24 years ago, Ben Folds’ Rockin’ the Suburbs entered my bloodstream – and I still remember the bus ride to Montreal with the CD in my Discman. It wasn’t just the music though. Part of what mesmerized me is that the album was practically a one-man show. Ben Folds wrote, recorded, and produced the songs, playing virtually all of the instruments – piano, vocals, keyboards, guitars, bass guitar, and drums.
I wanted to be able to do that one day.
Rockin’ the Suburbs was Ben Folds’ solo debut, after his band broke up (though, at least they didn’t re-form without him…). About 15-18 years ago, my band fizzled out, and two other things happened around the same time. First, I got engaged, married, and started a family, which meant less time for my own music for a while. Second, I went through a significant conversion on software freedom, leading to my commitment to a free/libre software/culture approach to music.
That was a long time ago, and I’ve barely produced any of my own music since. What have I been up to musically? Well, a lot, actually. But very little of it was my own. And part of the problem is that I set a pretty intense standard for myself: I want to use free software to produce freely licensed music.
That’s not as easy as it sounds.
Taking a free culture approach to music means, for example, no royalties. In effect, that means no collaboration – because it’s very unlikely I’d ever find another musician to collaborate with who shares the same commitment. Legally, in practice, it’s not a “per song” question, but that means avoiding the automatic copyright assignment that is a standard part of membership with a PRO – and thus avoiding songwriting or performances from musicians who haven’t made the same rare decision. While I can collaborate without permission with other free culture artists – like Brad Sucks or Josh Woodward – that’s not the same as making music together.
The Rockin’ the Suburbs approach started to become very interesting again. What if an entire album is a solo effort?
There’s still a second problem though – the software tools. Back in 2007, I left Windows and swore off proprietary software, as much as possible.
From 1999-2008, I was using Cakewalk as my recording and arranging software. Leaving Windows and proprietary software meant finding an entirely new software ecosystem. I did find Ubuntu Studio, and later KXStudio (as I switched to Debian), but there was a steep learning curve. In hindsight, I realized the problem was that I was going through two major transitions at the same time: an entirely new software stack, as well as a new musical style (more folk than rock). For a long time, I just felt lost and incompetent. Though, around 2015, I went through a bit of a revival and growth spurt in my learning aided by libremusicproduction.com (now librearts.org), but I still wasn’t very good at recording or mixing. It was frustrating, because I was getting decent results as a total amateur with no professional gear in high school, but I couldn’t get anywhere with more experience, and more gear.
I had a lot going on in my life over the past 15 years, and I took on a lot with the standard I set for myself. No music collaborators? Okay, I’m the songwriter, vocalist, guitarist, pianist, violinist, bassist, drummer, and more… Free software? Okay, I’m going to have to figure out how to score, record, edit, mix, and produce my own music – nevermind lighting, filming, editing, etc for any video. And in 2025, I’m still fighting it…
But maybe, I just needed time. I think I’m finally getting the hang of it – and I’ve got a theory of change to build enough experience and competence out of my home studio over the next 2-3 years to start recording and producing the music I’ve been writing for the last 20.
Discovering Recording Revolution during the pandemic was a game-changer, especially because of the software-agnostic approach and home studio focus. I can easily apply what I’ve learned from Total Home Recording and Mixing University directly in Ardour, even though the courses use Pro Tools. I’ve been using Ardour since 2008, but now I feel like I’m really starting to actually use it — and over the past 6 months, I’ve upgraded from 5.x to 7.x now to the latest 8.x.
I’ve been settling into my software stack. KXStudio and the Liquorix kernel have helped optimized my Debian system for audio. DrumGizmo gives me powerful sampled drums, and I’ve only begun to explore the array of other LV2 synths and samplers. One thing that did work very well for me from about 2008 or 2009 onwards was Rosegarden for music notation for strings (especially since it was easy to score against an audio file). However, MuseScore is definitely the modern standard, and I’ll be exploring that soon.
During my 2015 growth spurt, I also ordered one of the first MOD Duo devices, but never got around to experimenting with it for more than a day – in part, because the software wasn’t very good yet. Well, I finally spent some time with it over this past Christmas break, and figured out how to upgrade the firmware a decade forward and the game changed again. This embedded computer runs all the free software plugins I’ve been playing around with on my laptop for the past 10 years, but in a stomp box – making it easy to connect my Telecaster or my violin, etc. In Recording Revolution terms, I’ve found a core tool to create an infinite studio rack. For live performances, I’ve realized I can pack the tools I use on my laptop into a stomp box. I’ve had this little device full of free software sitting on a shelf for a decade, and now I’ve finally started to unleash its power.
Enamoured by the Boomerang looper pedal, I found SooperLooper and a SoftStep to be an incredibly powerful combination. I can use my SoftStep2 with my MOD Duo as well to provide additional controls. On the video editing side of things, I’ve been using Kdenlive and am still getting to know it better.
I’m finally getting the hang of these tools and building meaningful competency. But it takes creating a lot of not so great stuff before you get good. Maybe it’s a strange way to tell you, but I have a theory of change to do just that: I’m going to produce 50 songs in the next 2-3 years, not all of which I’ll share, but all of which will be incremental steps towards using these tools better, and developing these skills further – so that, one day, after working for 25 years, I can produce an entire album on my own.
