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Impulse Responses

*Updated 10/15/2022 to include Linux Studio Plugins.

When I first really got started recording instruments, I began hearing about something called IR’s and had to dig to find out what they were. I was a late bloomer it seems.

IR stands for Impulse Response. Essentially an IR is a recording of a sound (like a guitar) played though a speaker (cabinet) in a environment (ie: studio live room) through a specific microphone. The final recorded file is just a wav or an aif with wav being much more common.

You load up your IR file into an impulse response loader, which is added to a track that contains a DI guitar and an amp sim of some sort, and the IR mimics the sound of the cab/microphone/room that was recorded.

IR’s are a must have if you’re using straight up amp sims on your guitar tracks. Normally amp sims on their own don’t sound super great; they’re very dry and don’t have a ton of “character”. Stick an IR of, for example, a Fender Tweed Champ 58 on the track and you’ll notice a big difference right away.

IRs can also be used for reverb. Similar to the idea of capturing a sound of specific amp/mics/rooms, reverb impulses capture the ambiance of specific places be it a famous concert hall, the space under a bridge, or even a school hallway.

While there are a ton of IR loaders out there, both paid and free, as with everything else, a good percentage of them are for Windows and/or Mac.1

All is not lost and there are Linux options, and they’re damn good.

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The First Linux Recording

Here is thirty seconds of my first, official, render from Linux.

Notes:

      • Current hardware setup: Tascam US-16×08 into HP EliteBook 850 G3 running Fedora Jam 36.
      • Drums were recorded via Reaper on Windows the week before I started moving everything over to Linux. No processing was done to the drum tracks after the initial recording.
          • Once I got Reaper running on Linux, I exported the raw stems and imported them into Mixbus 32c
          • Plugins used: ACE EQ and Compressor on the drum bus and the kick and snare tracks. All other drum tracks were mixed using only the inline Mixbus EQ and Compressor.
              • Reverb bus 1: ACE Reverb.
              • Reverb bus 2: Gverb 1
      • Some guitars (base rhythm tracks and some melodies) were recorded via Reaper on Windows (DI run through GuitarRig 6 Player) before the move.
          • Like the drums, the stems were exported and brought into Mixbus.
          • I kept the GuitarRig processing on these tracks because they sounded good, and I wanted to use them as a reference while I dug into ToneLib GFX.
      • Remaining guitar tracks (additional rhythm and melodies, bridge guitars) were recorded via Mixbus (DI straight into the Tascam) and run through ToneLib GFX.
      • Bass recorded via Reaper on Windows before the move.
          • Bass was not a DI, it was recorded by micing the amp (Ampeg PF-350, TC Electronic BC212, SM-57).
          • No processing on it before the stem export.
          • Once in Mixbus, the tracks were touched up with ToneLib TubeWarmth and the Mixbus inline EQ.
      • Slight EQ, compression, and saturation on the master bus; no plugins, just the track controls.

All tracks that had plugins, especially guitar tracks with heavy hitters like ToneLib GFX, were frozen/printed to cut back on system resources.

The full song, music wise is finished and recorded. Lyrics were completed this past week and I’ll be laying down vocal tracks over the coming days.

It’s been well over year since I completed When Something Appears so it’s nice to get something done even if it’s just a single song.

 

1: I think Gverb is included either in Mixbus or Fedora Jam. I do know it’s by Juhana Sadeharju and I can’t find anything on it other than this bit at RTcmix. No matter where it came from, it’s fantastic.

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Software Alternatives

Is there a hard and fast rule on what software you need to use? According to big tech, yes. There is only Windows or macOS! There is only Photoshop! There is only Office!

As Big Tech gets bigger and swallows up smaller companies, the landscape for software can seem pretty one dimensional and expensive unless you’re willing to do some digging and be skeptical about how you procure these products.

I’m already a little off the beaten path with software mainly because I loath the subscription model when it comes to applications. I don’t mind subscriptions for services such as music/video streaming or online storage; I subscribe to Spotify and Netflix (the originals!). I also have online storage and password manager accounts.

For apps though, I just don’t agree with the subscription model. I like to pay for an app and be done. Some subscriptions are kind of ok; Microsoft 365 is good because you get Mail (sans advertising), all the Office apps, and a terabyte of OneDrive 1 storage for a decent yearly price so you’re getting a full package of stuff. Some are meh (Adobe), and some are downright awful (I’m looking straight at you, Pro Tools).

The bright side to all of this is that you can still  buy apps that are just as good, or often times better than the flagships.

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Universal Stupid Bullshit

There has been some ballyhoo of late over the EU’s regulatory decision to force phone hardware companies to use strictly USB-C connectors for charging.

The quick and dirty is that the EU wants to force hardware manufacturers to make charging ports on all phones, tablets, cameras, headphones, portable speakers, and handheld video game consoles USB-C.

Uh-oh. Sounds like they’re trying to stamp out innovation, kill competition, and shut down Christmas all at the same time.

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Low End Tricks #1

When recording and/or mixing music on lower end or older computers, the following tricks are important:

      • When mixing, increase your buffer size to around 4096 or so depending on how many tracks you’re working with. It may need to go a little higher.
      • Freeze/print tracks that are plugin heavy. In fact, freeze/print any track that has a set and forget plugin.
      • If you need to record a last minute track (a vocal harmony or a little guitar weedly-doo) disable/mute everything but the bare minimum needed for reference and drop your buffer size as low as possible.
        • As an example of bare minimum: disable all drum tracks except the overheads and disable all guitar except the base rhythm tracks.
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The Easy Part Is The Computer

I’m going to add a little more to my post from last week. Yes, yes I’ve whinged and kvetched about computers here many times but I’ve been rethinking my relationship with technology quite a lot over the past few weeks.

Up until the past year or so, I’ve been what you would call a die hard Mac user and had been since around 2007. Apple was my jam. The house is filled with MacBooks, iPhones, iPads, Apple TV’s, Apple Watches, and HomePod mini’s.1

I still have two Macs but one is at deaths door and the other is so slow it’s been relegated to being a lowly media server.  In the meantime, I’d been researching new machines and using my work computer, a Dell XPS running Windows 11, as a stopgap – and we all know that using your work computer for personal shit is never a good idea.

While I’m somewhat interested in MacBooks, I’m no longer the fanatic I once was. Apple made some design and pricing decisions over the past few years that soured my taste. Touchbars, USB-C, shitty keyboards, $500 wheels, $1200 monitor stands … you get the picture. Some of their recent designs are good (well the MacBook Pros anyway), and the Apple Silicon chips are interesting. Yet while I was considering saving and getting a MBP, in the end I simply could no longer justify the prices Apple is asking for their computers. So instead of spending a small fortune on a new MacBook Pro started looking at the PC market.

After years of deriding Microsoft, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Windows is actually really good now. Especially Windows 11. Sure, there’s cruft, legacy garbage, and weird design decisions hanging out in the background, but there is cruft, legacy garbage, and weird design decisions hanging out in the background of any operating system.

The work Dell I’ve been using would be a really nice computer if it wasn’t so prone to hardware issues. At the beginning of of the year I had to run the gauntlet with Dell Support. Three motherboard replacements later and currently the trackpad doesn’t work if the laptop is plugged into power – and this is a $2500+ laptop.

I also am partial to Lenovo ThinkPads but one of those would also run me a couple of thousand dollars.

And then I got to thinking: do I really need to part with that much money just to get a computer, any computer, that can handle basic music production and light video editing?

“Marketing, marketing, marketing. Everything is Better! Faster! Thinner! Lighter! New new new! Forget about what was out just a few months ago! Check out what we have right now! It’s better!”
– Every Tech Company That Exists.

So I started looking at the second hand and refurbished market.

Here is what I found:

      1. Companies market to us in order to get us to buy new and stigmatize anything second hand/refurbished.
      2. Thanks to this, people rely on new items way more than we should which, in turn, is creating massive amounts of e-waste.
      3. There are way more second hand/refurbished options out there than I think anyone realizes.
      4. It’s all good stuff.

So count me in. Here I am on my refurbished HP laptop and everything is going just fine.

1: I’m severely disappointed with the HomePod mini’s.

Pros:

    • They look good.
    • They sound great for their size.
    • They pair and work ok with the Apple TV. Sometimes.

Cons:

    • Siri is just  as useless as it is on the iPhone and it’s the only way you can control the HomePods.
    • The setup and settings in the the Home app is non-intuitive garbage.
    • They only work half the time when mirroring a Mac to the Apple TV. 
    • When starting a movie on Apple TV more often than not, they’ll forget they’re connected and there is no sound for nearly two minutes. Then they’ll remember the ATV and sound kicks in.
    • They constantly lose connection with each other or the Internet.
    • They only work with Apple Music. As luck would have it, I was trying out Apple Music this summer and let me tell you, calling up music on the HomePods was shaky at best. It would ether play the wrong thing, or try and play it on the TV. More often than not, I’d hear “There is a problem with Apple Music please try again later”. I canceled my Apple Music subscription because I found it in no way better than Spotify and it never worked as advertised on anything past my iPhone. It sucked on the HomePod and the Apple TV and my computers. The Mac app is merely ok. There is no dedicated Windows app so you either get iTunes or the Apple Music web interface (both of which are garbage). You know what Spotify has? An app for Windows, Mac, and Linux. And they’re all fucking great.
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Linux Tip #1: Max Amount of Locked Memory

This is primarily for Mixbus and Mixbus32c running on Linux. the distro I’m using is Fedora Jam, however this may apply to other distros as well as Ardour, which Mixbus is based on.

Issue

Mixbus 32c shows the following message when launched:

WARNING: Your system has a limit for maximum amount of locked memory.
This might cause Mixbus32C to run out of memory before your system runs
out of memory.
You can view the memory limit with ‘ulimit -l’, and it is normally controlled by /etc/security/limits.conf
Solution

Open a Terminal window and check the memory limit by typing ulimit -l . You may see something like this:

$ ulimit -l
8192

This means that Mixbus is limited to 8GB of memory. To open this limit up, in Terminal, edit limits.conf:

$ sudo vi /etc/security/limits.conf

Add the following line (or if it already exists with a # in front of it remove the # and change the number value to unlimited):

@audio – memlock unlimited

Save the file and check the ulimit again. You should see this:

$ ulimit -l
$ unlimited

Launch Mixbus. If you see the same warning message, check your group in Terminal:

$ groups username

If you don’t see the audio group listed, for example:

username : username wheel pkg-build

add your user to the audio group:

$ sudo usermod -a -G audio username

Check groups again. You should see audio listed:

$ groups username
username : username wheel audio pkg-build

Launch Mixbus and the message should be gone.

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Another Major Shift

After all my posts opining about Apple, macOS, Dell, and Windows, I’ve thrown my hands in the air and given up looking at new computer hardware. I have a ton of reasons which I’ll write about, but the main one is that I’ve become dismayed thinking about the amount of second hand computers that exist while companies churn out new product for ridiculous prices. As a friend of mine recently said: “I like the idea that Apple is making high performance chips that are low on power consumption but I can’t, and won’t spend that much money on a computer.”

After looking into the second hand market, I headed to a local, mom and pop refurbished computer store and marveled at the WALL OF LAPTOPS they had on display:

WALL OF LAPTOPS

These are all second hand/refurbished. And they have more than these stored away in the back. They have old old computers, not so old computers, and newish computers. Give them an idea of what you’re looking for and they’ll hook you up. Why would anyone buy something brand new? Performance? The ability to run whatever is shiny and new?

Well …

I ended up purchasing a refurbished HP EliteBook  850 G3. The model is around six years old and came with an i7 6600u, 16GB of memory (which I upgraded to 32GB thank to an extra stick of ram I had lying around) and a 512 SSD. Supposedly the CPU is not Windows 11 supported but who cares?

In another twist, I decided to flatten the hard drive and give Linux a run for its money.

After doing some research, I settled on Fedora Jam as it’s geared towards music production and so far so good.

I’ve got my Tascam US16x08 running using ALSA – which came with Fedora Jam and needed no configuration – and it all works with Mixbus32c. I have to say that, so far, Mixbus runs so goddamned smooth on Linux, which makes sense considering it’s based on Ardour.

My usual go-to and longtime favorite DAW is Reaper, and it turns out they have a Linux build.  I managed to get it installed and running but, at first, it would not pick up the Tascam. I kept at it over the past few days and now it seems to be running just fine – although under JACK rather than ALSA. I mean ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Music aside, I’ve managed to set it up Fedora as a full-on desktop environment running KDE Plasma and with all my usual apps (Firefox, Spotify, FocusWriter) as well as a good number of Open Source alternatives. The most pleasing surprise is a video editor called Kdenlive. it’s go just the right amount of features that I used in DaVinci Resolve and Premier Pro to make it just right without excessive bloat.

I’m also loving how well a new release of Linux runs on six year old hardware. When I first brought the laptop home, and before I nuked the drive, I gave the Windows 10 install a spin and it was a little sluggish. Fedora, on the other hand, is running like a dream.

Linux has come a long, long way since I seriously tired it last. I know it will never overtake Windows or macOS – I mean, it’s been poised to take over for as long as I can remember – but wow, it’s so much better than I remember.

So far so good.

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A Call To Action

Last year I decided to try my hand at content creation on YouTube.

I ended up doing five videos which picked up a grand total of twenty one subscribers, got some comments, and one video got well over a hundred views. Nothing earth shattering, but kind of cool since I didn’t tell anyone at all I was doing this. I never promoted my channel in any way, other than posting the videos here (and I haven’t told anyone about this site either).

While it was fun and I learned a little more about video editing, I came to realize that the sheer amount of time needed to keep a channel going is simply unsustainable for me.

The effort it takes just to get a piece of content done is amazing. Scripting, lighting, sound, shooting, editing 1 all takes time. A lot of time, which is something I have precious little of.

Now I know there are those out there that who would simply pshaw at not having enough time 2:

“You need to sacrifice everything to make it, man!”

“You gotta hustle, man! You gotta griiiind!”

Listen, the Hustle/Grind Culture thing is toxic and grossly misleading. Like everything else, there are a lucky few who manage to break through the cracks and make it. For everyone else, the grind becomes expectation, and hardly anyone achieves the promised pot of gold.

The Grind only leads to burnout. Which leads to stress and illness.

An old manager said to me regarding raises and promotions: “There are rarely salary bumps. We reward hard work with more work”.

I have a family that I love and I work to make sure they’re happy. I have a good job that I enjoy. Both of these things take up a good chunk of my life, and I jealously covet my time outside of work and I refuse to ignore this for a small slice of the YouTube global audience.

I’m well past the time in my life where I could make it in any artistic career. In my late twenties, I made a conscious decision to stop pursuing art as a career and, for lack of a better term, I “sold out”. I got trained up in computers, snagged a job in IT and have done pretty well for myself and my family.

Music, visual art, video creation are fun for me. It’s what relaxes me during the down time that I do have. Why ruin that by hustling and grinding away my free time to pump out YouTube videos that won’t even guarantee any kind of success?

I made a conscious decision: I’ve deleted the Low Budget Lifer YouTube channel. I didn’t even want to keep it up as a “hobby” or whatever, I wanted to be completely off the platform.

I am still playing around with video creation, and any that I complete will be will be posted on this very site. When I want. How I want.

1: Then there is the obsession with stats. When one of the videos got enough views to open up the stats a little more, I stared going back again and again and again to look at the graphs and charts – even though there was very little happening.

2: This fucking guy. I could do a whole rant about this dude because: JFC, really?

 

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Punk Rock

Punk Rock is about freedom, it’s not about your chart position, and I’ll sing any fucking song I want.

– Patti Smith (The Defiant Ones, Ep1)