Yes, indeedy, it’s the 2,000th post here on Walkabout! And it actually would have been here a little bit sooner, but I decided that I was going to feature something for it, which required finishing a long-standing project, and I have now. That’s all explained in the podcast, because yeah, it had to be a podcast too.
Walkabout podcast – Two Thousand
Just for the record, it’s a total of nine separate tracks; I had a lot more, but mostly of other riffs that didn’t make the grade, that were muted out and then, when I was satisfied (for now,) discarded.
The MIDI keyboard was/is the M-Audio Oxygen 25 Mk IV, though I got mine used so lacking the full software bundle, and thus only what I could download for free.
The main software for all of this is the same as for the podcasts themselves, which is the marvelous Audacity.
The Windows side of the synthesizing was done with Reason Lite – literally thousands of instruments, but only a small percentage of those were ones I’d find useful.
The Linux side was largely accomplished by Rosegarden, with help from Hydrogen. There is also MuseScore, which is a pretty slick program in itself but not used for this particular project.
If you have the interest in tackling music production on a Linux OS, I found this page to be the most helpful by far. However, it is also helpful to route PulseAudio through Jack so that both the MIDI sound system and all other system sounds (like music files, videos, and so on) can be heard simultaneously – if you don’t do this, you’ll have to choose one or the other for a session (which basically means starting and stopping Jack – not difficult, but a pain in the ass if you’re trying to follow a video tutorial or want to hear some sample sound files.)
By the way, in my defense, when I finally decided I was going to finish this project for the 2,000th post, that milestone/kilometerrock/furlongmineral was only ten to twelve posts off, and I buckled down and completed the entire set of tracks in a couple of weeks. I think one of the riffs was composed beforehand, but all of the recordings were done in that time – previous stuff that I’d played with never made the final cut. So while I’d been noodling with this for a long time (including the delay when the system simply wasn’t going to allow any futzing around with music at all,) the actual work was accomplished fairly quickly. At least for an amateur that, seriously, can’t actually play any instruments.
I mentioned finding another mantis egg case in there:
Even though it exists at a little below eye-level, you may get the impression of how difficult it is to spot casually, and this one is going to prove challenging to photograph or video come hatching time. But yeah, I was glad to see the mantises succeeded in placing two egg cases in the yard, even when they weren’t anywhere near cooperative enough to so do when and where I could see them.
The Welcome page was written back at the very beginning and edited only trivially since then, and still maintains the purpose and reasoning behind the blog, so check it out if you wish.
And while I feel like I should have even more superfrabulous content for the 2,000th post, it occurred in the slow season when there really isn’t a lot that I could add, and delaying it until there was would mean, well, fewer posts. But just you wait until the 3,000th post!
