Some Music Made With Ardour

(And Other Linux Audio Software)

Updated: April 2008

Creative Commons License Just so you know: The original works on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License.

If you'd like to hear more music made with Ardour and other Linux audio software check out Hans Fugal's excellent LAM site. Podcast and M3U feeds are available, and the musical variety is well worth the trip.

4 April 2008

For the past few years I've been dealing with various tough issues facing some members of my family, including the illness and loss of faculties so typically associated with growing old. My father has advanced Parkinson's disease, my stepsister recently passed away from the effects of Huntington's disease, and other older friends and family members are showing signs of memory loss and other impairment. I'm closing in on 60 years of my own life, and watching how people deal with the the ravages of illness and old age has been a hard cautionary tale.

The following song is dedicated to my father Robert L. Phillips, my stepsister Sue Pape, and to anyone who suffers or lives with the sufferings brought on by terminal disease and the harsh effects of aging. It's certainly not my usual sort of song, but as Mississippi Fred McDowell put it, "When the law says to move, you got to move". I got moved. 

  Tell me again how I got here
  Tell me again how long do I have to stay
  It seems I can't remember how to remember
  And I lose a little more of me each day

  I have this feeling like I ought to know you
  You look familiar, say, what's your name ?
  Can you stay a while ? I hope you don't have to go soon
  I feel like everyone I ever knew has gone away

    And sometimes in the evening when I sit outside
    I hear strangers' voices whisper in the dark
    I see strange constellations forming in the stars
      Then I fall asleep and I dream that I'm all right,
      Got everything I need and I'm feelin' fine
      There's always someone who loves me by my side

  Tell me I tried to be a good friend
  Because I think it matters even though I can't be sure
  I hope I always did the best I could then
  Because there ain't no taking back what's done before

  I can't say what day or month it is now
  And I don't really care, it doesn't matter anymore
  I can't say much anyway, I'm forgettin' how
  And I don't want to be here but I really don't want to go

      And sometimes in the evening ...

  Tell me how long have you been here
  My mind wanders some, I don't recollect so well
  I'm getting' tired, turn the lights down when you go
  And I'll try to fear no evil, but who can tell ?

      Because sometimes in the evening...
Written and performed by DLP.

3 April 2008

I decided to expand this page to include some of my more-or-less recent work with other Linux audio applications. To begin, here's a basket-load of various works, including original instrumental compositions (mostly written in 2006-2007), old blues, classical transcriptions, et cetera.

2 April 2008

Thanks to the generosity of Matt Probst, my Internet service provider, I now have ample space for more pieces. So, after a hiatus of more than two years I've uploaded some recent and not-so-recent material. I hope you enjoy it.

First up, a version of Can't Nobody Hide From God, a Southern gospel song originally recorded by the legendary Blind Willie Johnson. I've taken the song into a slightly different space, treating it to a vocal quartet arrangement. All parts were performed by myself, with no pitch-shifting or autotuning. Play it loud for best effect.

Next, another original blues, my first recording to use drum loops (from Beta Monkey). All other parts are performed by the flesh & blood Dave. 

  I remember the first I saw your face
  Yes I remember the first time I ever saw your face
  I recall it all, temperature, time, and place

  I like the way you walk, I like your figure and your style
  I like the way you walk, I like your figure and I like your style
  I haven't seen such a lovely sight for such a long long while

  I believe I'll love you 'til the day I die
  Yes, I believe I'll love you 'til the day I die
  Never ever leave you, never say goodbye
Written and performed by DLP.

I maintain a private studio where I teach guitar, bass, vocal techniques, and general music to students in and around my hometown. I have many good students who perform in regularly scheduled concerts hosted by Craig Allen and his wonderful crew at Coffee Amici, but without a doubt my star for the last two years has been Corin Marshall. Corin is very talented, as the next recording demonstrates.

This set includes four pieces recorded in a live session. The first piece is an improv jam featuring the Studio Dave All Stars (David Lloyd on bass, Phil Davis on drums, and myself on guitar ). The next three songs feature Corin leading the band through Norah Jones's Don't Know Why, Annie Ross's tongue-torturing vocal version of Wardell Gray's great Twisted, and Peggy Lee's famous Fever. I think she does a pretty credible job with the material, not bad at all for a 17 year-old high-school senior living in Findlay OH.

9 December 2005

I've remixed and remastered a number of the songs on this site, thanks to the awesome JAMin mastering software from Steve Harris & Co. I've also deleted two tracks to make room for a couple of new ones. Sorry about that, but I'm already pushing my provider's available bandwidth. If anyone misses the older tracks, let me know and I'll see about putting them on-line again. So, on to the new stuff...

Here's another original song, nothing special, just an old tune from the days of my youthful indiscretions. The performance is new, and once again that's me playing and singing all parts. This song is supposed to be a bit Robert Cray-ish but that's probably just how I like to think of it. 

  Once I loved a woman, thought I had it made,
  Testified to the whole world, never fade away,
    But it's over, past and done
    Yes, it's over, she changed her mind and went movin' on

  I found out the hard way that love is truly blind,
  Break your heart like a plaything, lie to you all the while
    Then it's over...

    You can try too hard or not hard enough
    But that won't matter at all when she gets you down to the harder stuff

  Take my advice, think it over, every word is true,
  Think twice, don't go there, it can happen to you,
    And it's over...
Written and performed by DLP.

9 December 2005

Here's another one of Mom's favorites, Tomorrow Night, a ballad originally recorded by the great blues singer/guitarist Lonnie Johnson that topped the rhythm and blues charts for seven weeks in 1948. Curiously, Lonnie recorded two very different versions of this song, once in an acoustic setting with just Lonnie and his guitar, and again with backing singers and a full orchestral setting. I like both versions, but my recording owes more to the earlier acoustic rendition.

15 November 2005

At long last, some new material! This song is just a knock-off blues, but I had a ball recording it. All parts are played by yours truly on real instruments, with the exception of the drum track (still MIDI drums, sorry). 

  Well I've got a good woman, one who will stand right by my side
  Yes, I've got a good woman, one who will stand right by my side
  She knows how to keep me, how to keep me satisfied

  Every time she walks, she shakes like a willow tree
  Every time my baby walks, she shakes just like a willow tree
  And every time she smiles, shines like the sunlight on the sea

    That woman's got a mojo and an all-seeing eye
    Make a little baby laugh and make a grown man cry
    But I know that she loves me, I'll tell you the reason why
    She knows how to keep me, how to keep me satisfied 

  She's got a cool disposition, she can give and she can take
  She's got a cool disposition, she can give just as good as she can take
  But buddy boy better watch your step, she can bend but she don't break

    Now my mama's got something, she's trying to keep it hid
    But papa's got something to find that something with
    'Cause I know my baby loves me, deep down inside
    She loves to keep me, she loves to keep me satisfied
Written and performed by DLP.

7 December 2004

My mother wants recordings of some of her favorites from my performance sets, so here's one of 'em, John The Revelator. I first heard this piece sung by the great Son House when I was 13, it was like listening to music from another planet. It's become a popular piece, recorded by the likes of Taj Mahal, John Mellencamp, and Beck, but I still prefer Son's version.

Very straightforward recording direct to Ardour, one channel only. I slapped the TAP Fractal Doubler on the vocal track and Freeverb3 on the Master, that's it. And I repaired a particularly nasty mistake by using Ardour's outstanding region edit capabilities, but I'm not going to tell you where that happens.

Later that same day...

I didn't care much for the effects processing, so I changed it. I thought everything was too heavily applied, I backed off all settings for each effect, and I like the results better now.

6 December 2004

I really am working on some new stuff, but I keep getting sidetracked. Ron Parker's setting of Ezra Pound's Sestina prompted me to dig this piece out of storage and brush it up in Ardour. The original was a mono track, so like the organ pieces above I simply copied the original into two tracks and applied some effects. For this one I used Tom Szilagyi's TAP Autopanner very lightly on one channel and his TAP Fractal Doubler on the other. The effects are not very strongly present, but they definitely made a difference that I liked.

The poem is The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter, it's from Ezra Pound's Cathay. The original is very beautiful, but I must warn the listener that I employed the composer's prerogative and have cut some names and a few lines from the poem to accomodate the setting. I hope you like it, it's quite unlike Ron's setting, but perhaps you'll find it enjoyable anyway.

The background sound was created with Csound, and I've completely forgotten how I processed my voice. I can't even recall what program I used for it. Man, this getting older is a bitch...

By the way, you can read some excellent commentary on this poem at On "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter". That site also includes a page of Other Translations of "A River Merchant's Wife", very interesting to compare with EP's work.

26 November 2004

Steve D's Blues In C #2 prompted me to revive a set of pieces I wrote for an imaginary organist playing a nice organ voice on my Yamaha TX802. The prelude is a simple contrapuntal 12-bar blues, with intro and outro vamps, and with a fair amount of obvious chord extension and substitution. It's a tonal counterpoint exercise, and it's supposed to be a chirpy, bubbly, happy 12-bar blues. Go figure. The fugue was also much fun to write, I exploited a batch of common contrapuntal techniques and paid no attention to real-life playability.

Pump up the volume !

Again, a simple 2-track recording in Ardour. The tracks were identical: I had recorded these pieces to disc already, so I simply ripped them from the CD and used Snd to recreate a mono WAV from the stereo original. My use of Ardour was purposely restricted to applying Tim Goetze's Versatile Plate Reverb (that's what Tim calls it) to one track, rebalancing the tracks, and lowering the master output to avoid some clipping. I like this sound better than the original recording.

November 2004

Maria Elena was a hit record by the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra in 1941, but the version I heard in 1963 was recorded by the guitar duet Los Indios Tabajaras. The performance recorded here is just an homage to Los Indios, it was fun to learn, and it also happens to be one of Mom's favorite songs.

Simple two tracks in Ardour, with Gverb, TAP EQ, and SC4 LADSPA plugins. Rhythm guitar recorded first, with Ardour click track. Melody guitar part was saved in some bad spots by Ardour's region definition and editing tools. The intro phrase didn't sync well with the first beat of the chords, so I set a range, made a region out of it, and nudged the region to the sweet spot. Ardour enabled a second save at mid-song where something went wrong with my fingers. I defined the affected range as a region and exported it as a WAV file. I repaired it in the Snd soundfile editor, removed the bad region, and inserted the repair at exactly the deletion point. Most helpful tools: mouse-cursor position + [e/p] (moves edit or playback cursor to mouse-cursor position) and mouse-cursor position + s (defines region division at mouse-cursor position).

November 2004

I wrote an article for the Linux Journal about using Ardour to create multitrack recordings of some original pieces and other music. So here's my first song recorded with Ardour, and I hope y'all like it. 

  Now I got a woman 'bout five feet tall
  Makes me sleep in the kitchen, make me eat in the hall
  Got a bad attitude and a mean right hand
  I think she's thinkin' 'bout thinkin 'bout another man
    Well she makes me wanna holler and shout
    But I might as well dance and sing
    Cause it's like talkin' 'bout the weather
    Never seems to change a thing

  Well I work like a dog all the live-long day
  Pump a whole lotta pain just to take a little pay
  You go downtown early and you stay out late
  Come home when you want, you got nothin' to say
    Well you make me wanna...

  Go on, big mama, bring the barrelhouse down
  You a tailor-made mama, ain't no hand-me-down
  Got a new way of walkin' make a blind man see
  Got a new way of talkin' like you don't need me
    Well it make me wanna...

Written and performed by DLP.

Seven tracks in Ardour, four MIDI-to-WAV conversions (via TiMidity) imported for basic guitar/keyboard, bass, and drums, three live tracks for rhythm guitar, vocal, and harmonica. Btw, I'll probably add another vocal and some more harmonica, and I promise to do something about the drums... someday...

LADSPA plugins included TAP EQ on the MIDI guitar track, plate reverb and mono amplifier on the vocal, plate reverb on the harmonica, and the SC4 compressor on the master.

Technical Jive

All the OGG files here are made with q=7 and range in size from 3 to 12 MB. As of November 2005 I no longer keep MP3s on this site. If your media player programmers won't support the OGG format, shame on them.

I have a simple desktop audio production studio (known as Studio Dave) based around an M-Audio Delta 66 digital audio I/O card, an AudioBuddy preamp, and a Yamaha DMP11 8-channel mixer. My microphones are low-cost dynamic mics, a Shure SM58 and a Yamaha MZ106s. The guitars used on these recordings include two beat-up electro-acoustics (an Alvarez and an Ibanez), a crappy Ibanez bass, and an excellent Fender Jazz bass (courtesy my friend Terry Mercer).

The pieces from 2005 and earlier were recorded on a computer with an 800 MHz AMD Duron CPU. My current system includes two AMD64-based machines, one running the superb 64 Studio in native 64-bit mode, the other running the great JAD 32-bit system.

Software used includes Ardour, the JOST system, LinuxSampler, the ecasound hard-disk recorder, QSynth (with generic General MIDI soundfonts), and the JACK-Rack host for LADSPA plugins.