Musicianship

When making music, the most important thing to do is make a whole song. I need to force the whole thing into some conceivable, packable structure or else the feeling dies with me and it can never gets shared.

Linux music

Making music with Linux free software is frustrating. Heres how I do it.

Linux does not come free with the synths and audio drivers necessary to wire up basic sound like windows does. You need a sound server. Pulseaudio is for cute regular laptop like watching Youtube and being a degenerate but you need to up your heat to Jack or PipeWire for midi and domain specific stuff.

For a DAW I use Ardour. Really all DAWs are the same. If you know Linux you can learn software fast. Gear doesn’t matter with music making it all comes from inside.

Ardour is completely bare bones so you need some plugins for synths. I use Amsynth, a Minimoog emulator, and Cardinal, a modular emulator.

production

Compression turns something from sounding like small jazz into big electronic.

composition

Allow yourself to slop out repetition. Being ‘lazy’ about writing tunes is an excuse your brain gives you to block your creativity. Copy paste that garbage. Sounding annoying dose not matter, repetition legitimizes.

You don't even need as many tracks as you think. People were making music on 8 tracks and 4 tracks. Remember the works out there for solo snare drum.