songs from a forest

Not so soon, but anyhow the album is now ready!

http://tapanisysimetsa.bandcamp.com/album/kuun-valtakunta

It includes some new songs and remixes of older ones. Produced with Linux, and a good part of it with 64 Studio.

New song called Aamunkoi ("Breaking Dawn") is available here

100% made with Linux (Debian/64Studio + Ardour, Qsynth, Hydrogen etc.)

More stuff: www.sysimetsa.urli.net

I'm trying to finish my first album soon... Regards, Tapani

t_sys, you've got some great stuff there. I wish I understood the words. Thanks for sharing it.

New song "Sininen" here:

www.sysimetsa.urli.net

Here's yet another song called Elämänpuu (Tree of Life): http://www.kolumbus.fi/sysimetsa/tapani_sysimetsa_-_elamanpuu.ogg It was made with Ardour, Hydrogen and Qsynth + guitar, bass and drums (thanks Mikko!). It was not the easiest song to mix down... Anyways, Nuku EP is now more or less ready, you may download / order it here: http://www.kolumbus.fi/sysimetsa/music.html

This was surprisingly... "epic" for the style of music it is. I like it very much.

I agree... I'll check out the new version now! Thanks for sharing

Sorry, that was terrible. NEVER master anything with with earphones, no matter how eager you are to get something out. Here is a (hopefully) better version of Tunturi.

Here's a demo version of a new song called Tunturi. It was made entirely with 64 Studio. Mixed & mastered with earplugs :)

Another soundfont that i like is called PC51f.sf2. It includes a big bunch of various instruments, as does Titanic. PC51f.sf2 seems to be available here: ftp://ftp.personalcopy.net/pub/PC51f.sf2.gz

Doh, it seems that Titanic is not for redistribution or commercial use without creators' consent: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3008988

Thanks a lot matth!

Hi guys and girls... i have a old soundblaster card 5.1 platinum and my soudnfonts on the originall cd are not more posible to repair, the whole CD scrached. I cant find the right SF on this Side. http://instrumentsvirtuels.free.fr/freeware.htm please please send do anything to help me, i hope i didnt google me crazy. Spasiba kamensky at gmx de

Hi, I found that page somehow randomly, and can say that was a good catch. I really like your recordings sysimetsa, the way the sound is light clear with punch. I feel also some Massive Attack spirit there. Your sound gives hope with OSS-based music creation. Also thanks for the technical details ! Looking forward for others of your creations. Keep up the good work.

Hi, I'm musician (keyboards) in France (Brest) and I'm enjoy (very happy) of your system who is very fiable, top and performance With 64 Studio 2.0, one interface audio FA66, Athlon X2, one keyboard Korg Triton, i'm realising two albums : http://www.jamendo.com/fr/artist/BlueDid_-_didier.merlateau It's free naturally ! Thanks ! Ps : excuse for my poor english ;-)

I'm very sorry to tell you that i'm in southern India now, and will be here until the end of March 2008. I dont have the Titanic soundfont here on my laptop, so i can only promise to upload it after returning to Finland in the beginning of April. I wish you could find it somewhere else before that... .... It's been too long since i finished any new songs, but maybe i will be able to upload some new stuff in April-May at least... Well, actually there are a couple of new songs from another project/band called Tuhosieni: www.myspace.com/tuhosieni (or http://users.utu.fi/totaha/tuhosieni/tuhosieni-sumu.mp3 http://users.utu.fi/totaha/tuhosieni/tuhosieni-ulos_hakeista.mp3 sorry, no ogg-versions available right now) Drums were recorded with ProTools in a studio, the rest was made with 64-Studio at home / rehearsal room. Drum tracks were transferred to 64-Studio as wav-files, no problems with that!

These are my settings in QJackCtl: * Server Path jackd * Driver Alsa * Priority 0 * Frames/Period 128 * Sample rate 48000 * Periods/Buffer 2 * Port Maximum 128 * Timeout (msec) 500 * Dither None * Audio Duplex * Input Channels 0 * Output Channels 0 * Input Latency 0 * Output Latency 0 * Realtime, Monitor & H/W Monitor are switched on * Start Delay (secs) 2 * Latency 5.33 msec In addition to Audiophile 24/96, these settings should work with M-Audio Delta 66 and Delta 44 (and maybe others with ICE1712 chip).

sysimetsa, can you post your JACK settings for your M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 sound card?

If anyone has problems finding / compiling the soundfont then maybe i could upload it somewhere as one file. Is it legal and/or is permission needed from the creator (who?)? It takes 275,5 Mb, but i don't have that much space on my pages.

Thanks again for you compliments :) Here are some effect settings of 'Nuku'. Vocals: * CAPS Versatile Plate Reverb: bandwith: 0.502, tail: 0.375, damping: 0.250, blend: 0.302 * SC4 mono: RMS/peak 0.160, attack time 1.500, release time 76.041, treshold level -17.938, ratio 16.866, knee radius 8.307 * Delayorama: input gain 0.495, feedback 11.856, number of taps 2, first delay 0.077, delay range 1.0121, delay change 1.000, delay random 0.000, amplitude change 1.000, ampl. random 0.000, dry/wet 0.129 I used the same reverb and compressor settings for guitars, and same reverb for stings (49 Slowstings of Titanic_200_GMGS_1 soundfont). Actually these SC4 compressor settings somehow strangely tranform the sound, but i didn't let that bother. Should try other compressors as well.

The Titanic font is very hard to find...but I found a link to a French site (http://instrumentsvirtuels.free.fr/freeware.htm) where you can download the "Titanic 200 GM-GS SoundFont 1.1.sf2" in 4 rar-parts. I had this font before, but because I was unable to load it in QSynth while running UbuntuStudio I dropped it and yes, I still have the same hardware: 64Studio rocks. And I agree (again) with stanlea: you have a pair of good ears, because your mix is very pleasant to listen too. I listened to quite a few songs that were made with OSS and was not so much impressed. But you really make nice music with it: looking forward to your future projects.

Thank you. I think you have also a pair of good ears.

I used Samson Q7 mic for vocals. It produces clear sound and works live as well. I don't have a preamp, a simple 6-channel Behringer MX 602 mixer has been enough for my purposes so far. Electric guitar was recorded through Digitech RP100 multieffect pedal and bass directly through the mixer. For recording sound samples, acoustic guitar and my other band's rehearsals, i use tiny Sony ECM-DS70P stereomic with MiniDisc. Otherwise it has good sound, but lacks bass. This can be added with EQ plugins or mixer, no problem. Perhaps the most expensive recording hardware (excluding computer) i have are AKG K240 monitor headphones, I really like their sound. My sound card is M-Audio Audiophile 24/96. All in all, i think that big investments or professional equipment are not necessarily needed to produce quality sound with 64-Studio. This is a great distro. I had only few months experience with Linux before switching to 64-Studio around one year ago, and i have not faced any major problems so far.

Thanks for the precisions. You are very humble but you did a good job really with these two songs. Good recordings too. Do you have expensive or average microphones and preamps ? I don't want to annoy you with too much questions, but you're proofing that one can make good level production with 64studio, and it's intersting to know how.

'Nuku' means 'sleep' (imperative) and 'Iso moottori' is a 'big motor'. Gotta go to sleep now, but i can send you some effect settings later. They are not anything very special, mainly just CAPS plate reverb, SC4 compressor, Delayorama and such.

Well, the primary programs i've been using are the good old Ardour, QSynth, ZynAddSubFx and Hydrogen. So far, i have not really learned how to use Seq24, Rosegarden or other midi sequencers, so i've just tried to play things live, save the better parts and make samples out of these. I've found many nice sounds from the Titanic soundfont (anyone know a link?). Another useful soundfont has been PC51f, because it's much smaller than Titanic and can be played even with my old IMB T30 laptop. In addition to many native plugins of 64-Studio, I find CAPS plugins quite good, especially CAPS plate reverb. Unfortunately, CAPS 10-band EQ seems to be very unstable. If you happen to know how to fix this issue, i'd be glad to know. Process chain... well, probably not the most straightforward. 'Nuku' is a distant relative of a guitar based song of my former band Netrakona. We never finished that song then, but i managed to rescue a drum loop of its demo version from a messed up Windows system. Then, jamming on that loop with synths and guitar, trying out Finnish translations of the old English lyrics and figuring out new ones, recording lots of nonsense, picking some clips up, deleting loads of others and finally having a bunch of nice sounds together but no structure for the song at all. Then, i had to mute all channels except the drumloop and record vocals and guitars more or less live in order to find some more natural sounding structure for the whole thing. After this, i moved the other clips to their ”right places” and recorded guitars and vocals once again. At first i had a Massive Attack -ripoff bassline made with ZynAddSubFx, but since i never got it really working i had to play something else with a real bass. Actually the bassline is the only track in the song that has been recorded as almost one take (yes, i'm proud of it ;) I also have a habit of carrying a MiniDisc redorder wherever i go, especially in the forests, and this is where the background noises come from. The process for 'Iso moottori' was rather similar, but easier, because there were less tracks than in 'Nuku' and because the lyrics are much simplier. Now i'm struggling to finish two other songs, for which my friend played nice drums. But there are at least ten tracks of these drums and none of them are good as such, because they were recorded at this ”no-structure” stage. Yeah, life's about learning, isn't it....

And yes, if you could tell us a bit more how you made it, i.e. what synth's and/or samples, how and what sort of effects (settings) you applied it would be very appreciated. What are the English titles/lyrics to your songs, because I still have to brush my Finnish ;-)

Nice songs, good mix. Please give us some details (software used, effects, process chain).