When using a regular or low-latency desktop kernel, realtime scheduling for applications might not yet be enabled. However, it just takes a few steps to enable it:
Add the following lines to /etc/security/limits.conf (before the "#End of file" line, needs root access):
The other day I was trying to get my USB MIDI Keyboard (M-Audio Keystation Mini 32) working in Ardour 4.2. Here's how I did it.
Start Ardour and in the Jack setup window select the ALSA Legacy Sequencer as midi system.
Start a2jmidid:
a2jmidid -j default -e
Create a MIDI track and connect the input of the track to the MIDI Keyboard Output in the gouting grid.
Confine all MIDI input and output to channel 1.
By now you should be able to see that the track receives MIDI events when pressing keys on the keyboard. If you're not hearing any sound, try enabling the "in" button on the MIDI track and arming the record button.
This is a selection of various songs that were produced with Ardour.
Uturuncu - Pacto con Mefisto
"We used Ardour 5.8 as the one and only app to record this album. Every song get its own Ardour project, then we made a final Ardour project to put the entire album toghether and make some EQ and final adjustments. Calf Plugins were used for EQ (8 band), Delay (using Vintage Delay) and Reverb and AVL Drums' Black Pearl kit for drum programming. On the hardware side, a Jackson DXMG through a Metal Muff Micro, Shure SM57 and a bass all right into a Behringer UM2 audio interface. Long live Ardour!"
A Sunny Day in Dallas - Closer (acoustic Version)
"The song was recorded using Ardour, Calf Fluidsynth with jRhodes3a
soundfont, Calf Reverb plugin, Calf equalizer and Jamin on KXStudio.
Hardware is a Scarlett 18i20 and two Milab microphones. The background
percussion is all acoustic, it's two chains with shells and bells. We
recorded everything at home."
Marius Stärk - Welt aus Staub (feat. Yeray Diaz Hurtado)
"'Welt aus Staub' is a rock song with soft verses with clean guitar and a heavier, distorted chorus. There's also an interlude with a guitar solo played by my friend Yeray Diaz Hurtado and some Irish folk inspired part afterwards.
Vocals and percussion were recorded using a Neumann TLM102. The rhythm guitar is a Duesenberg Starplayer TV and the bass is a cheap jazz bass copy with Fender Jazz pickups. The solo guitar is some Ibanez guitar, not sure which model.
The song was produced using Ardour 4.2 in UbuntuStudio. It uses DrumGizmo with the DRS kit for drums and Calf Organ for the synths. The guitars are done using the Guitarix plugin suite. The most important plugins I used were the Calf Compressor, Reverb and 5-band-EQ."
Niels Ott / Jürgen Kost - Transient Dream
"This piece started out as a live impro. Niels first played an acoustic bass guitar loop into a BOSS Loop Station. Playing to the loop, Jürgen added tablas, and Niels some more bass. This was recorded multi-track into Ardour via a Yamaha 91V96i console connected via ADAT to an old RME Digi PCI card. In a second take, Jürgen added the frame drum. The piece was then shortened by cutting away quite some material in the middle. Subsequently, Niels improvised the piano track and added a little synth stuff towards the end. Mics used were Rode NT5 (tablas) and Oktava MK012 (frame drum) For the mixdown, Voxengo Elephant (Windows VST) was used on the percussion and piano, plus BlackEQ for any kind of EQing. Reverbs are the Yamaha REV-X engines from the 01V96i console. Mastering was done with Voxengo Elephant, too. "Transient Dream" is part of the EP "between2eternities" consisting of mostly improvised, Loop-Station-based music that is available for free at http://em.drni.de/em008."
Altiplane - Life in HD
"These are songs I track in a demo version of FL Studio, because of the synths. But I mix them in Ardour. All the kicks come from Hydrogen and I use several native LV2 and LXVST synthesizers in Linux like DEXED, ZynAddSubFX, AMsynth, Calf Monosynth and so on. 'Life in HD' is a techno track I did in a two week span. the way I work is quite similar. I program the drums first and then I let the project away until I grab again and finish it. With this track, I decided to follow a similar line as Manual for Error and Undisclosed. I build the baseline with Calf Monosynth and automatized the filter to reach a acidish sound. Finally I did the pad with the help of amsynth, and I hardly worked it with a reverb and a delay."
Rated Blue - "Waiting"
"Waiting" was recorded with a custom build of Ardour 4.4 with WinVST support and was tracked by playing live with lined-in guitar and bass mixes fed to the drummer's headphones. The drum tracks were kept and the bass and guitar tracks were re-recorded with miked tube amps and then the vocals and some percussion were added. The interface used was an older Mackie Onyx 1640 mixer with FireWire and overdubs were done with a Tascam US-122 and a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2. As far as plugins the Ardour session contained linuxDSP PEQ-1a Pultec EQ emulation on the kick drum, the OverToneDSP RVB-500 plate Reverb on it's own bus and the Calf Vintage Delay also on it's own bus. For channel dynamics the linuxDSP DYN-500 compressor and Barry's Satan Maximizer were used. The Master bus used the linuxDSP AF-2 EQ, Barry's Satan Maximizer, the Calf Stereo Tools and the 'LoudMax' Windows VST for final Maximixation and Limiting.
Screwit - "Gelatinous"
"The feel of this song reminds me of jelly hence 'Gelatinous'. I made this song to learn recording clean guitars.
The drums were recorded using the "BigMono" kit in "Hydrogen drum machine". Each instrument routed induvidually to mono audio track in Ardour for more control.
Rig: Schecter-Omen-6(BKP pickups) --> Line 6 Pod HD300 --> Fousrite Scarlet 2i4 --> Ardour
There are two guitar tracks equally panned. Tuning is in C# std. The bass is my guitar pitch glided to an octave lower with a bass amp in Pod HD300, I used the highpass in Ardour to remove the extra chunk in the bass. Except for the highpass in the bass no post processing tools were used."
Michael Oswald - "The Canyon"
"The intention behind this song was first to improve my integration of electronic stuff with more acoustic parts (in my case mostly metal). It started from the electronic drum loops created within LMMS (I liked this low electronic kick sound, which is the first note in the song, so basically it all started from there) and gradually evolved into what it became now.
The synths used are mostly ZynAddSubFx from within LMMS. The patches for the bass lines were created by me, the strings and the space voice in the verses are actually (modified) ZynAdd presets. The heavily distorted Lead in the beginning and after the piano part are the Triple Oscillator from LMMS fed through the TSE 808 tube screamer and a LePou LE456 plugins, which are both freely available (Windows VSTs). Before the tube screamer a variable automated low pass filter creates the wah-effect. The wobble and noiser effect before the last chorus are done with the Synth1 plugin (also a free Windows VST).
The tracks were then exported to WAV and imported into Ardour 4.2. The drums are done with drumgizmo with the Muldjord Kit.
The creation of the drum tracks is a bit non-standard and maybe interesting. Since I don't like Ardour's MIDI editing capabilities a lot (especially moving around is a bit tedious, no drum maps etc.), I did the MIDI editing for the drums from within Muse, which has drum maps and also the MIDI editor is more to what I am used to. Since the drumgizmo LV2 plugin has 16 audio outputs, but Muse can only handle 2, I put a Carla Patchbay as LV2 plugin into the track and connected all drumgizmo outputs (of course depending on stereo/mono channels of the Muldjord kit) to the Carla outputs. Together with the JACK transport you can play Ardour and Muse together, which helps a lot.
The finished drums were exported as MIDI and imported into Ardour. From there I rendered the MIDI to audio tracks to free the drumgizmo resources and then I could disable the drumgizmo MIDI track. There is also a sonic boom sound which I got from FreeSound.
Next was recording of bass and guitar. Bass is a cheap Peavy Millenium BXP 5-string bass tuned down to F# (wibbly wobbly timey wimey) to match the 8-string guitars. The guitar is an Ibanez RGA-8 in standard 8-string tuning (F#-B-E-A-D-G-b-e). Both were recorded via a Line6 PODxt with different patches (a Mesa/Boogie 400 patch for bass, Mesa Dual Rectifier patch and Engl Powerball patch for distorted guitars, a clean VOX AC30 patch for the clean guitar). During recording my old friend, the Saffire LE interface, died, so I got a new Focusrite Saffire 40 which is now my main interface.
The piano is a midi track also created in Muse and imported in Ardour. Since I wasn't able to get the LinuxSampler LV2 plugin to run reliable, I just routed the MIDI track to Fantasia which hosted the Piano available from the LinuxSampler website. The MIDI was then also rendered to an audio track.
Mixing was done completely within Ardour with mostly the Calf plugins (8- and 12-band EQ, compressor, sidechain-compressor, multiband-compressor, gate, vintage delay, pulsator, crusher, limiter, multiband-limiter, stereo tools, reverb, saturator, bass enhancer and tape simulation), OvertoneDSP plugins (FC-70 compressor and PEQ-2A Pultec EQ). Drums have quite a lot of parallel compression, the bass is also parallel processed, the track is sent to a bus containing a EQ4Q from Pere Rafols Soler and a Carla Rack with the free TSE BOD (bass overdrive Windows VST).
The main reverb (all non-plate reverbs) is done with some free IR files and the KlangFalter plugin since I could not get the reverb effect that I wanted with Calf-, invada- or zita-reverb. Mostly that's it."
The Sleeping Philosophers - "Kayanga"
"I'm much more a musician than a tech, so I tend to concentrate on the music and playing. I use very few plugins and processes, I like the sound natural. Hardly anything else than SC4 compressor, MKII EQ and GVerb."
Craig Pidruchny - "Fireflies"
"I found a tape of this song from the late 80's that I multi-tracked by recording onto one cassette deck, playing that back while recording onto another, and on and on. I decided to do a proper version in Ardour. The plugins are all from the Calf suite using compressors, equalisers. and Calf reverb and vintage delay in a reverb and a delay bus. The drums were done in Hydrogen with GMaq's Black Pearl 4 pce kit. I think all the electric guitar parts are with a Fender Strat I bought new last year and the acoustics were a new Martin and an old one that says CBS Masterworks. I played the electrics
through an Art Pro Audio preamp and into Guitarix. There are 10 separate tracks of guitars (not all playing at the same time) which is a lot more that I would normally do."
Kiersten Andrews featuring Hologram Slim - "Wyld"
"Wyld is kind of chillout, head-nodding trip-hop number with a bit of futuristic influence. I wanted to make something that had verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure so someone could potentially rap on it, personally I always heard female trip-hop vocals on it in my head but I haven't been able to get any captured for it yet :) I started by sampling a beat into my Boss SP-303, manipulating it there, then multitracking that into Ardour along with some Novation Bass Station II sounds and, I believe, some sounds from TAL Noisemaker softsynth. I think I may have also used Audacity to edit some samples before they got to Ardour. For plugins I rely heavily on Calf Studio packages, limiting, compression, EQ and so forth.
Update: Finally found my female vocalist! Collaborated with a singer/songwriter from my hometown, recorded in Ardour and mastered lyrics with Calf compressor, 5-band EQ, some delays and exciters."
Eugène Bandit - "Seriously Love"
"This song has been recorded and mixed using Ardour, no plugins or effect have been used in post-production. All the tracks are recorded live from a set of microphones (3 in most cases, 4 for the drums) through a pre-amp (ART Tubeopto 8), Yamaha N8 Mixer (for the baked in reverb) and directly to a Focusrite 18i20."
Salsic - "Bulgar Cigany Horo/Greek Cocek"
"Mixed and recorded on ardour. A Behringer X32 was used for this live recording. Used Plugins:
Compressor, Eq from http://overtonedsp.co.uk/, Mixbus Delay."
Brittle Giants - "Birth"
"Birth is to me a fast-paced atmospheric instrumental rock song with layered melodies, a twist in the middle and a vigorous finale. Stylistically, it's somewhere between post rock (it takes 1:40 to build up to the main part) and Satyricon-style black metal. But who cares about labels, right?
All played by myself, recorded using Ardour and mixed mostly with plugins like the Calf plugin suite, the Invada stereo compressor, and linuxDSP plugins (mostly their parametric EQ)."
Christian Bunge - "Free Sound Lab44"
"Free Sound Lab44 was made with Ardour and some nice LinuxDSP plugins. I only use samples from http://www.freesound.org/."
gabsson Perry - "E FUNK"
"Mixed and recorded on ardour like all of my productions. I could not think about something better than ardour for my music, just what I need, the way I need it. Made with an MPC5000 and Yoshimi. Kind of deep house with some extra drums."
Marius Stärk - "Nichtig"
"A light electronic song with a smooth vibe and German vocals. I recorded vocals, guitar, shaker and tambourine myself. Vocals are recorded using a Neumann TLM102. The guitar sound is done with the Guitarix Metal Head Plugin and played on a Duesenberg Starplayer TV. Drums, except for the bass drum, are done with DrumGizmo and the DRS Kit. Synths used are the Calf Mono Synth for the bass line and the Calf Organ and MDA ePiano for the rest. I also used some samples from http://www.freesound.org/."
Marius Stärk - "Prokrastination"
"One of the first songs I did in Ardour and the first song I released on different digital download platforms like iTunes. Vocals, bass and guitars are recorded by myself and Drums are sampled with DrumGizmo using the DRS Kit. I would mix it differently now but it was a great learning experience."
***
If you want your song to be added to the list, send me an e-mail (staerk.marius at gmail.com) containing a link to your song (e.g. Soundcloud, YouTube,...). Also write a short description. Tell us about the style of your song, what the process of production was like, which plugins you used and so on.
Before starting Please consider buying the pre-built binaries from the Ardour website instead of building it from source to support the Ardour project: http://ardour.org/download.html
The Ardour website states that you should these modified versions of the following libraries:
I found that Ardour also runs with the libraries from the Ubuntu Studio 15.04 repositories, but I experienced some crashes and at one point I couldn't open a project anymore. You should therefore really use these versions. However, for simplicity, this guide uses the repository versions.
Acquiring Necessary Files
Install the prerequesites and accept the prompt for installation of further dependencies:
Go to the directory where you would like to download the Ardour source code to. I personally use ~/src/ for this.
mkdir -p ~/src
cd ~/src
Now download the Ardour source code from the official git repository.
git clone https://github.com/Ardour/ardour.git
Go to the source folder.
cd ardour
I prefer using a certain release version. In this case I would like to use the 4.2 version of ardour so I check out the specific version tag.
git checkout 4.2
Building Ardour
The next step is to actually configure the build environment.
./waf configure
The end of the configure output should read "'configure' finished successfully (5.649s)". If not some dependency could not be resolved. I tested this on Ubuntu Studio 15.04 so this should not happen if you're using it, too.
Now build the source code. Replace the number behind -j with your cpu core count to speed up the build process.
./waf -j4
Installation and Execution
After the successful build you can deploy the application.
sudo ./waf install
You can start Ardour by executing the ardev binary in the gtk2_ardour folder.
After installing the realtime kernel as described in this article, Nvidia graphics card owners will probably want to install the official graphics driver from Nvidia (if you're using Ardour you're going to need this driver to get smooth GUI performance). Unfortunately, the installer will just complain about the realtime kernel and quit. With some tweaks it is possible to install it nevertheless. This article describes the installation of the Nvidia driver version 352.41. For different versions you will need a different patch file or perform the patch manually.
Warning: I found that the driver sometimes locks itself up on my system, leading to a frozen image. If 100% stability is a requirement for you, you should not install it. During the installation you will need to stop your desktop session so consider printing this guide or open it up on a different device.
Open a console and change directory to the folder where you downloaded the driver package to.
Make the driver package executable:
chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.41.run
Extract the driver source:
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.41.run --extract-only
Apply the patch file:
less nvidia-352.41-rt.patch | patch NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.41/kernel/nv-linux.h
Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to open up a terminal session and login as root
Stop your desktop manager. If you're using XFCE (UbuntuStudio) this is LightDM. Beware that this kills all programs running in the GUI session, including the browser you might be reading this article in:
/etc/init.d/lightdm stop
Set this environment variable to disable the a check for the realtime kernel patch in the installer:
export IGNORE_PREEMPT_RT_PRESENCE=1
Change directory to the folder where the nvidia driver source was extracted to.
Run the installer just like you normally would:
./nvidia-installer
Restart your desktop manager:
/etc/init.d/lightdm start
Your system should now use the freshly installed driver!
If you want to adapt this process for a different driver version, you will need to take a look what the patch actually does and make those changes to the nv-linux.h file manually. If you do so, it would be very nice of you to create a new patch file and post it here in the comments. Of course, there's no guarantee that this will work for newer driver versions.
If you want to get serious with music production on Linux you will need a realtime kernel. This guide is a condensed reference on how to patch, compile and install the 4.1.5. kernel. This should work with other kernel versions, too.
