 However, we're going to kick off the next talk with Gavin, and he's going to take us on a musical journey. Give him a round of applause. Thank you very much. My name is Gavin Phantom, and I'm going to talk to you about making music in the free and open source world. So I've been making music, not professionally, but for fun for quite a lot of my life. And I'm also interested in free and open source software and the whole kind of technology thing as well. So obviously, today we're going to talk about a bit of a crossover with that. So music technology is a thing that has been quite important in music for a few decades now, and there's an accidental mouse click. There we go. And there's a lot of music that has been created digitally. There's also a lot of software that is not commercial. So while a lot of the people who are making music commercially or even non-commercial using commercial software, what I want to talk to you about today is software that's available that's free and open source. Now I'm using Linux here, but that doesn't mean that Linux is the only option for free and open source software for music. Some of the software I'm going to talk about today runs on other operating systems, and there are different bits of software that are also free and open source for other operating systems as well. I need to give a bit of a caveat here. I'm going to be talking about a few different pieces of software. I do not have time in one slot to talk about all the bits of software I would like to talk about, and if anybody here has used any free and open source software to make music, there is a significant chance that your favorite piece of software will not be mentioned today. That doesn't mean I think that you're using the wrong software. It doesn't mean the software sucks. There's only so much I can talk about in one go. The first thing I want to kick off with is something that you might not immediately associate with making music, which is a bit of DJ software. I am not a DJ. I do not have mad DJ skills, so I don't expect too much from this. I just want to give you a very, very quick overview of this piece of software. This software is called Mix. That's with a triple X. It's not porn, I promise. To demonstrate this, what I've done is I've taken a few pieces of music from the Free Music Archive and a Creative Commons license, and I'm going to use a couple of pieces by an artist called Timecrawler82 in order to satisfy the attribution license. This is just a simulation of a couple of DJ decks. I should have found a better surface for this mouse. Here we go. What we're going to do is play some music, and then I'm going to take you through a really, really simple crossfader that might go wrong, because I've never done this on stage before. Here we have a piece of music that's running. We've got a few minutes till the end of the music. I'm not going to play the whole piece. We are going to skip into it. But while that's going on, I'm going to load up the next piece. I can have a listen to this. This is where it all goes horribly wrong. If I press play on this side, I've taken the headphone button, which means hopefully you won't hear any of it. When I put on my secret headphones, that doesn't really work. What I can determine is where I actually want to start this piece. In this particular case, it's going right to the beginning. And we can set a key mark. Now, you'll notice there's some beat markers going across. This software does actually try and find where the beats are, so that it can help you synchronize them. It gets them slightly wrong occasionally. It's got them mostly right for this piece, for the other piece, it's slightly wrong, so we're not going to be using that. But there's a button you can click here that will just synchronize and line it up and do most of the hard work for you. Now, at this point, we skip onto the end of the piece, because otherwise we'll be here all day. And we can start the other one, which is hopefully in sync. They're not quite, but it'll do. And then we start a nice little crossfade. At this point, we can get on with the next track and spend the next hour or two making music. Hopefully, by the time you've got an hour into it, you've got a bit better than I am now. And people will actually be enjoying your mixes and just carry on with the dancing. Right, so that's DJing done. And we're going to move on some more software now. We're going to go for something completely different. And for the rest of the software in this talk, what I'm going to be doing is doing a little piece of music in each bit of software. And at the end, we'll have some fun combining them into something a bit ridiculous. So here we go. If you think of making music, there are a lot of different things you might think of. And before, about 30 years ago, you probably thought of picking up a musical instrument and playing it like a, well, maybe not picking up, but a piano or a clarinet or a guitar or something like that. And if you're doing that, then you're probably quite interested in this bit of software. This is MuseScore. And this is what's called a notation editor. This allows you to write the sort of music that you can then read. Apparently triple clicking and talking at the same time is not the easiest thing to do. So with this, this is the sort of blank sheet music that you might find if you're playing a piano. And we can add a few notes. And you might hear them pretty quietly in the background as I add them. Okay, so that's a very simple fraction of a tune. It's not quite what I was going for, but we'll go with that. And then you can play it back. Now at this point, I mean, by this point, I mean by the time you've spent a little bit more time of it and maybe turned it into this, you can play it back. At this point, you've got two choices. One is to print it out and play it. And the other one is to export it into some other format and put it into some other piece of music software. That's the one that I'm going to do. But if you're a classically trained musician, your music technology process probably ends here with the print button and it go into your printer and you're picking up the piece of paper and spending the next few hours playing it and recording it. We'll come back to this melody later. I have exported it, so I'm not going to show you that process. Going with the theme of completely changing from one type of music to another, let's talk about drums. So obviously, a bit of piano music doesn't normally have drums in it, but we can go to more electronic music. And if any of you have ever hung around in a music shop and played with synthesizers, you'll have done this. I know I did. But I'm going to choose a slightly different sound here. I'm going to go a little bit more electronic. This is the TR808 kit, which is quite popular in dance music. And we can make a really, really, really simple drum pattern. What do you think the simplest drum pattern we can possibly make is? I can see somebody at the back signing exactly where I'm going and it is this. One, two, three, four. And it sounds like this. You know what? Let's make it a bit faster. We can make another pattern. We can start off with the same thing. And the next simplest thing we could possibly do is this. You can do a lot more complicated things, but this is good enough for quite a lot of EDM and other things. So we'll go with that. Now you can combine the two. And rather than just dealing with an innovative pattern, you can put the patterns in different places and make a song. So we can have four bars of this followed by four bars of this. So I'm sold, right? We're making music already, right? Okay, let's do something with it. So the next bit of software I want to talk about is a digital audio workstation called Ada. It's not the only one, but I really like this one. And it's extremely capable. So digital audio workstation is really the workhorse for recording studios, for synthesis, for all sorts of other bits and pieces. And let's get rid of this one because we don't need this yet. So what I'm going with this is that we can transfer something that we've done in Hydrogen, our drum machine, into Ada. We can actually record it as a track. So we make sure that Hydrogen is connected to Ada. This is using a piece of software called Jack which does pretty much what the name suggests. It allows you to plug things into other things. In this case, the output from our drum synthesizer to the input of the drum's track in Ada. And we're just gonna make sure nothing else plays while we do this. Excuse this sound for a moment. We're gonna record this and off we go. So right now we're converting this drum track into just an audio file that's going straight in to Ada. And now if we close Hydrogen and play it again, we'll just be hearing it straight from the recording. So there we have our first bit of music that's gonna contribute to this track. Now what goes with drums? More drums or possibly bass. I think we're gonna keep it simple today because I could talk about drums for a whole day and I'm not going to. Let's have some bass. And this piece of software I wanna talk about with bass is a piece of software called Helm. It's a synthesizer that's based on oscillators and filters. So there are a number of different types of synthesizer that exist and this one's quite good for, I'm my opinion, it's quite good for bass lines and sort of your more electronic synthy sounds. I'm afraid my laptop's quite an old one. So let's go with this. In the spirit of connecting things, here's the bit I forgot to click earlier. I have a little tiny little keyboard here and if I connect it, that allows me to start playing some sounds hopefully. So here you go, maybe make it an octave lower. And the nice thing with this is you can change all sorts of parameters all over the place or you can add in some noise into the oscillator or you can change the waveforms that it starts with and end up with all sorts of different sounds. So again, this is not gonna be a tutorial on playing about with Helm because literally you could spend all day playing the sounds but that gets you to the point where you can actually start to record some other things. Now the recordings I'm gonna make here are pretty terrible because I'm playing with a fiddly little keyboard here on the stage rather than a nice thing that I can actually play in time and those speakers are far away so it's definitely not gonna be in time but we'll have it go anyway. Let's go with that. Have a slightly better version of this for later. And what this has recorded, this has recorded the MIDI data and that is the starts and the ends of the notes and it's running through the synthesizer. So when we play this back, it'll sound terrible. Yeah, I can't play this on stage. That's fine. That's what stuff you prepared earlier is for. And now we can do a similar thing with a different type of synthesizer. In this case, we're gonna go with Fluid Synth. Now I'm using both Helm and Fluid Synth as plugins for Arda. They both do run standalone but they're particularly convenient as plugins for the digital audio workstation because then everything's integrated. So in this case, yeah, you can just choose a sound font. This is a wavetable synthesizer and it's maybe familiar if you've played with your Yamaha or Casio keyboards in the music shop again. In this case, we'll go for a nice marimba sound. This recording process, by the way, you can do, if you have a microphone, you can do this with acoustic instruments or with your voice or anything else. It's just for demo purposes, I'm using MIDI instruments here. Hey, here's a wonderful demo of why it doesn't work if you forget to plug it in. So we have Nanakey and Marimba. There we go and this will work better this time. Ayed is working, it's just very quiet. Okay, never mind that. So that's a general sort of workflow that I tend to use for recording these MIDI tracks or audio tracks and I would like to add in an effect with some other that comes from something completely different. A thing that you might have seen at EMF before is live coding. Again, this is not a thing that I've played with an awful lot, but it's a technique that definitely falls within the relevant sort of things that you can use to make music. So whereas before we've seen notes from a keyboard and we've seen graphical representations with things on screen, Super Collider is an environment where you type in code and that code comes out of your speakers. So this first line here, I can execute this first line and we get a couple of sine waves. Those on the left will be listening to 440 hertz and those on the right will be listening to 600 hertz and those in the middle get a nice chord. And you can make slightly more complicated things here. We've got a random choice of a pair of frequencies and if I run it a few more times, it gets a random choice each time and adds it on top of each other. Then we can move on to another effect. This is adding an envelope to the sound so that it's changing its amplitude over time and we can combine stereo effects as well. That's a pink noise sound that's sweeping across from the left to the right and back again. But what I actually wanted to do for this to put towards this track at the end is we're gonna make a synth and we're gonna play some arpeggios on it. I'm gonna slow it down so that you can hear what it actually sounds like as an individual synth. But what I wanted was an effect here so I'm just gonna divide this by eight and make it a lot faster and then we have something that sounds like this. So you can use the same technique then to record this into a track in Arda. I'm not gonna show you that now because we are running slightly short of time. But the end result will be a load of material that we can mix together in Arda. And there's one final component that I want just to make this a little bit silly and you'll see quite how silly this gets in a minute. I had a lot of fun with this, by the way. This is John T. Given the opening ceremony of EMF 2016. So how is that music, he might ask? Well, let's have a listen. We don't really need this, it just looks nice. So you can see exactly what we've been doing for the last week. It takes about 10 minutes. So if you sit quietly, that's all we're doing now. Now that is it. Right, so welcome to Electromagnetic Field 2016. This is Steve. Okay, so that was John T. And you might have noticed that I might have clicked a couple of places and sliced things up a bit. And that just gives us a little bit that we can listen to. Now that is it. Right, so welcome to Electromagnetic Field. And then we can chop and change those. Maybe start there. Welcome to Electromagnetic Field. And then if you spend an entire day doing this, you can come up with something that's a little bit more fun and a little bit more silly and is what we're gonna hear in just a few minutes. In fact, less than just a few minutes. Now, unfortunately, I don't think John T. is able to be here right now because I'd love to see his face for this. Now, this is where you see all the elements come together. You can see in the mixing screen, we've got a few effects here. We've got compression here. We've got synthesizers. We've got a multi-bank compressor on the master string. These are all plugins that you can use within other or any other thing that can use these plugins. These are LV2 plugins for the most part. But also, I mean, there's the Windows standard VST which you might have heard of. It's the same kind of thing. You can also use your favorite VSTs in this. But since we're talking about free and open source software, I'm not really talking about VSTs very much. So once we've got this all mixed, we've got all the level set, all the bits and pieces, all the synths sorted out, and a few of the tracks recorded into audio. We are ready to have a little bit of fun with all of the elements that you've heard, plus a few more put together into a track. Here's one I made earlier and take it away, Johnty. Right, so I'm Johnty. I am one of the organizers of Electromagnetic Field, but I am a small part of this. I'm a very small part. This is a huge team that worked for over a year to build everything that's here. Everything from the people who got you in the gates, everyone who sat here at the side of the stage. There's too many of you. Welcome to Electromagnetic Field. Very small, very small, very, very small part. Very small part. Right, so I'm Johnty. Please be nice to them. Please say thank you. Buy them a beer. There's too many of you. I might be lying. Is that really the best we can do? That's quite a lot more than I expected. Yeah. Music on the stage. Who's been to EMF before? Really awesome. Please be nice to your neighbours on the site. We're all here to have fun. Stop, stop. I can't hear you. Please give it back. Please give it back. Please give it back. Please give it back. Give it back or I'll find you. They don't really care what you do, of course. It's quite a fun thing to do. This is not a lie. I promise. We aim time. What can I say? There's too many of you. There are a lot of lasers on site. Do not stop. Just run. We're not done yet. Do ridiculous things. Collapse on the floor. Finally. Right, so I'm Johnty. Welcome to Electromagnetic Field. And that is absolutely it. Thank you very much. I'm Gavin Phantom, not Johnty. This has been making music in the free and open source world. And if any of you have any questions, I will be outside in about five minutes after I finish packing up. Thank you very much.