This is a song recorded by the experimental rock creative commons band Lorenzo's Music using only open-source tools and software.
Here is the final recording from this session on YouTube
You can also download this song from our website https://www.lorenzosmusic.com/2024/06/friction-called-quest-by-lorenzos-music.html
We thought of a way to use GitHub for music to record remotely with the recording software Ardour and the Linux OS Ubuntu Studio. This is another song from that experiment.
Since Ardour is all controlled by a main code file and distributes the tracks it uses to folders in the project, we realized recordings could be version controlled by GitHub.
From that, the band could share our sessions and create branches for each new track or instrument idea that was made to the song using the the full Ardour sessions with audio and all!
We use Github for the working Ardour files of our songs to collaborate, make changes and record our parts outside of the studio.
View the description of the original idea for this Github for music process on our website How we came up with a way to use GitHub to write songs remotely.
We use the free and open source Linux based operating system Ubuntu Studio. The Ubuntu studio OS has programs and plug-ins for this project preinstalled and ready to use.
The song is recorded with Ardour an open-source digital audio workstation.
Most of the effects used come from the open-source audio effects software projects Calf Studio Gear or Guitarix virtual guitar amplifier plugins.
If you would like to clone this repository to see how it's done, do a remix or build upon it.
In order to use the files you will need both of these.
- Ardour DAW https://ardour.org This is the recording Software that is used for these files so you will need to install this :)
- Git LFS https://git-lfs.github.com. This is the "Large File Storage" plugin that needs to be installed on your computer to access the large .wav files from the recording stored in the Github repository. If it's not installed there won't be any music to hear in the recording and you will get an error saying files don't exist when you open it.
Effects and EQs
These should be installed to recreate the actual version of the song we made, but the recording is still able to work without them, it will just sound very different without these effects.
- Calf Plugins Effects. https://calf-studio-gear.org. These are the EQ and compression effects. These are only available for Linux operating systems but some of them come pre-installed in Ardour. If you can't install them the songs will still play the original files without these efects.
- Guitarix The guitar pedal effects used on the tracks. Sadly these are only available for Linux. You can still play the files without them if you are on another operating system you will just hear the un altered sounds. - https://guitarix.org
The only thing you you need to install is the "Large File Storage" Plugin Git LFS https://git-lfs.github.com to download the large .wav files from the GitHub repository.
If you create anything from this song, remix it or build anything from it let us know! We would love to hear it!
You can message us on Twitter @lorenzosmusic or email us from the contact section on our website here at lorenzosmusic.com
Friction called quest by Lorenzo's Music is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
