Category Archives: Music

New song: “He made a way”

April 23, 2019 , Leave a Comment ,

I’ve been working away at my next book, keeping well ahead of schedule, and decided to take a short break over the Easter holiday to record a song that’s been rolling about in my head.

The song is called “He Made a Way” and you can find it on my music page in MP3 and Ogg formats. Unlike most of my recent work, this song isn’t in an odd meter and doesn’t use fancy harmonic stuff; instead, I decided to dip my toes into African styles like Soukous and Rumba, because I don’t think there’s a happier-sounding style of music on the planet. Sometimes you just want to write a happy song, you know?

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Posted in: Faith, Music , Tagged:

Random thoughts about “Linux on old computers”

May 16, 2018 , 1 Comment ,

Many years ago I wrote a series on “reviving your old PC with Linux“, a topic which still remains in active discussion all around the Linuxy corners of the Interwebs.  Most of what I wrote still applies, so long as you shift things forward seven years into the future.  But as someone who continues to engage in the hobby (and discussion of the hobby) of foisting free operating systems on whatever decaying PC hulks float my way,  I thought I’d write up random thoughts about the subject in response to things people say or the changes in computing.  A bit of a rant, a bit of state-of-the-union, and a little thinking out-loud on the topic of old hardware running old faithful.

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Posted in: Fixing stuff, Free/Libre Open Source Software, Music, Old computers, Technology , Tagged: , , , , ,

New Songs, and how I recorded them

May 19, 2016 , Leave a Comment ,

April is Autism Awareness month, so last month I released to my (five-or-so) anxious fans a couple of songs inspired by an autistic person close to me.  You can hear them here (click the album covers):

echoes from hyperspace cover

Echoes From Hyperspace

He's an alien cover

He’s an Alien

I spent several months recording and mixing these, hopefully the quality (and the message) comes through.

Since this blog appeals to the geekier side of human nature, I thought I’d write up some of the technical details behind these recordings.

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Posted in: Music , Tagged: , ,

Omega Hymnal improvements

January 22, 2014 , Leave a Comment ,

Since uploading Omega Hymnal to Github ten days ago, I’ve made numerous improvements.  It almost seems like it’s time to slap a version number on it and call it a release.  Here’s a rundown of the features and fixes:omegahymnal-ss-2014-1-22

  • The utility links (import/export/settings/etc) are all grouped under a “Tools” submenu
  • I removed the default DB file from the source, so if you happen to use the default settings I won’t clobber your database when you “git pull”.
  • Omega Hymnal can initialize a clean database if you don’t have one, or you can reinit your database if you want to start clean.
  • I fixed a lot of nuttiness in the auto-text-sizer on the song screen. It’s more consistent now.
  • I added the capability to manually insert pagebreaks in the lyrics using the [pagebreak] tag. This is an alternative to manually shuffling things between text boxes.

Not sure where to go next, hopefully I can convince some others to start using this and get some good ideas. I’d love to figure out a way that I can make lyrics + chord entry a lot easier and less geeky (the world apparently doesn’t share my love of markup languages), though my ideas so far either go beyond the limits of JS or just over-complicate the problem.

Posted in: Music, Programming, Technology , Tagged: , , , ,

Lykwyd Chykyn Pay-what-you-want Music Salestravaganza

November 1, 2012 , Leave a Comment ,

I’ve been putting a bit more work into my music pages on this website, notably my Lykwyd Chykyn site; in addition to a revamped Random song player (now using HTML5 “audio” tags),
I’ve got a link to a page with all my songs, using a “Pay what you want” system so that you can have all the Lykwyd Chykyn/Alan D Moore music you can stand for a gift of 5, 10, 20, or 0 (if you wanna be like that) dollars.

Yeah, I know, maybe not what the world has been waiting for, but considering what people are happy to shell out to iTunes for DRM-locked tracks from the west coast music machine, I’m hoping they’ll see the sense in dropping a few
bucks in the hat for some liberally licensed (CC-BY-SA-NC) tracks made with love and care. Time will tell.

Check it out at http://www.alandmoore.com/lc.

Posted in: General, Music , Tagged: ,

Ubuntu Studio 12.04

May 10, 2012 , 3 Comments ,

A screen cap of the Ubuntu Studio Desktop

The Ubuntu studio 12.04 desktop.

Not so long ago, I posted about my attempts to bring my old DAW system back to life with Lubuntu.  Emboldened by my success, and eager to get it on a nice firm LTS-release foothold, I tried to upgrade it to Precise Pangolin a few weeks ago.  Sadly, the results were not so great:  after upgrading, I ran afoul of a mysterious bug that caused Ardour, Audacity, and Hydrogen (and possibly other programs) to segfault when I started them.  Despite my best efforts to track down the error (probably caused by my liberal use of PPAs and 3rd-party repositories), it became clear I needed to start afresh.

This time I decided to skip a bit of the DIY and just grab a ready-made audio production distro; after all, there are plenty of them out there, aren’t there?  Well, the hunt began for an audio-production oriented distro that would work decently on an older 32-bit system while promising future updates; and yes, believe me, my not-so-fond-of-Ubuntu friends out there, I didn’t limit myself to ‘buntuland.  Yet search as I might, every project I found seemed either at least 18 months stale (if not out-and-out abandoned), or a one-man project based on Debian or Ubuntu anyway.  In the end, Ubuntu studio seemed best to fit the bill.  So I downloaded the nearly 2 GB .iso file, popped it on my flash drive, and loaded it onto the old workhorse; and here, dear reader, are my findings so far…

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Posted in: Fixing stuff, Free/Libre Open Source Software, General, Music, Old computers, Technology , Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

First recording with my new setup

February 11, 2012 , Leave a Comment ,

Finally got some time last night to do a little recording on my Lubuntu/ardour setup.  I wasn’t doing anything serious, just wanted to lay down some sounds to experiment with software, workflow, and getting a good sound out of my new cajon.

The result is here.  No sequencing or drum programming going on (obviously), just laid down one track at a time into Ardour and mixed down with a handful of plugins.  The lead synth is nekobee running through a parametric eq and rotary speaker sim, recorded live into Ardour.

I’m pretty happy with what it can do, though I still feel like the workflow with Jack/Ardour is a little cumbersome.  My hardware is kind of flaky too, sadly.  Still, there’s something that inspires me more about working with duct-tape and baling wire than with some shiny turnkey system.

Posted in: Free/Libre Open Source Software, General, Music, Technology , Tagged: , ,

Reviving my home studio, this time the free software way

January 11, 2012 , 2 Comments ,

Long ago, before I ever knew a lick of BASH or even what an OS kernel was, my passion was not technology but music, music, and more music.  Roughly the first half of my adult life was devoted to the writing, playing, and recording of music, and by around 2002 I’d built for myself a tidy little home recording & mixing setup centered on Cakewalk Sonar, Jeskola Buzz, and Windows XP.  Alas, the years were not kind to my career or gear, and up until recently my music computer was busy being a game & education machine for the kids.

Thanks to a hard drive crash and the purchase of new machines for the kids, I got my old music machine back, albeit lacking a functioning operating system and software.  So, I decided now was a good time to rebuild it.  This time, though, I decided the time was right to kick XP and Cakewalk to the curb and go it Free Software style.

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Posted in: Free/Libre Open Source Software, General, Life, Music, Technology , Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,