Sat Aug 22, 2020 9:58 am
I posted a query in Support recently about octave or other transpositions. In that query I also mentioned something which I discovered about LMMS which makes it very easy or useful for some applications.
The particular feature which I found useful is the ability to put a section of music into a loop and then to dynamically change instruments. At least this works with the GM soundfonts in the Soundfont player. Actually it works with most of the instrument plugins - as I just tested.
Why is this useful? In my case I wrote a piece - and initially I wrote it out on a piano stave using Musescore. I listened to what it sounded like in Musescore, and developed it a bit. After a while it had more instrument lines, which at first made it sound more interesting, but then after a bit further working it became horribly muddy. There is a mixer in Musescore, but it's not particularly good, so that wasn't able to help me much.
So I created a Midi version and imported the piece into LMMS, and this allowed me to turn on particular lines, or turn them off - to hear what different mixes of instrumentation would sound like, and to try to reduce the muddiness.
Then I discovered that I could loop the piece and change the instruments in Soundfont player very quickly - so one line seemed to work quite well on the cello virtual instrument. Being able to change instruments quickly and dynamically is a huge advantage while testing out ideas.
I wondered if other DAWs could do this - and since I have access to others - including currrently Garageband, Reaper, Logic Pro X and a version of Ableton Live, I tried in a couple of those. So far I've not found anything better than LMMS for this particular task.
This doesn't mean that LMMS is the absolute best DAW - it still lacks useful features (splitting merging tracks, audio) but for this phase of composition it can be very useful.
Sadly (!!) I then thought that having identified a good combination of instruments I could transfer my Midi file to Garageband or Logic Pro X, and change the instrumentation there. GIven a lot of time, that might have worked, but as currently I have the tools running on a Mac using MacOS Catalina, Apple has managed to trash a number of my virtual instruments, because they "were not downloaded from a recognized developer". This wasn't a problem in earlier versions of MacOS, but Catalina is aggressively useless in areas like this - it also trashed my registered version of Microsoft Office, maybe because it's only a 32 bit application.
So finally I made things worse by resorting to synthesised sounds in Logic, using the Alchemy synthesiser in that package. I tried several synth sounds and presets until I found some that I thought I liked, and then produced a new version using that. However, finally it turns out to be far too complicated, with the extra effects from the synth presets really obscuring the underlying music.
Maybe the particular piece is not rescuable. Even in the cello version it sounded a bit dirge like, something which the synth version took away, though it then became almost unrecognisable as the same piece. This is for me marginal, but an interesting experiment. The piece can be reworked in the tools I have, and if necessary even scored for cellos in Logic, which would give better control over the instrumentation as it could be rescored for several cellos by splitting the tracks, and having different solo cellos - which could also be panned out into a wider soundstage - so that would be good - but it would take a little time to set up the instruments in that package.
One lesson learnt from this is that LMMS provides a very fast way of trying out different instrumental combinations dynamically, and it is useful for this, even if later the work is moved to other DAWs which may have better or different instrument sets. So far it seems to me that the other DAWs don't come close to this, though they win out easily in terms of splitting tracks and regions.
Not everyone will want to work this way. Ultimately some people might prefer to go back to the notation tool - here Musescore - and renotate the music they have written, while others will be happy just go for an end result, in whatever DAW it eventually ends up, and produce a bounced out audio file.
The particular feature which I found useful is the ability to put a section of music into a loop and then to dynamically change instruments. At least this works with the GM soundfonts in the Soundfont player. Actually it works with most of the instrument plugins - as I just tested.
Why is this useful? In my case I wrote a piece - and initially I wrote it out on a piano stave using Musescore. I listened to what it sounded like in Musescore, and developed it a bit. After a while it had more instrument lines, which at first made it sound more interesting, but then after a bit further working it became horribly muddy. There is a mixer in Musescore, but it's not particularly good, so that wasn't able to help me much.
So I created a Midi version and imported the piece into LMMS, and this allowed me to turn on particular lines, or turn them off - to hear what different mixes of instrumentation would sound like, and to try to reduce the muddiness.
Then I discovered that I could loop the piece and change the instruments in Soundfont player very quickly - so one line seemed to work quite well on the cello virtual instrument. Being able to change instruments quickly and dynamically is a huge advantage while testing out ideas.
I wondered if other DAWs could do this - and since I have access to others - including currrently Garageband, Reaper, Logic Pro X and a version of Ableton Live, I tried in a couple of those. So far I've not found anything better than LMMS for this particular task.
This doesn't mean that LMMS is the absolute best DAW - it still lacks useful features (splitting merging tracks, audio) but for this phase of composition it can be very useful.
Sadly (!!) I then thought that having identified a good combination of instruments I could transfer my Midi file to Garageband or Logic Pro X, and change the instrumentation there. GIven a lot of time, that might have worked, but as currently I have the tools running on a Mac using MacOS Catalina, Apple has managed to trash a number of my virtual instruments, because they "were not downloaded from a recognized developer". This wasn't a problem in earlier versions of MacOS, but Catalina is aggressively useless in areas like this - it also trashed my registered version of Microsoft Office, maybe because it's only a 32 bit application.
So finally I made things worse by resorting to synthesised sounds in Logic, using the Alchemy synthesiser in that package. I tried several synth sounds and presets until I found some that I thought I liked, and then produced a new version using that. However, finally it turns out to be far too complicated, with the extra effects from the synth presets really obscuring the underlying music.
Maybe the particular piece is not rescuable. Even in the cello version it sounded a bit dirge like, something which the synth version took away, though it then became almost unrecognisable as the same piece. This is for me marginal, but an interesting experiment. The piece can be reworked in the tools I have, and if necessary even scored for cellos in Logic, which would give better control over the instrumentation as it could be rescored for several cellos by splitting the tracks, and having different solo cellos - which could also be panned out into a wider soundstage - so that would be good - but it would take a little time to set up the instruments in that package.
One lesson learnt from this is that LMMS provides a very fast way of trying out different instrumental combinations dynamically, and it is useful for this, even if later the work is moved to other DAWs which may have better or different instrument sets. So far it seems to me that the other DAWs don't come close to this, though they win out easily in terms of splitting tracks and regions.
Not everyone will want to work this way. Ultimately some people might prefer to go back to the notation tool - here Musescore - and renotate the music they have written, while others will be happy just go for an end result, in whatever DAW it eventually ends up, and produce a bounced out audio file.