music

This is the page where I put all of my music recordings. Here I upload full-length videos, uncompressed and in full resolution, as well as audio files, music sheets, additional information, etc., without the restrictions of the various social media sites (but there are also links to those here, if you are a masochist).

It doesn't need to be said, but I am (at best) an amateur musician; I make these recordings because:

1. each one is a personal challenge, even when that is dealing with frustration, and a great learning experience
2. they become a nice record of a particular point in my life (musical and otherwise)
3. music is one of the most important things in my life, I absolutely love it, and I enjoy bringing into the world the music I have inside of me.

And I hope you enjoy them too =)

licence

First, the disclaimers.

Every piece of content here is free to use for any end, and has no commercial purpose. Copyright of the music obviously does not belong to me.

Everything music-related I do, from studying to composing to recording and publishing, is done exclusively using free and open-source software.

sheets

My memory is terrible, so I write down almost everything I study. I am not a professional musician (clearly), so it may happen that I will not play a piece for some time and completely forget it.

These notes are also very helpful while I am studying. Every piece I learn is meaningful and important to me in some way, and so I try to learn the original with as much fidelity and in as many of the original instruments as I can, even if that is not how I am going to play them in the end.

And since these sheets are part of the recording process anyway, why not make them available to other people? Most pages here have links to them, both the finished product and the “source code” to recreate it (see the next section). I try to keep them as close to the recording as I can, though what I play may not be 100% pre-written, so some details may escape me when I re-edit the sheet, but they should be close enough to be helpful.

musescore

I do all my music transcription and composition using MuseScore, a fantastic piece of software, which just keeps getting better and better over time. Next to the resulting PDF file, I also include the mscz file which generated it, so it can be recreated, edited, and adapted for any use.

IMSLP

I also cannot fail to mention the amazing Petrucci Music Library, a web site which makes available public-domain music sheets, some of which I have used and included in these pages. If you are a fellow lover of classical music, make sure you take a look, they have absolutely beautiful scans of old sheets (by which I mean centuries old), including some of the original manuscripts by the composers themselves or their contemporaries.

instruments

The obligatory obsessively-detailed description of the recording equipment.

These days, I have arrived at my dream collection of instruments: a small set, all of which I love very much. In no particular order:

• bass: 1996 USA Fender V Jazz Bass. The bass was the first instrument I learned to play, and the one which defined my playing and how I like things to sound. This Jazz bass was the first “real” instrument I bought, and is still one of my favorites.



• guitar: 2023 Mexican Fender Telecaster. My newest baby. Ever since I knew anything about guitars, I knew I wanted a Tele. I'm not a phenomenal guitar player, but I love the way it sounds, so it features frequently in my arrangements.



• piano: 2013 Roland FP-80 digital piano. If I was forced to choose just one instrument, it would be the piano, and this one is the stuff of dreams. It has a fantastic weighted keyboard, the best I've ever seen on a digital instrument. The built-in sounds are pretty great too, so much so I just use them directly when I record.

  In some of my older videos, you will also see a Nord Electro 5 HP, which I used to own (and loved), but had to sell when I moved. In even older videos you will see a Yamaha DGX-620, my first “real” digital piano, back when I was just learning to play (but you can skip those =).



• acoustic guitar: 2016 Ibanez GA15-NT. Having grown up in the pampas of Latin America, the classical guitar resonates deep in my soul, and I really like the sound of this Ibanez. Even though it's a pain to play and record, I include it whenever I can.



• mandolin: for completeness, you will also see on some videos my old Richwood F-style mandolin. Unfortunately, it no longer lives (R.I.P.), but I loved playing it and plan to get myself another one as soon as possible.

recording

My recording setup is almost comically simple:

• microphone: Zoom H2n. This is the star of my setup, my trusty H2n. It is the single piece of equipment I have used to record every video in here (OK, all the ones that sound good, after I acquired it and stopped recording audio using just my phone). It sounds great, can work with only battery power and an SD card, can be taken anywhere, and can record two stereo tracks (or up to four mono tracks) at once. I also use it as my poor-man's sound interface: every electric instrument I record goes through its line-in input to the computer.



• pre-amp: Behringer BDI21. A relatively-recent addition; I for the longest time used just the Zoom's pre-amplifier, but then realized I had this one laying around and could put it to good use. It has a nice signal boost and drive (the configuration you see in the picture is pretty much what I use for everything) so, even though it's a bass pedal, I now pass every (mono) instrument through it.

• “camera”: videos are recorded using my Android (LineageOS) phone, a cheap Motorola Moto G7. The camera is passable when there is enough light, but not great, I need to get me a real camera at some point.

software

Everything audio- and video-related is done on my personal Linux computer, an aging 2018 Lenovo Thinkpad T480s, running Arch Linux (BTW).

audio

I do all recording, mixing, and editing using Ardour, combined with some of the amplifier simulators and effects from Guitarix. That's more than sufficient for my rather primitive mixing skills (which essentially consists of the generous application of reverb, compression, tape emulation, and occasionally some light overdrive/distortion).

Audacity also deserves an honorable mention: I sometimes use it for audio analysis and editing (it also gets the prize for the greatest name for a piece of audio software).

Buying an electronic kit and learning to play drums is on my list, but I do know the theory behind it, so for my videos I use samples generated with Hydrogen that I program myself. It has very nice controls for the synthesis (including parameters such as attack velocity, so you can create those lovely snare ghost notes) and, with a bit of mixing, the result is surprisingly very decent.

video

With the audio portion done, I then export it from Ardour and synchronize with the video(s) and do some minor editing using Kdenlive. For more heavy-weight operations on video (and audio) files, I use the amazing ffmpeg (directly, anyway, since it is also what Kdenlive uses to render video).