My journey with “computer aided” music started in 1998 when my parents bought me first PC. I was obsessed with sound possibilities of DAWs and SW plugins (at the time VST only started). I tried of course Cakewalk, Steinberg Cubase, FT with tons of then free and paid (in my case cracked of course 😉 ) VST/DX plugins. However, especially with the standard Soundblaster AWE64 soundcard I needed to be really creative. My biggest achievement then was to create demo recording for a local band using simultaneously 3 (!) Soundblaster sound cards in my PC which gave me 6 mono inputs! Of course, this “hack” had it’s own pitfalls – mostly with syncing, but at the end, I was proud of myself to overcome such challenge.
Time passed, I tried more powerfull PC/laptops with newer HW, supporting ASIO, but I was more or less always attached to linear DAWs. Cubase was my primary choice. In 2010s, with bunch of packed plugins and sounds it was best-you-can-buy thing. But real big change for me was to switch to Apple and thus Apple LogicDAW of course. But again – workflow didn’t change that much… And of course more sounds, more plugins and cycle had continued.
Suddenly I started to feel cluttered with too many possibilities – always just browsing for right sound or right plugin. I felt really like this is going against my creative flow and the stuff I produced was mostly crap (not saying that the current work is not! 🙂 ). I thought that changing paradigm – from linear to pattern based composition – could help. Of course I bought Ableton Live as the state of the art for non-linear composition DAW. But old habits are old habits – I never really switch my composing attitude towards pattern based one. So even with Live I ended up with linear composing (switched from pattern to arrangement view – bleh).
During the COVID pandemic I somehow became a Linux aficionado. Not just the clean and sleek OS itself, but whole philosophy was appalling for me. I started to use VIM as my primary text editor, installed linux even on my iMAC (!) and of course, started with Linux Audio.
Firstly, I have to say, that Linux changed a LOT from the early days, when I tried it. JACK is now usable, there are stable media oriented distributions (like UBUNTU Studio) and Ardour/Reaper are truly full fledged DAWs now. I even bought Harrison Mixbus (great sound, with splendid channel strip and massive sound – I’ll describe sometimes later). I tried bunch of free LV2/LinuxVST plugins (I can recommend Dexed, OBxD, Zynaddsubb) together with Win bridged ones (used to have Synthmaster, Blue Organ etc.). Everything work more or less nicely together. Having linuxsampler as primary SF2/GIG sound engine I enjoyed it even more, since I could use my old sample libraries from early 2000’s. I enjoyed this new “new” with uncluttered UI, less possibilities, need to be a sound engineer again, but from creative flow perspective – no change again. Good old linear, harmony based, compositions with piano as primary composing tool.
I really thought about to quit and focus on my primary income producer – programming. But COVID pandemic still raged in early 2021. I learned Python at that period of time, bought myself a Raspberry PI with bunch of sensors and played with it.
But I wouldn’t be myself not to try audio possibilities even on Raspberry PI. I found out plentiful Raspberry driven open source projects (e.g. Zynthian), but those are more for producing sound, not composing. So more or less only possibility (reasonable one) was to compose with an old school tracker – Milkytracker (FT2 clone). Everything else was too resource greedy for Raspberry. Well, challenge accepted, I told myself… (end of part 1)