![]() In the following sections we will review three of these four I haven’t used sample tracks in a song yet, so I’ll revisit that topic in a future post.Įnvelope and low frequency oscillator settings for the Verse Melody sound When you first launch LMMS you are greeted with an empty project which has one each of the four possible track types: instrument, sample, beat+bassline, and automation. I am not an LMMS guru, or a sound engineer, or even a music theory expert, but let me give you a quick description of its tools and how I used them to make a few songs. I was impressed with it from the first time I used it, and I am still pleased at what a capable synthesizer it is. The web browser you are using to read this article may or may not have a modular design under the hood, but you probably use it as an all-in-one solution and its modularity is transparent to you as the user. Would you rather open a terminal and use wget to retrieve the html document, then pipe it to some html rendering engine? Yeah, I didn’t think so.Īnyway, as I was saying, LMMS is a really nice environment for composing electronic music. But the Unix philosophy applies to the design of a software application, not necessarily to the preferred behavior of its end users. So I opted for the all-in-one approach of a single application which acts as a sequencer and a synthesizer, which is LMMS.Īs I have said before, this approach differs somewhat from the traditional Unix philosophy of connecting together small, modular tools. But I didn’t want to mess around with different applications held together with duct tape and chewing gum in some MacGyver-ish Linux audio setup I just wanted to plug in my new toy and play with it. The other option was to use JACK to connect Rosegarden or some other midi sequencer to a software synthesizer. (Any suggestions? How about: “Let’s Make Music, Sonny?” Yeah, nevermind.)Īctually, I did a bit of reading before I settled on LMMS. The website currently says “Let’s Make Music” in the top banner, which would work for the acronym if we could think of a word that starts with “S” to add to it. LMMS is an obsolete acronym for “Linux Multimedia Studio,” which made for an awkward name when it became a cross-platform application. This article is meant more as a review and a memoir than as a how-to guide. Once I brought it home I had to find a way to use it, and that search led me to LMMS. There are many good tutorials and other documentation which cover every aspect of installing, configuring, and using LMMS, and I’m not trying to duplicate any of those efforts. In 2012 I found a keyboard midi controller at a yard sale for $10, and I couldn’t pass it up even though I’m not much of a keyboardist. ![]()
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