you need a visual cue to use later to sync the sound. Clap, or tap something in a way that you will be able to later find the exact moment that the sound was generated. Then, play your piece; then stop the camera, stop the audio, and go to the next step.


Editing

Transfer your video to the computer and play it with mplayer (mplayer FILENAME) . Find the exact time in the video where your visual cue is. You can do this with mplayer by stopping just before the cue using the space bar and then step frame by frame using the 'period' key. The mplayer console shows the times of each frame. If you instead used a gui, trigger the on screen time display by hitting the letter 'O'. Once you figure out the timestamp for the visual / audio cue, quit Mplayer , then create a new video file by editing out all the video up to the video cue. Do this using mencoder with the copy option. For example, if your video cue was at 1 minute 3 seconds, and your video file is called FILE.avi, run this command:

mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy -ss 00:01:03 FILE.avi -o EDITED.avi
# where -ss is seconds or hh:mm:ss

There is also an "-endpos" parameter that uses the same format. Use this to trim off that awkward section where you get up to turn the camera off.

Now you have a new video called EDITED.avi that starts with your audio / visual cue.

Use your music editing software to find the audio cue of the audio file. Delete the audio up to this point. You don't have to trim off the end stuff. Audio that extends beyond the video will be dropped in the next steps.


Combine the Audio and Video

To combine your superbly recorded audio file named "MYAUDIO.wav" with the edited video file named "EDITED.avi", do this:

mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy EDITED.avi -audiofile MYAUDIO.wav -o COMBINED.avi

Check the new file with mplayer. It should have the original audio and the high quality video and be almost ready to upload to YouTube.

mplayer COMBINED.avi

Finishing Touch

You want to recopy the video to trim off the cue and make your video start at the beginning of the piece. Use the -ss option as you did above to trim off the pre-cue video. If the part that you want starts 12 seconds in the COMBINED.avi, run this command:

mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy -ss 12 COMBINED.avi -o FINISHED.avi



Good luck. Hope to see, and hear, some professional 12-string videos soon. My videos are here.

UPDATE - dadgadjohn's comment reminded me that some links to source material might be a good update, so here are some handy links pointing to original sources.

Mplayer and Mencoder are the same program; mplayer plays and mencoder writes.

DVD author is software to move your final video to a DVD. Articles about DVD author a useful because they often focus on getting the correct video format.

Here are the links:

MPlayer web site documentation is here, in English (other languages available)
It's a bit overwhelming. I used this section about video formats a lot.

Linux journal articles about MPlayer / Mencoder here and a DVD authoring article here.
Linux.com article about DVD conversions.
A little crib sheet of MPLayer / Mencoder commands.
A DVD Author primer.

Body Beat

So I'm slow and have no sense of time. Let's see if a metronome will help.

I went looking for some traditional type metronomes. Better to have one handy rather than have to trapse over to the computer to adjust the beat. I came across the "Body Beat" metronome that you can feel instead of hear. Hey, I can use it while recording!



Here are the package contents. The "thumper" on the left plugs into the top of the Body Beat with a standard mini-plug. You get beeping sound if you unplug it; plugged in, it vibrates so you feel the beat.








The thing works as advertised. It has beat options like dotted note combinations; I find these kind of useless when it's in the vibe mode, but they sometimes can be useful in the audible mode. Also, the accented signatures in vibe mode cause the thumper device to vibrate loud enough for a mic to pic up in a quiet guitar setting. So for practice session I just set the beats to zero and adjust the speed. The mics don't seem to pick up any sound from the vibe unit at the zero setting.

It's pricey - about 100 USD, yet it's kind of flimsy. I'm scared of jumping up from a session with the vibrator on my body yanking the Body Beat off the stand onto the floor.

Action - how low can you go?

I put the LKSM-12 down very, very low. Lower than most guidelines I've read. The 1st course is about .045 inches. The 6th course is about .055 inches.

It doesn't buzz - as long as I don't pound the strings.

Tension is also very low. Today I'm using heavy Elixirs; they are tuned down a fifth from concert pitch, thus they pull about 250 pounds. When I use Elixir mediums, I tune it down a minor third. This pulls about 210 pounds.

Then I took out the relief until the top strings start to "sizzle", which is how I describe the very slight buzzing against the frets. I think this is the treble equivalent of the "growl", which is the buzz of low strings on the frets. The relief is non-existent to almost negative. It's very easy to play.

The downsides are:
- some lack of sparkle due to the low tension
- difficult to get the room to respond well to frequencyies under 70 hertz

But I'll sacrifice some clarity to ease-of-playing; lately my hands are kind of sore.

Guitar Expo

Buddy Mike and I went to the Guitar Expo in Spartenburg on Sunday. We came back through the beginnings of a rare March snowstorm. The expo seemed to draw a middling amount of people, perhaps because of the impending storm, perhaps because of the recession. One of the dealers said the sales were not good.

There were lots of Martins. The earliest I saw was a 1943. Most were in good, playable condition. D-18's and D-28's abounded. I know less about the 6 string market than I do about the 12-string market. It seemed that pretty nice sounding D-18s from the 40's and 50's were offered for mid 2,000 to maybe upper 3,000 (all prices USD). Martin itself had a booth with some special edition guitars. I think their D-18 was listed for more that some of the older Martins. To my ear, they sounded pretty similar. The 1943 model seemed to have pretty sweet sounding treble strings. As a 12-string finger picker, I find fingering bluegrass guitars very difficult. They all seem to have very high action. The difference between a finger pick setup and a factory setup is huge.

Lots of Gibson J-45's, second only to Martin.

Larrivée guitars - the finish of them seems closest to the guitars of yesteryear. Glossy, old fashioned finishes. Some of the newer guitars that Martin and Taylor put out generally don't look nice to me. I can't get over the feeling that matte finish == unfinished. It's just a matter of taste, I know. As far as I can tell, the finish has no correlation to the sound.

Electrics: yeah, there were tons. Mike went for the electrics. He carted home an old Kay single pickup. Crikes, the last time I saw one was in a pawnshop window 40 years ago.

I had my head up my ass yesterday and didn't bring my camera to the show. So in lieu of some actually informative pictures, the shot above is what the backyard looks like this morning.