I don’t know about you, but I’m super excited to have the latest Zynaddsubfx running in Ardour. I actually got it from the github page for Linux and it took forever to build. I had tried to install it multiple other ways, but it had unmet dependencies or wouldn’t show up in Ardour.
I have come to love the different synths provided in Synaddsubfx because I used to use it in LMMS and it has especially nice choir sounds. It now has a bunch of new synth plugins, and plenty of options for customization.
So, you recorded yourself, but there is a big gap at the beginning of the audio clip. Well, that “problem” can be easily solved using Audacity.
Editing is as simple as dragging to select and deleting the undesired area. The problem is when you are trying to edit tiny bits of audio out of a recording. Maybe there is a wrong note on your piano recording, or you said the wrong word. It all depends how well you want the audio track to flow. In this song, a note is about .2 seconds long. That will differ from song to song, but this is around the sweet spot where you can pick out undesirable sounds.
There are some helpful editing tools that are highlighted in red in the corner. There are in order, the cut, copy, paste, trim around selection, and silence selection tools. There are also five zoom tools at the top, but it is easiest to just use the zoom in and out ones.
What is Audacity you may ask. Well, I’m glad you asked. Audacity is free, open source, cross-platform, audio editing and recording software. I am going to start off with the basics, but if you want to look at some of the cool stuff you can do with Audacity then consider checking out the wiki page.
So, yes, it is cross-platform. It runs on most of the main operating systems that are available today, and I am using it on Linux. If you are too it is as simple as opening up a terminal window and typing sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install audacity. Downloading using apt-get won’t always get you the latest version of the software, so you can also get the Linux source code, the Windows, or macOS downloads from their website.
Now that we have Audacity installed, what do we do with it? Well, lets start with recording. If you plug a microphone into your computer Audacity should pick it up. My settings are shown in the picture below, but keep in mind I am using Linux, so the playback and audio host software will likely be different on Windows and macOS.
The main thing that you should notice is the recording device. Mine is set to my laptop sound card, but if you have a DAC to plug in you would change that setting here.
If you click at the top of the application where the monitoring volume bar is you should be able to see the input of the microphone plugged in.
You should now be able to press the red recording button and record on a stereo track. Be careful that you aren’t clipping. You should have the input volume high, but the track volume can be turned down.
If you happen to have a mono microphone than you can click on the Audio Track drop down and Split Stereo Track. Then you can pan the mono track to the middle.
Having the ability to record and synthesize side by side is the reason that I have started to really use Ardour. I used my Behringer U-Phoria UMC-22 and my Samson CO1 Condenser microphone. It is really budget equipment, but it serves my purposes well. The nice thing is the Behringer DAC automatically came up as an option on Ardour as an audio interface. I know that on Windows, you sometimes have to install drivers to get the interface to come up, but on Linux it worked great for me.
As you can see, I switched my Input Device and Output Device from my laptop’s sound card to my DAC. To be sure that your microphone is coming through, you should see audio coming into the track on the input volume level bar (the green bar in the picture below). Once you have a microphone hooked up, then it is on to recording. All you have to do is add a normal audio track. There is a button to prime each individual track for recording, so be sure to click it on the proper track. You can then press Shift and Space bar to start recording. Instead of that shortcut you could also press the record button at the top of the program and then play.
Before I explain how to add and setup a sub mixing bus in Ardour, I must explain how it’s useful. My particular usage was to control the volume of multiple drum tracks. The bus basically allows you to affect or mix multiple tracks instead of doing them all individually. Another use case would be to add audio effects to multiple tracks, like reverb.
So, to add an audio bus in Ardour you add a audio bus track just as you add other tracks. Something to notice is that it automatically has the track set to mono, but I changed it.
Here is what it looked like on my mixer window. As you can see I had four different drum tracks that I was trying to mix together. On the end there is the audio bus that I added.
If you click on Window -> Tracks and Busses you can bring up the routing grid for all the tracks and busses. All you have to do to connect the tracks to the bus is disconnect them from the Master in, and reconnect them to the name of your Bus in. You also have to connect the bus to the Master in so it actually outputs audio. Below you can see my tom drum connected to the bus, and I just did that for the rest of my tracks.
