Episode: 2099
Title: HPR2099: Dat Muzak Showz
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2099/hpr2099.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:19:35

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This is HPR episode 2009 titled At New Mac Show.
It is hosted by X1101 and is about 39 minutes long.
The summary is Lyle, X1101 and Adj talk about making music on Linux.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An honesthost.com.
Hello Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Lyle.
You probably know me online has X1101 and tonight I have with me my good buddy Tosh.
Let's get everybody.
And you know, you may have just recently heard us talking about Docker where I was dropping
some knowledge to Tosh.
Now we're kind of reversing the roles here and he's going to be dropping some knowledge
on me about how exactly I should go about making music on my Linux box.
Well, I can tell you about the making music.
The Linux part is going to be a little suspect.
I know what the tools are, but we were discussing earlier that I really hadn't done any composition
or anything since I made the move to Linux about 10 years ago, which is insane.
So I understand the theory behind things and I understand like what tools you use for
what things.
And so we're just going to kind of talk about that.
And then I know a little bit about some of the tools and kind of figure out a workflow.
Good.
Because while I have the desire to create music and I know the kind of music I like and
would like to create the last time I played any music that wasn't hitting play on the
radio was probably around 2000.
And then I was a percussionist with the school band and I had my own kit, but I never
did anything more than bang around and make a bunch of noise because I never managed
to join and or form a band because I wasn't 16 yet, did not have a car to transport this
stuff with and neither did any of my friends.
In fact, did I have any friends?
That's been the runner of many band, but not having friends or not being able to move
their equipment.
Well, I was specifically referring to the not being able to remove or to move their equipment,
but yeah, friends, man, that probably helps you.
All right.
So I guess the best place to start is if you're imagining making music, what kind of music
do you want to make and if you could do it the perfect way, what would it look like?
So there are really two kinds of music that I always come back to.
I'm kind of eclectic when it comes to what I like to listen to, but I always come back
to my two great loves of music are I love heavy metal.
I love the heavier, the louder, the faster, the weirder, the better.
And keep going back to how much I really love like EDM, dance music, electronic, techno,
just stuff I can throw on and just vibe to this admin.
And I'm guessing I'll have a lot better luck with the second stuff than the first.
Well, I mean, there's obviously going to be a talent component to both.
I think you have to go in with something, but I mean, to get talent, you've got to start
somewhere.
I wouldn't let talent be the thing that keeps you away from it, you know, isn't talent
just the result of lots of hard work?
Yes.
And so you've got to start somewhere, you know, you spend years practicing scales to get
good at, you know, playing actual music.
So especially when it comes to making music, you've got to, you're going to put out a bunch
of stuff you don't like before you come up with anything you do like, or at least that's
always been my, my problem, even even when I was doing it constantly.
I was putting out more stuff that I didn't like than what I did like, but that just comes
with the territory.
And I think it's important to kind of understand what you like and how, what you want to make
and how that's going to impact how you interface with the technology to do it.
So like for me, for example, when I was writing music, as much as I hate to say this because
it's kind of a cliche, you know, I'm classically trained.
I went to music school when I sat down to write music, literally when I wrote composed,
it was not even anywhere near a computer.
It would be at a piano with a, a notepad and literally writing down what I was playing
that I liked little snippets, taking those snippets and putting them usually into a notation
program.
I, to this day, still do everything in notation and do it just like reading music because
it's what I'm familiar with.
It's basically a language to me.
And so being able to sit down and see things in a music format really helps me.
And a lot of times for me, the computer part was just to facilitate doing more with that
than I could do because I only have two hands on a piano so I can't really play all the
instruments at once.
So the computer would let me write different voices and hear them and then put that out
and have real musicians play it.
It wasn't a recording thing for me.
So that end I'm a little more fuzzy on even though I worked in a studio for a while so
I understand how it works.
But for me, knowing how my brain works and it helps me dictate what tools I use.
So if you're doing EDM stuff, would you still want to use like live instruments with
that?
Well, at this moment, no.
Mostly because I don't have any way to get my audio into a computer.
That is probably going to be changing at some point because I'll be thinking about getting
in a mixer board and I do have a couple of instruments.
But then there's the problem that I don't actually know how to play them.
And so that's another investment in time before I would get to being even mildly productive.
I'm kind of hoping I can leverage my other strengths and that I write scripts, I automate,
I build and I've heard lots of things about ways you can take that kind of mindset and
wrap that around some tools to somehow turn out interesting sounding music.
My friend, you need to learn about synths and sequencers because that is to me and
my brain.
That is the world of kind of making.
I look at a sequencer kind of if I was going to do it as a programming kind of analogy
and I'm not a programmer, but I know enough programming to get myself in trouble.
I see sequencers is kind of your writing functions and then you're taking the functions
that you've written and you're writing a script to fire them off in the right sequence
to make the music you want to make.
So it's flow control.
Essentially yes.
So you can use the sequencer in lots of different ways.
Probably if you're starting out, I would use some kind of looping software, something
I'm thinking everything I did prior to Linux was on a Mac, I'm sorry, I pay penance for
my sins every day, but I would use something like Ableton to do that to where I would
write a loop of something that I thought sounded cool and I would use virtual instruments
to do that.
And then I would write a loop that was would add on to that first loop or it would be
a different loop that may be like a different part of the song.
And then you can trigger those on the fly literally by just having keyboard assignments
to them.
So it's like I've got a groove on one and another groove on another and then I'll have
one that's kind of like the first one that maybe the bass is gone or maybe I'll have
a drop or it's just, you know, everything but just like barely in the background.
And I could set there and do it in real time, just pressing the buttons and sequencing
that out to where I got a song that I liked or something like that.
That might be a good place to start is to play with something like that and see if that
is kind of your head space, especially for something like that.
Sounds awesome.
And we talked earlier today and I installed a bunch of tools and I'll put them in the
show notes, which ones we suggested I play with.
Do you have one specifically we could poke around in?
Um, probably to me, the easiest one to play with that kind of has that idea would be hydrogen,
which is technically I guess a drum machine.
And I actually used hydrogen back in the day.
It was something that worked on max free and open source software for the wind.
So I script.
So where I'm going to try a sequencer and synthesizer and that's going to be fun.
Yes.
It should be.
What do I need other than said software that I am not going to launch now because I don't
want to fuck up my audio again?
Well, it depends on where you want to start.
So what I would say is probably the easiest one is hydrogen to get your head around.
And I think I did that for a little while.
I had something that sounded terrible, but I did have something.
And yeah, a lot of people, that's where they start and you get a lot of terrible, you
just go type hydrogen drum machine into the YouTube and you'll see some awesomely bad
things.
You also see some cool tutorials, but most of it's not great.
The cool thing about hydrogen is it teaches you a lot about just kind of the basics of
how sequencing works, like how you'll make a pattern.
And then you can repeat that pattern or place that pattern in different places.
I think that was the part I couldn't figure out how to do is how to loop the pattern.
I had to just keep making it.
Yeah.
There's a way to loop it.
I don't know how far out you have to go to start the loop, but I think there's a setting
you could do an hydrogen, whether it's to change the meter that you're in to get where
you want to be or whatever.
It would just be playing around with it to figure that out.
And that's something if you're like, help us talk and send me the file, I could probably
figure out just by playing with it.
But that's easy because you're dealing the bottom screen kind of in the default hydrogen
is sort of just dealing with one measure at a time.
And then the top is just putting them in a line and how you want to fire it off to make
your song.
So it's very easy to wrap your brain around.
You don't have to worry about creating sounds.
The sounds are already there.
You can find tons of hydrogen drum kits out there to just load in to get new sounds to
play with.
I think I could be completely wrong.
Let me Google this before I say this.
Yeah.
So I was right a couple a long time ago.
I don't know exactly how long.
Klaatu I know was involved in the Linux multimedia experience.
And so it was these packets of multimedia things that were all I believe free and open source.
You could use them however you wanted.
And inside of there are lots of hydrogen drum kits.
So that would be a good place to go to find new sounds to play with.
And then you could just kind of, to me, that would be the easy place to start is to just
practice playing with sounds and seeing what you can make there.
Because that's really going to be the, that's the core concept of sequencing, I think,
more than anything.
If you feel that like you groove on that, that would open up other possibilities that
you could use either with pre-made loops or if you wanted to start, you could actually,
if you wanted program loops in hydrogen and then pull those loops into a better sequence
that would do more and then use the power of that to put those loops together to do new
things.
So it's, you can kind of escalate out of the hydrogen into something a little more.
I don't want to say better, just a little more because I'm sure you could spend your
whole life in hydrogen and make awesome EDM music.
But I think you're probably want to eventually get out of that and to do something a little
more complicated than what you can do in hydrogen.
Cool.
I think, I think when I tried it the last time the problem I got into was I could develop
a really cool pattern, but then I just like played it forever.
And there was no, and there was no bass dropping and there was no something else cutting
in and that's the part where I was trying to develop the next layer of stuff on top
of it.
Yeah.
I mean, that's kind of, if you recognize that that's a problem, then that spurs where you
go next.
I think a lot of times.
That's one of the things I'd like, I always like to do is I had a bunch of friends who
were also composing at the same time and I would give it to them and be like, be brutal.
Just tell me what you need.
What is it not giving you and that feedback helped me a lot.
There were certain things that I was, I was just terrible at not paying attention to
that people got me on the right track just by telling me, Hey, this is terrible.
You need to, you need to fix this.
And so having that already for yourself that just kind of tells you where you need to go
next as far as, as far as you're composing and how you're writing music.
So another sequencer that I played with that it's kind of a, it is a sequencer, but it's
more than that is I'm not even sure how you say it.
It's love, I guess L U P P and this is sort of the idea of a sequencer.
This is more like Ableton to where you can do sort of the electronic loops and stuff,
but you can also mix in real sounds into this.
So if I had a keyboard that was like a MIDI keyboard or something and I had a synth hooked
up to it and I was playing synth sounds.
I could record those synth sounds into here and make a loop out of those.
So that would go where do you get, where do you get those synth sounds?
So it depends on how you want to go.
You can go with hardware synths, which are, you know, you can get them in keyboard.
You can get them as rack mounts.
The thing with, especially MIDI is that you've got a controller and then you've got where
your sound is coming from.
Your controller could be like a MIDI keyboard controller.
It could be literally the keyboard on your computer.
You can totally set your computer up to do that.
The sounds can either come from the controller itself, from an external synth or it can
come from a software synth.
And so one of the things that I put on that list for you to look at, which is probably way
too complicated to look at, is I did a little research in this seem to be a fairly popular
synth for Linux is fluid synth.
And you'd have to download a GUI to run on top of that.
And I think it was G synth or Q synth.
I can't remember which one.
I'd have to look it up is one of the more popular GUIs to run on top of that.
And so what you do with that is you assign your sound to that.
So a lot of times you'll find what are called sound fonts.
And you can load a sound font into that.
And basically if I set my, let's just say to where you don't have to buy anything,
this is all just what you have.
You have your keyboard that you just got on your computer and you've mapped, you've got
it mapped out.
There's, there's actually I think a fairly standard way that they're mapped out.
I've never played with it that much.
But you use the keys to trigger a sound in the synth.
So if you're running a software synth, whatever sound font or sound files that you have in
that synth would be triggered by those key presses.
So that's how you would get the sounds.
And then you would pipe those sounds out of the synth into whatever program you're using.
That makes sense.
A lot of music production is stringing together a bunch of different programs to get to the
end goal that you need to get to.
It looks like it is Q synth is the QT GUI for fluid synth.
But I am, I am not going to launch that for fear that it will make my audio subsysteme
its face again.
Yeah, most of the, for some strange reason and Linux, whenever you trigger an audio program
most of the time, they want to hide Jack your sound guard and there's, there's a program
called Jack, which kind of lets you have more fine tune control of how things work like
that.
I've never played with Jack because I've just never had the need to.
I probably will now, but I think they're now that I'm harassing you about how I make
music.
Yeah, like teach me, teach me the knowledge.
So I take possible synthesizer and I either get some kind of gadget to trigger the stuff
or I use my keyboard to trigger the stuff and I plumb that together with some kind of
looping software to loop those synthesized sounds and then I do something else and then
it makes a music.
Yeah, in a roundabout way you're right.
So it just depends on where you want to go with it.
So you could use a hardware thing like your keyboard to input the sounds.
When I was composing, I would, I had a big 88 keyboard that was a MIDI controller that
went to a hardware synth because I have yet to and still haven't found a good orchestral
MIDI synthesizer that doesn't sound like crap that isn't hardware where you had to
spend an outrageous amount of money to get it.
If anybody knows any different, especially if it's a software synth, let me know because
I would kill that.
But anyways, luckily the stuff I'm kind of interested in making doesn't need orchestral
stuff.
Yeah, and I guess I'm kind of hearing in my head, you know, old 9-inch nails, infected
mushroom, scrillex, that kind of area of music.
And the nice thing about that is there's so many sounds out there for that.
There's so many soundfons and things like that that are going to help you do that.
And the nice thing is that you're not trying to replicate something else's sound.
So it's going to sound right where if you're trying to replicate something else, it's
always a little off.
Yeah, I'm not trying to sound like I stride a very, I want mechanical sounding sounds.
And that's definitely the wheelhouse that this sort of stuff works in.
Now you can also use a sequencer to trigger your synth.
So I'm not sure which Linux sequencers will do it, but you can set up a pattern and
pull those sounds into some sequencers.
So that would take a little research to figure out what would do what, but you could usually
set up a pattern and trigger it in a sense.
You could also make a loop that you like in a sequencer and then dump that out as an
audio file and start just playing with the audio file in like a DAW, which is a digital
audio workstation and start cutting that up and stuff like more kind of the analogy of
literally cutting like the magnetic tapes and splicing them together, kind of audio editing,
like an audacity type deal to where you're looking at a waveform and doing that.
You can do that too.
You can do all these things as different steps in the process or you can use all these
things as the process in and of itself.
It just depends on what you're comfortable with and what your ideas are and what that
pushes you towards.
So you have this really cool beat that you've just written down, but you know you want to
get to a part where you just want to shred on top of it.
You're like, I've got this cool guitar part, I just got to play it.
The sequencer's not going to be able to handle that, but you could take what you sequenced
and a lot of your DAWs and Linux, I know QTractor and our door both have MIDI sequencers built
in.
So you could export the MIDI out of like say you built it in hydrogen, export the MIDI
out of that or export a sound file, just depending on how you wanted to do it and run
that and then record live audio on top of that.
And so like I'm saying, it just depends on, it's less about what software you use and
more about what you want to do.
It's almost like you, it's kind of like programming.
You have to have a problem to solve and once you have a problem that kind of drives your
decisions and what tools you use, you know, I can see.
So you're saying that because I can't hear something unique in my head, I may have
a hard time getting up and going, or is that me adding some context on top of what
you said?
I'd say that's context.
My suggestion is pick a tool, learn it and just bang out horrible stuff and just put
in and put in the hours of just learning how to do it.
And then you may hit pay dirt your first try.
You may make something awesome and that good on you.
Then it's what how can I expand this how what is this not doing that I want to do and
then see how that drives your decision or you practice and you keep making crap and
you're like, this just isn't working for me, then maybe I need to grow into something
else.
Maybe this tool is not the tool I need.
I'm using a tool that would get me somewhere kind of like I'm using a screwdriver for a chisel.
I mean, I'll get there.
It's not the most efficient process.
So I kind of get, I give you that list of stuff.
I would just start plugging around with things and see what in that that you kind of like
and what in there is letting you make the sounds that you kind of feel like you want to
make.
Part of the problem is a lot of the music that I like and that I would like to emulate
is almost background music.
It's almost, I hate to say this, I don't mean to insult the artist you've made it because
this isn't the right word, but it's almost forgettable.
For me, a lot of the time, so I'm listening to a lot of EDM because I want to take my
ADD brain and be like, here go play with this instead of being distracted and let me work.
It's the distraction to block out all the other distractions.
Right.
And I get what you're saying.
And to me, that's not an insult.
I mean, which is I come from, you know, my background is in scoring things.
And so to me, that's exactly what I want to hear.
I want it to be completely unnoticeable.
I don't want you to notice that there's a score going on.
And I just want you to feel that there's a score going on.
And I could see a similar thing with dance like the electronic music.
For me, it's a lot of times it's when I'm working, when I'm just admitting, I need something
to stop listening to the 10 conversations going on around me and start to just, you know,
block that out, both physically block it out by having other sound, but having something
that is interesting enough that the part of my brain that wants distractions is covered.
So the rest of my brain can go actually solve problems.
And a piece of advice that I got from my composition teacher that I studied with in music
school is very similar to exactly how I learned that this infotessible amount of coding
that I know go steal.
So one of the projects that we started with is go listen to what you like, pick out your
favorite part of a song like what is that one thing that whenever it happens in a song,
it's your goosebumps.
It just triggers something.
So like if I'm listening to a mall or symphony and the French horns come in and there's this
cool line, what is it about that line that you like?
Is it the melody?
Is it just the voicing or whatever it is?
Figure out why you like it and then just steal that and start putting that together and
you're going to write derivative crap for a while of just stealing ideas and putting
them together.
But then you start to figure out, oh, this is, this is really, I like what I'm listening
to and this is why I like it.
You're just dilating in your taste as to what you really like and by playing with it,
you're becoming more familiar with it and you're learning, oh, well, that will work here
in a song, but it may not work, you know, what will work in, you know, the most high
tempo part of the song is not going to work at the very beginning.
And you sort of learn that ebb and flow of how music works and how it affects you personally.
And then the next step that we did is take a song that you know and listen to it.
And then if you were going to add another layer to it, what would that layer be?
And then write that.
And then, you know, it may not be its own song, but it may be the start of your next song.
I remember we were all my friends, we were huge Star Wars nerds, we, and it was happy
to be in shock and awe.
Yeah, I know, right?
It happened to be when all the new, it was when the prequels were out, unfortunately,
but we were, you know, we're Star Wars nerds, so we did it anyways.
So a bunch of our friends, we would just take songs from Star Wars and we would write
sort of melodies on top of that and we would, we would take and kind of write our own
versions.
And I know for me, I wrote a version, a sort of a melody that went on top of a song
that already existed and then I pulled it out and I wrote a whole new piece around
that melody, but you would never be able to tell where it came from.
And so you almost used the old song to scaffold it up and then took and built the rest of
the body underneath it afterwards.
Yeah, which is exactly how I learned all the code, like bash scripting, how did I learn
how to bash script?
I looked at other people's bash scripts, I borrowed steel, stole them, and I just modified
it to do it.
I wanted, but it's still, after I've done that enough times, I can generate a script
on my own using these derivative pieces.
And then once I've done that enough, I can write scripts from the beginning to the end
using my own code.
I don't have to look at somebody else's stuff anymore and it's the same idea.
It's just you're dealing with a new medium and you know, that analogy really works for
me because that's been the last decade of my life, that exactly.
And I mean, music is no different, it's, you know, there, if you think about it, there's
only so many notes and so many rhythms and everything you've ever written, somebody
else has written, but they may not have wrote it in the same exact combination you have.
So it's, you know, just playing with it, you may write something that sounds exactly
like something else, but there's a little difference in it that makes it, you know, it's
own unique thing and there's nothing wrong with that.
It's sort of, I know a lot of people say to writers, you know, kill your babies, you're
going to kill a lot of songs before you get one that is just genuinely good.
But once you do, it becomes easier to replicate that.
And even when you do get there, you, you have your own sound.
So going back to Star Wars, it doesn't matter what movie John Williams scores.
You know it's John Williams.
I can hear Harry Potter, I can hear Indiana Jones, I can hear Star Wars, I can hear ET.
They're all John Williams, like definitively and you can even hear his classical work,
just not film scores and know it's John Williams.
But without it sounding derivative of each other, specifically with John Williams, I wouldn't
go there.
But okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
There's kind of this, this theme with John Williams that John Williams steals from himself
and anybody else he can, but he, you know what, he reuses it in a different way.
And so it's, it is what it is.
I don't, I love John Williams music and I know a lot of people are like, he's derivative
and, but I love it and I think it's awesome.
I just, don't be afraid to just blatantly copy until you get it right.
So the problems have been too much, on too much of a heavy metal kick.
And so the things I want to borrow and steal are all, you know, heavy metal, metal core
stuff that I don't know if you, I mean conceptually I know you can bring them over, but I don't
know how to bring over the sounds very well.
Yeah.
I don't know.
My music changed a lot.
So what's I got out of music school and I did audio and video production and stuff
for a while, I got hooked up with a group that did Indian classical music.
And so I had to learn Indian classical music, which is like a lifetime achievement.
And I crammed like two months worth of training in and I went and started playing with
these people.
And that changed me a lot musically because it was such a fundamental difference to where
I had the same sound and the same concepts, but I was doing it in a different way.
So I mean, I wouldn't discount there's things in metal that you would probably definitely
bring over what those are, it'd be hard to define.
Well, it's the kinds of sounds, but I try one of the things I tried to replicate and
it just sounded mechanical and terrible.
For me, the one thing in the two things, sorry, in like metal core that really just always
do it for me is rapid fire double bass.
And the like the drop the breakdown where the kind of builds in intensity and it just hangs
in the air a minute and then just drops and gets really heavy.
Both of those things that's yeah, yeah, so I would say, is it, is it the sound of the
double bass?
Is it the rhythm of the double bass?
Is it, you know, is it actually not the double bass?
Is the other things going on underneath it that you just don't aren't really paying attention
to because you're paying attention to that one other thing?
You know, it's a lot of it's slight in hand.
In certain, you know, metal sub genres, the, I realize this sounds funny, but percussion
is kind of treated as a single thing.
It sounds like, but you know, you get, it's almost like they've got the rest of the drums
and then you've got the double bass almost playing a whole other part by itself.
The way it's balanced and mic'd and played, you get parts where you basically get a bass
drum solo.
Yeah.
No, that's totally legit.
And it's like, wow, you are using your feet and making a AK 47 bass drum.
It's just wow.
So if that's something you like, can you replicate it or can you find somebody, especially
out there with the kind of net labels and creative commons and all that stuff, can you find
a sample of that that you can use to build into your other stuff?
I mean, that's awesome.
Being able to incorporate that could be super powerful in your sound.
You know, it's just going out there and finding it or just learn how to be a badass on
the double bass pedal yourself and then you can just do it whenever you want.
Yeah, it's, so if I do anything, it's really going to be trying fuse those two not unrelated
genres.
You know, the dance trance techno electronic electronic music in general with, you know,
like the thrash metal metal core, which are my two great loves in music.
I'm probably willing to bet.
I'm not going to Google it because I'm just, I'm going to go out and live in there.
I bet somewhere somebody has a hydrogen tutorial telling is showing something you how to
get a kind of double bass like that riff that just total going to town on it.
I have Google here because I mean, technically you could do 16 to 30 second note bass notes
on a sequencer, but I don't think it would be the same sound because it would just be
a.
It was the big yes, exactly.
I tried it.
Big thing that a lot of double bass is it's really there's two different ways to have
double bass from the the mechanical perspective.
It's either two bass drums with one mallet each or one bass drum with two mallets and
then you get get the interplay between the two.
So the first thing I would try just to see if I could replicate it is try to find two different
bass drum sounds that are similar enough, but different to where you would have it would
sound like two different drums when they were doing it, it would just be different enough
to where you could hear the sound move between the two or I would play so in midi and sound
in general, you talk about velocity, which is literally how hard you hit the key on a
keyboard.
And then that translates into how loud it is go into each beat.
And a lot of sequins or every sequence or ever seen you can do this maybe for somebody
who's doing double bass, maybe part of their sound is their left foot always hits just
a little lighter than their right foot and just go in and change that and see if you
could replicate that sound and maybe even randomize it a little bit to make it sound
more human.
Well a lot of that sound, the double bass sound I'm hearing is almost where there's, you
know, three, seven, whatever beats and then an accent beat that's even more aggressive.
So you get, you know, three or seven that all sound roughly the same and then an extra
hard one.
Yeah, what you could also do with volume or maybe you could find a drum kit that had
like a really aggressive bass drum hit and then use that patch, just patch that in for
just your accents and just kind of almost building, you're making your source code for
what you're going to do.
Sounds like I know what I mean to do for a little while.
Oh yeah, this stuff is way harder than anybody wants to imagine it is.
I mean, you genuinely have to really love doing it to be successful at it.
I mean, it's just like anything, you get, you get entranced by it to a certain extent.
I mean, I've spent a week working on four bars of a piece just because I'm so enthralled
with trying to make it right or it's frustrating me because I can't make it work and eventually
you just write something in deadlines, you know, but especially when you're learning,
you've got to really have a passion for it or it gets kind of overwhelming.
Well, I mean, I spend all day, every day listening to one of those two genres.
I would love to be able to occasionally listen to something that I put together.
And the nice thing is is you're going into it already speaking the language.
It's not like I'm asking you to write a little bit.
Well, I mean, I'm not as, you're not coming to me having never listened to it and said,
I want to write, you know, Indonesian gomalon music, like you at least understand the
tropes and the, the, the, the styles that you want to play in, which is good.
I mean, that's, that's going to save you time and hopefully jumpstart you.
I mean, the biggest barrier to begin with is just playing with the tools and, and trying
to figure out what tools work the best for you.
And then once you do, you just, you started going your way.
You know, do I work better with Ruby or Pearl or Python?
You know, it's, it's the same thing, just a different, different medium.
There is one other aspect that I just, I have to accept that I'm not going to be able
to duplicate.
That's the one thing that almost always draws me to music is a singular vocalist, not singular
is in only one, but some kind of unique individual, you know, discernible vocalist.
I thought for a second, when you said the one thing that draws me to music, I could
have swore you were going to say hookers and blow, but he didn't go there.
But that's, that's two things.
No, it's not.
It's one.
I'm also not a politician.
So, yeah, fair enough.
Yeah, I don't, I tend to vocalist get in the way for me.
It's, it's been something I've always had a problem with other than hip hop.
Hip hop is the one genre where the vocalist is more impressive to me than the music.
But most of the time, like, if there's vocals in a song, I, I typically don't even pay
attention to them.
Like, my wife, who can hear us on one time and can recite every lyric in that song because
she's got a brain like that, I'll be listening to a song and she's like, oh, this is really
good song.
It means all this stuff.
I was just paying attention to, you know, what the cool core progression that was going
on.
I get so lost in the music itself that I don't, I tend to not pay attention to vocals.
So that's just my brain.
We've covered a ton of material here.
I think maybe we should think about wrapping it up and maybe I'll put her for a while and
release something, whether it's good or terrible, probably terrible.
And maybe do an HPR follow up talking about how I got there and what tools I ended up
using and how much I bugged you about it.
Groovy.
I'm going to be doing the same thing.
I'm going to be trying to learn because one of my things is now I just got done.
I've been in graduate school working on that and I just got done.
So I'm trying to reincorporate music back into my life.
And so it's going to be fun for me to have to learn the things with the software to
kind of help you.
So yeah, it sounds like fun.
This should be an ongoing project.
Well, I guess with that hacker public radio, you've listened to us drone on now for
a while.
So take aways music.
It's fun.
If you're trying to record something, do not start another audio program.
It will fuck your shit up.
Contribute a show.
If you can hear my voice and you haven't done a show in 2016, you owe us a show.
And I'm going to again plug our other side project.
If you like our interplay and banter and you want to hear more of it, Taj, myself and
Poke do a show called you random.
You can find us at you random dash podcast dot info.
We do a monthly show where we start off the rails and go from there where we're going.
We don't need rails or maybe it's just the rails don't need us probably more likely.
It nerdy banter and just organic discussion where we go from topic to topic as our adult
brains drag us.
So it's fun.
But until next time, tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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