Re: [LAU] Synths and sequencers for house/pop music?

On 05/12/2011 10:48 AM, Ken Restivo wrote:
> My 10-year-old daughter has started to express some interest in music.
>
> Somewhat predictably (and perhaps unfortunately too) she is into pop-star house stuff: Selena Gomez, Lady Gaga, Taio Cruz, Katy Perry, things of that nature. I know nothing of that style of music-- other then occasionally hearing it at the gym-- and I've no idea what tools are used to get those sounds.
>
> She's got a rather ancient Debian ThinkPad of her own, with a working sound card. And I've got her set up with the basics, including the zita-at1 autotuner which so far to my ears seems to be the the number 1 most important ingredient in this style of music.

Hello Ken,

True :) If you've ever heard Katy Perry sing live without it you'll
understand why ;)

>
> Are there any synths on Linux which I could set up for her which are good for getting those kinds of house/techno/pop sounds?
>

Yoshimi has some great sounds, especially Will J Godfrey or Chip's bank.
Of course you could use those with ZASFX too. And like Leigh already
said before, WhySynth has some pretty cool patches. amSynth might be
nice too and PHASEX also contains some usable presets.

> Also, what might be a good, simple sequencer for this kind of stuff? I've used seq24 for years but I don't know if that's the right tool for the job here.
>

I'd also say LMMS and Hydrogen. LMMS doesn't always play nice with JACK
though but when you configure it to use ALSA you might not need anything
else as LMMS is a monolithic solution. Hydrogen has some very usable
kits (I use the TD7 kit a lot, or the 808 one) and its sequencer excels
in simplicity. Personally I prefer seq24, but it does add up to the
toolchain and some parts of it are not that straightforward.

> I'm trying to keep it simple, but if the toolchain requires lots of components, I could always write some custom glue in bash/python/whatever to make it easier.
>
> If this is going to require a foray into VST-land, I might be up for it.
>

Then maybe the TAL Elek7ro might be an option too. But I think it will
be quite heavy on an ancient ThinkPad. It barely runs on my netbook.

Best,

Jeremy

> If it's not going to be practical without a Mac with GarageBand, maybe I'd want to know that too.
>
> But if I can get something set up, it might help keep her occupied during the summer break.
>
> Thanks.
>
> -ken
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Received on Thu May 12 20:15:08 2011