I was inspired by Wulf to do the RPM challenge (see here) so after much umming and arrghing, I tried to record some music using my thinkpad and ubuntu. The whole process was really painful and hard to get a system to record. The whole set-up with thousands of cable/configurations to get something that nearly worked killed all creativity and I prompted missed the deadline. However, this kicked started me into buying a Toneport UX2 as I had borrowed one from a Swedish friend and found it worked rather well (as in actually) with Linux. These devices have mic and guitar inputs and usually retail for £150 new but I managed to find one on gumtree for £50 and it fully works!

So while my wife was doing tests which inadvertently lead to the birth of our second child, I was at our church, testing the new setup. (I did stop when I heard the wife was due to give birth!). Whilst playing, I noticed and interesting effect of the Toneport. It has the ability to simultaneous record a mic and line input. Using the multi-platform software Ardour, I found that it recorded the two channels as left/right input of stereo channel. The recorded level is quite low. The reason for this post so long after is that it has taken me an age to work out how to export sound to a wav format. I've then just used ffmpeg to create a quick mp3

The first song was a test of using the different inputs. It's the standard way which I play "This little light of mine" at church. The guitar tracks were recorded used a mike and the piezo input of my guitar whilst the cajon was dual miked, one inside, the other outside and yes, I know I need to practice more....

I was rather self conscious about singing loudly at church at 10:00 am with the offices above. It doesn't also help that I forgot/mumbled the Hungarian verse.

The second song started as an idea in my head after hearing a 6 minute track on BBC 6 Music which was basically an electric guitar playing along with its echo. The presenter was in rapture; I was in boredom and thought that I could definitely do better. The original was very safe musically, playing pentatonic sounds. Stealing inspiration from the excellent Steve Vai from Hina, I used the normal mic sound but played the piezo input through my faithful Boss ps2 which was set up to play a single delay and let the sound bounce from one side to the other. I've had a couple of the tune ideas knocking around in my head as I've been using them to make some church music more interesting. The piece is called DFB and is in honour of the father of some rather good friends (Names have been omitted to protect the innocent. I'm not sure of the quality of the work and there is nothing worse than dedicating something to someone and then find out no one likes it). He was an inspiration to me to play, collect and expand my guitar world and sounds.

I cba to upload these to soundcloud as I don't think that they are worthy but I might revist these tracks and repolish/purge the mistakes