Thursday, May 21, 2020

Convert your QWERTY Keyboard into Accordion/Piano with VMPK.

VMPK is a wonderful Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard. There are 128 instruments (called Program) to play. It has its own Synthesizer SonivoxEAS, so you don't need any other. I have played a song on it and recorded on Audacity without starting Jackd.

I used following keys:
vbhq wrt6
to play the song
"Jane Kahan Gaye Wo DIN" using Accordion. You can also try.

 

Saturday, May 09, 2020

Producing music is easier than playing music on a PC/Laptop.

As a child I learned to play Harmonium since there was one in the house. I also joined Vocal Indian Classical Music Class in the evening although there was a conflict whether to play in the ground (it was in front of our house) or go to music class in the evening. I passed Standard 8 of school and Intermediate level classical music at the same time but could not pursue music studies since there was a gap between the school closing and beginning of Music College and both were 3 Kms from my house and I could not walk the to and fro distance two times.

I used to play Flute in my College days (mostly Film Songs), directed College Orchestra, also bought Mouth Organ and Electric Guitar while working as a Trainee Enginner.

Recently I thought about converting my Laptop Keyboard into Midi Keyboard and the story begins.

As described in the last post I installed synthesizer played on it but it is not easy to play on QWERTY Keyboard compared to Harmonium, then connected my mobile phone through usb for Piano like keyboard.

Then I downloaded some Tabla/Drums wav files from Internet and played on their beats but did not like the quality of my music.

Finally I have discovered that producing music is easier than playing it on my Laptop.

I downloaded LMMS which was originally known as Linux Multimedia Studio but became cross platform for wider acceptance with the result that most popular plugin VST is based on Windows.

I searched for Tabla Loops and found free VST plugins.

I could not load VST plugins on LMMS installed on Ubuntu. Since I also have Windows 10 I installed LMMS on it and used the plugin.

Then I discovered that LMMS recommends that you install Wine on Ubuntu, download their AppImage from there website make it executable and run it on wine.

I find that it runs better on Ubuntu+Wine compared to Windows 10. I could load the VST plugin.

I made some preliminary music.
Yaman
Trital


Friday, May 01, 2020

Using amsynth Synthesizer on Ubuntu.


I installed amsynth synthesizer and jack-keyboard:
sudo apt install amsynth
sudo apt install jack-keyboard

I started QJackCtl
Clicked Setup/Settings/Midi_Driver/seq Advanced/Output_Device/hw:Generic, 0
Advanced/Input_Device/hw:Generic, 0 Ok
Then I clicked on Start

Then I started amsynth and Jacke-keyboard
On Jack-keyboard clicked on Connect/system:midi_playback_2

Selected BriansBank01 on amsynth

and started playing on Keyboard

V B N J Q W E R

which played the notes

सा रे ग म प ध नी सा

Next I need to record what is being played.

sudo apt install jack-capture
sudo adduser <username> audio
jack_capture -mp3

and I made first attempt to play a song and result is as follows:
Shared file on Drive.

Update 04 May 2020
Today I hooked up android midi keyboard to the Laptop:



Notice the Jack Connection:




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