Hell Labs

I got myself a guitar a long time ago in the hopes that I would someday learn how to play it, but it stayed in its case for years. Until now — after hearing Santiago talking about guitars all day for weeks (and even Miura telling how much fun he had with Wii Music) I decided to give it a try. Using the method from the Guitar Hero School of Music, I just picked up a tune that sounded easy enough — the Munsters TV series theme — and tried to match the notes with little knowledge and awful technique. My version is a mix of the first season, second season and Straitjackets versions of the theme, with some lines of cheesy Spanish dub from an episode and island mallets throwed in just for fun. Together with the bad guitar playing, this is guaranteed to make Jack Marshall spin in his grave, so my apologies in advance.

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A couple of months ago I bought a synth, and have spent some time trying to learn to play it. I can tell you: the whole process is much more efficient if you have fun and the right motivation — pick a music genre you like, something (preferably not too difficult) you’d like to hear yourself playing, and… play it. I chose old Amiga tracker music.

Protracker modules have a special place in my memories, from the countless hours debugging a player that was the first application I wrote for Linux and Unix. Recent work with Takashi Iwai, who I met back in the mod player days, prompted me to publish this story. Distant Call by Ronny Nordeide (a.k.a. Mr. Man/Andromeda) was one of my favorite four-channel mods back then, and now I found it’s also an easy and enjoyable piece to play — don’t be fooled, the somewhat uninspired and unrehearsed video above doesn’t make justice to its beautiful, evocative atmosphere.

The patch I used is a modified “Nice Piano” from Roland’s XV Collection, with a higher cutoff frequency for brightness, increased release to work around the lack of a sustain pedal and transposed down one octave. It is built around a bright, chorused JD-style piano sound similar to the one used on the original track (which is possibly from a JV-80). Not a flawless performance — any modplayer does better — but overall I’m satisfied with the result. What should I try to play next?

Those who got ahold of a Roland Fantom synthesizer and want to perform some basic patch transfer in Linux might want to have a look at Fsex, a set of Fantom SysEx and librarian utilities. It currently works with the Juno-G and, with a bit of luck, the Fantom-X. Fantom-S and Xa still need their model IDs and SysEx identity responses to be added to the code (would you do that?)

In its current incarnation (actually the first one) Fsex is able to transfer patches to and from the synthesizer, and allows one to list, extract or delete patches from Roland librarian files. It was written for my own needs so patches are the only data type currently recognized — support for performances, rhythms, arpeggios or other pieces of SysEx-transferrable information can be added later should anyone find that useful.