The album is a bit of a concept, as it’s nine muses, and so nine tracks. As such, the album is a collection of compositions from the past five years, all inspired by, and devoted to, different women in history and mythology, or feminine figures that for one reason or another were my muses at a certain point of my life. Being older tracks for the most part, I did rework them a bit, as of course my mixing and recording skills have changed a lot since when I first started: I didn’t do much (and as such the mixing or tone may be a bit inconsistent across the tracks), but I think I did enough to give even older tracks a coat of fresh paint.
Most importantly, though, the Cleopatra track is available here as a single track, so with no gaps as in the EP (where it was split in multiple tracks, causing streaming websites to break the flow a bit). If you were curious to hear it all in one go, that’s probably the best way to do it!
As usual, this was all recorded, mixed and mastered using Ardour: considering we’re talking of tracks I worked on at different times, I used different versions of Ardour (I think I started with Ardour 5.x in late 2019 but I may be wrong?), but the latest changes, plus the final mixing and mastering, was done with Ardour 8.6 on my Fedora 40.
Looking forward to your thoughts, I hope you’ll enjoy this!
I’m listening the album, i’m astonished by the good quality of the audio you reach.
But i need to ask you, How you did it?
I’ve got some problem in configure ardour on Fedora 40, can you help me in some way? My main issue is with Jack configuration, unfortunately I didn’t find anything that help me.
Listened to the first four tracks on Bandcamp. Very well produced! Though sometimes there are some parts where the musical performance isn’t flawless E.g. I noticed some dead notes in the steel-string guitar part at the end of “Mary”. But those only stick out because the rest is so well done.
One question: what sample lib did you use for the flute (or Ney?) at the start of “Scheherazade”?
Thanks for the kind words @oddmusic!
On Fedora 40, Pipewire is now the default audio system there and it comes with its own JACK shim that works very well: it’s what I’ve been using myself for a couple of years instead of “pure” JACK and I’m very happy with it. The JACK server will be always “running” so no need to start it manually and stop the other one.
I think all you need to do is install the pipewire-jack-audio-connection-kit package instead of JACK itself, and that library will be used by all JACK compatible applications. In case you run into a conflict when using dnf, I think there was a command to install it as a pure replacement, but I can’t remember which one on the top of my head.
You’ll also find a .config/pipewire/jack.conf file, that I personally edited to set the latency to 256/48000.
Thanks for listening @SpotlightKid! You’re absolutely right on the flaws. As I wrote in the description of the album, and then in the description of all tracks, this is more like a “collection” of tracks that were originally written and recorded over years: I re-recorded some parts and re-mixed some others, but many I left as they were, just patching what I could in not so much time. Mary is one of the oldest tracks in there, since it’s 5 years old (my first months in Linux recording), and so is definitely one of the most “flawed” ones in terms of recording: at the time I still tried to record all parts in a single take, which I then learned how to work around. That ending part was a single take, and probably attempt number 250 because I kept on messing it up At the end I felt that one was close enough and I called it a day. In later songs I learned how to record parts in chunks instead, for acoustic guitars even in separate tracks that I could “alternate”. I ended up re-recording the heavy guitars in Mary, but not the acoustic/clean ones, which is why the errors are still there. The same can be said for Skjaldmaer and the guitars in the intro, for the same reason.
It’s a Ney, from a free Windows VST called EasternONE. The oud you hear in the same song accompanying my sister’s voice is from the same VST. It has many interesting sounds, especially for being completely free. Fun fact: I originally wanted a duduk for that part, but that one is incredibly hard to find as a free virtual instrument: eventually I found one, but it had very short samples so it was basically unusable.
At the end I felt that one was close enough and I called it a day. In later songs I learned how to record parts in chunks instead, for acoustic guitars even in separate tracks that I could “alternate”. I ended up re-recording the heavy guitars in Mary, but not the acoustic/clean ones, which is why the errors are still there. The same can be said for Skjaldmaer and the guitars in the intro, for the same reason.