As Jazz students, we are often exhorted to take a lesson and practice it in all 12 Keys. How many ways can we take a pattern through all 12 keys? Lets do some math.
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Smirking Sigma
Design prototypes for a band logo


All images Copyright Adam Young.
Designed in Inkscape. Working title is “Smirking Sigma”
The font used is Beachman Script. by David Rakowski. It really seems to capture the classic feel of a fifties music venue.
Why is ABC Notation not ABC…?
When we read we begin with
A.B.C
When we sing we begin with Do Re Mi
–“Do, a Deer…” THe Sound of Music
Western music has coalesced around the major scale. Which is really a pity, because western music notation was built around the natural minor scale.
Continue readingSplitting the irealpro 1400
The irealpro player has become an indispensable tool for practicing a tune. Since I play saxophone, the fact that irealpro will give me a full rhythm section to play against makes working on a tune far more possible than it was for me in the past.
I recently got a new phone and went to reinstall the set of songs that I use. They come from a collection called the Jazz 1400. This snuck up slightly in number from the last time I imported, and it must have hit a threshold, because my phone refuses to import it.
Continue readingFixing Playback in Musecore on Fedora 35
Recently, the playback on Musescore became distorted. It was sped up, the notes were dissonant (no that is not my writing!) and they seemed to crackle and pop.
When both systems I have exhibited the same problem, I knew it was an upgrade issue, and not my hardware.
This phenomenon seems to have occurred a few times over the years, and I tried many of the recommended fixes. What finally worked was changing the output from PulseAudio to Jack.
Continue readingTriad Pairs
Or, as the Peter likes to call them “Double Mambo!” but I think he got that from someone else. Triad pairs are a technique for improvising that have recently gotten a lot of attention. I had not really focused on them in the past. Here’s my notes.
Continue readingKeeping Kdenlive from crashing
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb kdenlive |
I don’t understand, yet, why this works, but it does. Thanks to this post
QJackCtl and Pipewire
It took me a few tries, but I finally got a passable demo/tutorial about Pipewire and QJackCtl.
Here’s the final version. Well, final for now.
Here’s the version before that that got hit by a copyright claim and thus was not visible in Canada. I chose the “auto edit” option to remove the copywritten material. I think that means that you don’t see how you can feed browser audio back into itself. I’ve not watched it since it got cut.
Here is the original Camcorder version. This was really the approach I wanted to take, with the camera picking up the same audio that I was hearing. But the video was unwatchable.
Pipewire low latency
Just wanted to leave myself a note here. On QJackCtrl It shows the latency in the bottom right of the Parameters page. If I drop the Frames/Period to 16 (Lowest) the latency drops to 1 msec. For a Jamulus server with a ping time of 22ms I get an overall delay of 44 ms.
And that is over wireless.
This is on my laptop, not my NUC, and it does not have the Scarlet Solo USB Analog-to-Digital converter on it.
But it is encouraging.
Unifying Audio with Pipewire
ALSA. Jack. PulseAudio. MIDI. Musescore. Jamulus.
My musical interactions with Linux are not the most complex in the world, but they ain’t trivial. The complexity of the Linux audio landscape has been a stumbling block so far. Pipewire has just gotten me past that.
The title of this article implies that you need to do something other than install Pipewire. So far, this is not true. On my system, at least, it Just works.
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