CSound

After a wee break (6 months?), I'm back looking at music, this time playing around with CSound. I had looked into it maybe 4 years ago, and was not enthused at the time; it looked way too DIY for where I was then.

After playing with PD last year, I got frustrated with what seemed to me that not too many folks were actually using PD to write music. Graphics, yes. Signal processing, maybe. But I was having trouble finding folks just doing plain, regular music. Seems like CSound has more of that going on, even to the point of having a podcast of MP3s on their front page. And CSound has grown quite a bit in the past several years. Color me new and clueless, but the fact that you need to roll your own reverb in PD was a little scary; CSound has at least a couple reverb opcodes built-in.

So I'm dipping my toe into the CSound world. We'll see what comes of it.

Back to Music

Time for another run at creating music. I play keyboards barely at a beginner's level, guitar barely at a beginner's level, and have a tolerable understanding of what they teach in the first two semesters of college level theory. I've wanted to do something with all that, but for various reasons, get discouraged in short order and put it back on the shelf.

I have a decade-old Takamine acoustic guitar, a several-year-old Casio keyboard, and MIDI cables connecting the keyboard to my Linux box. I have Rosegarden and PureData/PD installed (among other things like Hydrogen and I think FreeBase), but have done very little with any of them.

So anyway, this blog will chronicle what I'm doing. I hope to use it to share what I'm learning, in theory, gear, software and the mental processes that I'm using to make beautiful (ahem) music.