Lilypond, a notation program

Whenever I post images of music, they are screenshots of PDF files generated by my favorite Linux based music notation program Lilypond.

It took me a long time to find a good notation program. Back when I could run a Windows emulator under OS/2, I used Studio from Midisoft. This is still around, in several incarnations. It was a WYSIWYG interface and I learned a lot about creating and editing midi files. It printed scores that were ok for personal use, but not good enough to publish. There are a lot of choices in Linux and I looked for a similar program. Rosegarden came closest, but during the search I happened upon Lilypond. Lilypond is about as different from the wysiwyg interface as one could possibly be.

My old cycling buddy and guitar teacher, Allan Alexander, uses Fronimo, which he calls "the best tablature notation software".

Pinkie- finger x

Try drumming your fingers as fast as you can with the pinkie extended, then compare the speed with drumming with your pinkie curled in. Most people get more speed, and accuracy, doing the latter. The pinkie tends to move in tandem with the annular (i.e. ring) finger. It's called sympathetic motion. Unfortunately, my pinkie tends to straighten out, especially as the music passages get more difficult. I blame this on the O'Leary brothers.

Time to Play, not play around

The temperature hit the 80's here in Greenville, and over 20 people showed up at the Sunshine Shop on Saturday for the group ride. Today the heat continues. When I lived in upstate New York, cycling days were precious, particularly in the Spring. Old habits die hard, so any time the weather is good, I hit the road. I thought it would never happen, but some days I want rain.

In between rides I played around more with the AcoustiSoft program, found some mistakes with the way I was interpreting results, and made an important decision.

No matter how many traps and acoustic panels I used, there was an overwhelming 58-62 cycle resonance . I played a test signal in this frequency and I could feel the foil side of the traps vibrating! The vibration was very strong along the floor edges right where I had set up the recording booth. Two problems with this for playing and recording a 12-string are, one, the lowest string is tuned mighty close to this resonance for a couple of my twelve-strings. Two, the radon fan vibrates in this area, and I don't want to keep turning it off and then forgetting to turn it back on. So I abandoned the idea of having a booth near the wall and ran some tests in front of the listening position. As far as I can tell, everything looks better. Time to see if it sounds better.

AcoustiSoft - too much fun

Give me a new measuring tool and I am one happy person. I downloaded a demo of AcoustiSoft's measuring software and the room tests that I've been doing with difficulty suddenly become fairly easy.

It runs on Windows only (minus points for that) so I dug out an old computer with Windows 2000 and a sound card. It helps if the sound card is duplex, that is, it can record and play at the same time. This one did - after a driver update.

Room Treatment - Bassy or Boxy?

I had an 'ah-ha' moment yesterday as I was repositioning panels. Yesterday I thought the sound was bassy. I found a broad peak from about 55 to 65 hertz, and re-read a lot of the room treatment articles. Ethan WIner came through, again, with this article about density tests. First, I noticed that the panels had the foil side pointed in to the room. I don't know why this helps bass absorption, but according to the specifications it helps greatly. So I turned several of the traps over foil side in. His article also provides an explanation for the broad bass peak I observed:

...the absorption widens the bandwidth (lower Q) of those resonances. In my experience, this feature of bass trapping is at least as important as flattening the low frequency response and reducing modal ringing time. With a wider bandwidth the peaks and nulls are audibly less intrusive - instead of individual bass notes sticking out like a sore thumb, a much broader range is emphasized.

Room Treatment - Too much Bass

Room treatments - lot's of work - hard to judge results. Bass sounds cleaner, but the room still has a 'too much bass' quality. To check it, I ran through the mp3 frequency files from Ethan Winer. There is a big hump from 55 to 65 hertz. If the emphasis was at a lower frequency it wouldn't be so important, but a 12-string tuned low starts in the 60 cycle range. Just to be sure it wasn't the speaker or the amplifier, I moved the speaker outside - and heard no hump in that range. Haul the speaker back inside, and sure enough, the hump sounds like it's shaking the room!

view of the front of the room

Creating Tunes, continued

The Tremolo study is coming along. At first I wanted just to experiment with the technique, then I started wondering if a tremolo even sounds good on a 12-string. I found early on that the melody is in the tremolo part, so writing a piece is like composing a piano piece that has a slow melody with a simple broken chord left hand. After a bit of work I came up with this (click on the image to see it larger):

Home Listening or Recording?

We are slowly installing the acoustic treatment. The four corners are loaded with Studio Tips Corner Traps. One of the ceiling traps is in place, and there are panels set up in a little 'booth' for recording. So far the change in sound for listening is remarkable, but I'm in a bit of a quandary about proceeding for recording. I'll get to that in a minute. The traps each consist of one 2 inch panel of Owens Corning 703 FRK and one 2 inch panel of 1280 Mineral Wool.

Goniometers, Mic Position, and Phase

While chasing the wily whomp I started recording with microphones widely spaced, 'A-B' position. With close mic'ing and wide spacing I was able to capture an interesting guitar sound while minimizing the 91 hertz output from the sound hole, which unfortunately was the frequency the open 5th course was sounding.

Room Noise

We are still wrapping panels, building a booth and treating the room.

Getting Old

I always knew if a television was on when I was young. They emitted a sharp ringing sound audible throughout the house. I thought that the newer televisions didn't have this problem.

Room tests of the booth

I didn't feel like playing the guitar today; experimenting with microphones was the alternative activity. I had created a mini-booth for recording from the corner absorbers. This sounded good enough that I wanted to buy some more acoustic panels, but before I spent a lot of money, I wanted to take some pictures, to see if my ears were fooling me.


These pretty pictures above are spectrum diagrams of one click of the metronome (GTick). The top one is taken with the microphone and speaker in the 'booth', and the lower one is with the microphone and speaker in the middle of the same room, outside the booth. The vertical scale is frequency, the color is intensity, red being loud, blue not so loud. I guess the white sections are very loud. The horizontal scale is time.

The notched saddle

The notched saddle I describe here is still in use on the LKSM-12. I've been using that guitar exclusively, so I don't know if there will be a difference going back to the old flat top saddle. But I'm almost convinced enough to start surgery on the Bob Colosi saddle on the 355.

The Great Outdoors

After hiding from the whomp by lowering the tuning a semitone, I tried, as promised, some outdoor playing. It's still kind of cold in the mornings, so with stiff fingers amidst bird calls, school buses, and other traffic, I recorded a bit using the same wide-spread AB mic configuration. The result is here.

The guitar sounds very brittle, very crisp. Very little bass. The lack of room effects is very noticeable. The microphone configuration that I was driven to primarily to get rid of the whomp, does not sound very nice. Here is the same piece

Compulsive note takers

Donald.E.Knuth is one of the foundations of modern computing software. Among his many accomplishments he created the Web language, not as in World Wide, but rather a self-documenting computer language. He invented typesetting languages, and to use them, he designed his own fonts. His three volume Fundamentals of Algorithms is the definitive text of recipes that computer scientists use for work.