this.ven – Blog

Drums in the box: sequence and control

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 05:10:33 +0200

While I am sequencing with the Tchimera Drum Kit in a process of migration from the Flac_GSCW-2 drumkit in Hydrogen, I realized that the open hihat rather sounds like a half-open one. I listened to the samples and found open hihat sounds. However, some control parameter seemed to be set with a default value that triggers the sample of a half-open snare.

Long story short

The short story is that the MIDI continuous controller (CC) #4 determines the position of the hihat pedal—with 0 fully open and 127 closed—and defaults to a more closed value of 100. A clue to this was the opcode¹ set_cc4 in the hihat.sfz file and the explanation in Michael Willis’ announcement². Using MIDI CC 4 to control the degree of hihat openness appears to be “the common pedal assignment in electronic drum kits” according to sfz format documentation on cymbal muting.

You may be laughing if you learned to sequence drums with mute groups and MIDI CC assignments in the first place. However, as I autodidactically explored this realm with Hydrogen and Flac_GSCW-2 before sitting on the stool, I was unaware of such MIDI capabilities and intuitively worked around such constraints. I guess that this has contributed to the way I am writing a drums score. Hence, I recap some of the lessons I have learned along the way in this post.

Choosing a drum kit

The primary and one of the most important things about working with drums “in the box” is to choose a drum kit that already provides a good foundation for the sound you imagine. For example, I was soon disappointed by the default GMRockKit and TR808EmulationKit supplied with Hydrogen. It lacks a second crash cymbal and some samples seemed to be faded out prematurely in order to reduce the file size. Moreover, there are no more than five layers to reflect the dynamic range without alternative samples to avoid the sounding like a machine gun in snare fills.

For this reason, I soon moved to try other drumkits provided through the sound library import³ function. When I started my digital drums journey back in 2010, there were about 10–15 Hydrogen drumkits available and I chose one depending on the song. Without being aware of concepts such as MIDI CC, I settled on using Flac_GSCW-2, as it provides choked crash cymbals and snare and tom flams. Though I wondered why an open hihat is muted by a following closed one in TuxGuitar’s output, and realized that a flam is written as a grace note—which means that it can be produced manually through triggering the same note twice—I lived with that.

Anyways, the point is that you get started with a drumkit that works for you. And from my experience, this may involve using an out-of-spec drumkit and learning about some technical details later. I wish they would’ve taught us these internals during my academic course, but don’t get me started talking about all the issues of surviving at an university of applied sciences that offers product training rather than sovereign education⁴. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Make use of velocity

Another crucial element of a drums groove is to change the velocity of individual notes to add variation and make it sound more human. Hydrogen has velocity lane below the pattern grid and Ardour just implemented “lollipos” in its velocity lane with the release of version 8.1⁵. It’s a matter of listening experience combined with intentional rule violation to create interest while keeping the human feel. Try to think like a drummer: You cannot keep the exact same velocity throughout a couple of bars and accentuate certain beats to support the groove.

To keep things simple, consider the example “bum tchak bum bum tchak” pattern I introduced in my first post about scorewriting and reduced to kick drum (note 35) and snare (note 38) only. The > and ^ signs mark an accentuated and heavy accentuated note on the kick drum to make the 1/4 and 3/4 beat stand out of the sound, as typical for a four-four time bar. However, I could also only accentuate the last kick drum to draw attention to another beat.

C|---------------------------------|
C|---------------------------------|
C|---------------------------------|
C|---------38--------------38------|
C|---------------------------------|
C|-35--------------35--35----------|
   ^               >

It depends on what is happening in the arrangement and how the drums are used in a song. Simultaneously, keep in mind what a human drummer is able to play. Of course, you might want to violate that rule and have drums that are interesting due to being difficult to play by a human. Over time you will learn how to groove your way.

Human patterns

I like to scorewrite drums and create patterns that a human would be able to play. Though it’s fun to experiment with the opposite and push the limits, human patterns work better for my style of music. Consequently, I also keep the “think like a drummer” law in mind for simultaneously hit individual instruments. A human drummer has two arms and feet. For this reason, four instruments can be played at a time (e.g., kick drum, closed hihat, and snare). This means that the following example snare fill is more of a drummer’s fantasy:

C|-57--57--57--57--57--57--57--57--|
C|-51--51--51--51--51--51--51--51--|
C|-46--46--46--46--46--46--46--46--|
C|-38--38--38--38--38--38--38--38--|
C|-45--45--45--45--45--45--45--45--|
C|-35--35--35--35--35--35--35--35--|

For explanation, the notes in addition to kick drum and snare are 45 = high tom, 46 = open hihat, 51 = cymbal (left), 57 = crash (right). A drummer would need five arms to play this bar. If this is your style, go for it. Similarly, you may come up with a pattern full of 64th notes and a tempo of 360 bpm, but I doubt that even an advanced listener is able to identify each single hit. Don’t get me wrong, experiment and push the limits. It’s just not my style.

Leveraging continous control

To conclude my comments on drums sequencing, let’s get back to the new technical detail that I learned recently: continuous control. Using this value, the different levels of openness of a hihat can be controlled. For example, consider a hihat that transitions from rather closed to full open over half a bar just before a chorus in the song. The image below illustrates how a course of automation values would look like to gradually release the foot pedal.

Using automation for CC#4 on a MIDI track in Ardour to control the openness of a hihat

I will experiment with CC for the hihat openness and groove my way along the planned album. I guess the next thing to learn is polyphonic aftertouch AKA channel pressure⁶ and this is used to choke cymbals.

Opcodes in the sfz format documentation ↩︎
New drum kit: Tchimera post in the Ardour forums ↩︎
Drumkits subchapter of the Hydrogen documentation ↩︎
German post on myths in educational institutions: Bildungswesen: Entlarvung der häufigsten Microsoft-Mythen ↩︎
Ardour 8.0 & 8.1 (hotfix) released news post ↩︎
Pitch Bend & Aftertouch chapter in the Ardour documentation ↩︎

Further technical hurdles

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 17:50:34 +0100

‘I do this not because it is easy, but because I thought it would be easy.’ It seems like there’s still a lot to do before I can actually start recording. The legacy of the scorewriting workflow I got used to now comes back at me. So I need to learn new tools, adapt to new formats, and find a new workflow. However, I can do this because I want to do this. And one thing I know is: Going the hard way leads to many insights.

Scoring with a drum machine

In my last blog post I wrote about how I got used to save my ideas with a tablature editor and happened to compose and arrange with it. But that’s only half the story. Since the drums of a soundfont quickly sounded not vivid enough for me and I was curious to try out other free software, I started scoring drums with Hydrogen, the advanced drum machine.

Using the integrated Sound Library¹ the drumkit Flac_GSCW-2, which is based on samples from Salvador Pelaez², appealed to me. Hydrogen provides a lot of options to fine tune the sound of a drumkit. However, I have basically used it to better imagine the sound of the drums in my arrangements. And I ended up drictly feeding single instrument tracks, such as the kick, snare, etc., into separate tracks in Ardour in the recording step to do the fine tuning in the DAW bypassing all the advanced options of Hydrogen.

Exporting a Hydrogen Song to MIDI

My drums scores are currently saved in Hydrogen’s XML³ format and bound to the drumkits provided by Hydrogen. In order to work with the Tchimera Drum Kit, as described in the #Drums section of my pro audio documentation, I export the Hydrogen song (.h2song) to MIDI.

Exporting a song in Hydrogen to MIDI

However, importing the resulting .mid file into an Ardour MIDI track—which has been initialized with an sfizz-multi instance loading the full_kit.sfz of the Tchimera Drum Kit virtual instrument—doesn’t do the magic. While listening to the MIDI notes triggering the samples in sfizz I note that a crash cymbal is triggered instead of a low or floor tom, for example.

The reason is that the mapping of MIDI notes for the Flac-GSCW-2 drumkit in Hydrogen is different to the mapping of the Tchimera Drum Kit provided as SFZ file. The value in the Note field of the MIDI Output control bar on the lower right side of the image above reveals that the Snare instrument is mapped to note 37, for example.

Flac_GSWC-2 default mapping

First, I write down the notes used in the Hydrogen drumkit Flac_GSCW-2. The following table shows the mappings and the General MIDI (GM) standard for reference:

Note	GM⁴	Flac_GSCW-2
36	Electric Bass Drum	Kick
37	Side Stick	Snare
38	Acoustic Snare	Snare flam
39	Hand Clap	Snare side stick
40	Electric Snare or Rimshot	Snare roll
41	Low Floor Tom	Snare rim shot
42	Closed Hi-hat	Snare drag
43	High Floor Tom	Crash 14"
44	Pedal Hi-hat	Crash 14" choke
45	Low Tom	Crash 18"
46	Open Hi-hat	Crash 18" choke
47	Low-Mid Tom	Tom 13"
48	High-Mid Tom	Tom 12"
49	Crash-Cymbal 1	Ride 22" - bell
50	High Tom	Tom 10"
51	Ride Cymbal 1	Ride 22"
52	Chinese Cymbal	HH closed
53	Ride Bell	Tom 12" flam
54	Tambourine	HH open
55	Splash Cymbal	Tom 10" flam
56	Cowbell	HH pedal
57	Crash Cymbal 2	Tom 13" flam
58	Vibraslap	Splash 6"

At first glance, this mapping appears to have been made in sequence accounting for instruments to be triggered on notes you wouldn’t expect, if you are already familiar with the GM standard.

Tchimera Drum Kit default mapping

Next, I investigate the keymap.sfz file containing the mapping of the Tchimera Drum Kit as shown in this table:

Note	GM and GS⁵	Tchimera Drum Kit
22		HIHAT_CLOSED_EDGE
23		HIHAT_HALF_BOW
24		HIHAT_HALF_EDGE
26	Finger Snap (GS)	HIHAT_OPEN_EDGE
30	Scratch Pull (GS)	TRASH_BOW
31	Sticks (GS)	TOM_4
32	Square Click (GS)	TRASH_EDGE
33	Metronome Click (GS)	TOM_4_RIM
35	Acoustic Bass Drum	KICK_FREE
36	Electric Bass Drum	KICK_DAMP
38	Acoustic Snare	SNARE_CENTER
39	Hand Clap	SNARE_EDGE
40	Electric Snare or Rimshot	SNARE_RIM
41	Low Floor Tom	TOM_3
42	Closed Hi-hat	HIHAT_CLOSED_BOW
43	High Floor Tom	TOM_3_RIM
44	Pedal Hi-hat	HIHAT_PEDAL
45	Low Tom	TOM_2
46	Open Hi-hat	HIHAT_OPEN_BOW
47	Low-Mid Tom	TOM_2_RIM
48	High-Mid Tom	TOM_1
49	Crash-Cymbal 1	CRASH_1_BOW
50	High Tom	TOM_1_RIM
51	Ride Cymbal 1	RIDE_BOW
52	Chinese Cymbal	CRASH_2_EDGE
53	Ride Bell	RIDE_BELL
55	Splash Cymbal	CRASH_1_EDGE
57	Crash Cymbal 2	CRASH_2_BOW
58	Vibraslap	RIDE_EDGE

In addition to General MIDI, the mapping expands down to note 22 including notes that are part of the General Sound or General Standard (GS) superset and even non-percussion notes (notes below 26). And compared to GM and GS the mapping in the Tchimera Drum Kit appears to be rather less systematic. The reason is that the notes correspond to those used in typical e-drums hardware made by Alesis, Roland, and Simmons.

E-drums often provide different trigger zones to simulate different sounds produced by hitting a drum or cymbal at the bow or edge, for example. For this reason, there are six mappings for hihat sounds and three mappings for the snare. Though this doesn’t comply with the GM and GS standards it’s a good practice to not spread the notes across the whole spectrum.

Remapping in Hydrogen

The tables reveal that Flac_GSCW-2 and Tchimera Drum Kit are different drumkits providing different samples using different MIDI notes and a one-to-one match isn’t possible. However, to generate a MIDI export that triggers most of the instruments just fine (kick, snare, hihat, toms, cymbals), I can remap the notes used in Hydrogen to similar instruments of the Tchimera Drum Kit before exporting the song:

Note	GM and GS	Tchimera Drum Kit	Flac_GSCW-2
30	Scratch Pull (GS)	TRASH_BOW	Splash 6"
36	Electric Bass Drum	KICK_DAMP	Kick
38	Acoustic Snare	SNARE_CENTER	Snare
40	Electric Snare or Rimshot	SNARE_RIM	Snare rim shot
41	Low Floor Tom	TOM_3	Tom 13"
42	Closed Hi-hat	HIHAT_CLOSED_BOW	HH closed
44	Pedal Hi-hat	HIHAT_PEDAL	HH pedal
45	Low Tom	TOM_2	Tom 12"
46	Open Hi-hat	HIHAT_OPEN_BOW	HH open
48	High-Mid Tom	TOM_1	Tom 10"
51	Ride Cymbal 1	RIDE_BOW	Ride 22"
52	Chinese Cymbal	CRASH_2_EDGE	Crash 18"
53	Ride Bell	RIDE_BELL	Ride 22" - bell
55	Splash Cymbal	CRASH_1_EDGE	Crash 14"

Additional instruments in Hydrogen, such as Snare flam, Snare roll, Crash 14" choke, Splash 6" etc., are mapped to a range of notes unused in the Tchimera Drum Kit (60 to 69):

Note	GM	Flac_GSCW-2
60	Low Bongo	Snare flam
61	High Bongo	Snare side stick
62	Mute High Conga	Snare roll
63	Open High Conga	Snare drag
64	Low Conga	Crash 14" choke
65	High Timbale	Crash 18" choke
66	Low Timbale	Tom 10" flam
67	Low Agogô	Tom 12" flam
68	High Agogô	Tom 13" flam

Motivation

This way I can maintain the note information (length, timing, velocity etc.) and decide to drag the note to another note for triggering another instrument while working with MIDI in Ardour or find other ways to produce the sound I intended. The additional instruments cannot occupy the same note as the regular Snare, for example. Otherwise, they would be discarded as a duplicate note on export.

Although it will take some time to get used to the features of the Tchimera Drum Kit and a lot of work will be required to find ways to maintain the intended sound of the drums I composed using Flac-GSCW-2 in Hydrogen, I am confident that I can tackle Dozen Lessons for Educationists well, soon.

Chapter 10. Sound Library in the Hydrogen documentation ↩︎
A drum-samples repository providing the source samples ↩︎
Chapter 21. Used File Types in the Hydrogen documentation ↩︎
Parameter interpretation for General MIDI (GM) Percussion in the Wikipedia ↩︎
Additional percussion notes for General Standard (GS) in the Wikipedia ↩︎

Reinventing the zeal without starting from scratch

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 17:23:14 +0100

As a self-taught musician who has grown up playing the guitar I got used to tablatures (tabs). There are many ear-transcriptions of popular songs available and this form of musical notation is perfect for fretted string instruments. I started writing down my first song at the age of 15 using the Power Tab Editor. However, its limitations regarding drums and proprietary nature back in the days got me looking out for something else.

Scorewriting with TuxGuitar

I soon switched to TuxGuitar as an alternative to GuitarPro. Creating and editing tabs feels intuitive and as the proprietary formats of GuitarPro are also supported I could learn from communities, such as UltimateGuitar.

Example tab in TuxGuitar using some effects to shape the guitar sound

Writing down guitar riffs has been handy and fun as TuxGuitar provides means to also note the “effects” to shape the guitar sound, such as harmonics, vibratos, bends, slides, hammer-ons/pull-offs, and palm muted notes, for example. In addition to note duration and dynamics characteristics, I have been able to precisely sketch my song ideas without actually having the time to record any tracks.

Bum tchak

Another important feature is its capability for drum notation using General MIDI key mapping (notes 35 to 81¹). For instance, the following ASCII tab represents a typical drum pattern of “bum tchak bum bum tchak” with additional crash cymbal on the first note, eighth notes on a closed hihat and an open hihat at the end:

C|-57------------------------------|
C|---------------------------------|
C|-----42--42--42--42--42--42--46--|
C|---------38--------------38------|
C|---------------------------------|
C|-35--------------35--35----------|

The first songs I wrote aimed at being a typical rock band arrangement for guitar(s), bass, and drums. I never felt the need to write down vocal melodies as I was rather into the other instruments. For this reason, many songs of mine have evolved from ideas saved in TuxGuitar’s binary .tg files while I was happening to compose and arrange with it.

Other instruments

I also experimented to include scores of other instruments: A piano playing chords or melodies, a synthesizer playing a drone note to create a specific atmosphere, or even woodwinds and brass for some variety and excitement. Since I haven’t seen the need to dive into MIDI and synthesizers, and since Ardour hasn’t had MIDI support before version 3², I even used TuxGuitar to drive the instruments using Fluidsynth and its SoundFont³.

However, this is not what TuxGuitar has been intended for and I must admit that it’s rather a stopgap solution I came up with while focussing the guitar, bass and drums sound. And since I decided to go a zero barriers way regarding my music, I also want my musical notation to be as open and accessible as possible.

New territory

Learning programs for musicial notation needs time to master from what is my experience. I choosed to try MuseScore in order to use a more complete scorewriter and MusicXML as an open standard. About two years ago, I already tried to migrate from TuxGuitar to MuseScore (version 3.6.2), but there was no path to convert existing compositions with an acceptable amount of subsequent work to correct notes, add effects, and clean the scores from any misinterpreted special notation.

A matter of interpretation

As of writing this blog article exporting my existing TuxGuitar compositions into MusicXML to proceed my work in MuseScore still isn’t feasable. The screenshot below shows the same melody of the example tab above in the middle of this three track composition. Apparently, the note rather than the exact string to play is read, sustained notes, and effects (vibrato, trill, hammer-on, slide, ghost note, and bending) are completely ignored.

Composition with the melody of the example tab above in the middle track

The first track is a strummed acoustic guitar. However, due to the same quirks regarding string information, sustained and palm muted notes, and the direction of strumming, without heavy adjustments this tab is rather useless. And concerning the drum track at the bottom, writing it from scratch may be the better option.

Starting over

Without compatibility between TuxGuitar tabs and MuseScore I have to rewrite my scores from scratch. Though this is a good training to learn MuseScore I am currently unsure if I am willing to spend time to this process of migration as it is just another project to keep me from recording and producing the Dozen lections for educationists album.

Don’t get me wrong, I sure want to share the compositions. However, since time is a limited resource and all of my efforts as this.ven are a spare time occupation I must prioritize. And at the moment playing and recording instruments, editing the tracks, and doing the sound design and mixing is a primary driver.

Since composing and arrangement has already been finished and TuxGuitar still works for me to recall the ideas I collected in addition to the drafts, I guess learning to write tabs with MuseScore can wait for now.

General MIDI Percussion in the Wikipedia ↩︎
Ardour 3.0 released announcement ↩︎
SoundFont in the Wikipedia ↩︎

Record arming for the album

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 10:40:55 +0200

I’m about to begin with recording sessions for the planned album Dozen lections for educationists. Since my last post I’ve focussed on writing the Professional audio guide while setting up my environment on a new notebook. The background is that I switched to using just one notebook instead of a dedicated device for pro audio work to release some hardware and be more portable.

Good old ThinkPads

For this reason, I had to say goodbye to the mature setup on my beloved T430 ThinkPad, which is perfectly supported in Arch Linux¹. While I was finishing my degree I even bought another T430 when I accidentally spilled water on it. However, about a week later it booted just fine again. This showed me how robust this device is and I started looking for and evaluating a desired task for my new spare notebook. (This process is still ongoing.)

Projects using the T430 ThinkPad as hardware

Modding fun

Another reason to “fall in love” with a T430 is its modification ability. The Definite T430 Modding Guide describes a lot—if not all—of the adjusting screws you can turn to improve the default configuration. To me one of the most crucial mods is BIOS flashing using 1vyrain. This allows to me disable Intel ME² in the BIOS setup, removes the WWAN and WLAN whitelist, and unlocks AES-NI³ capabilities. With a spare notebook at hand I was brave enough to try flashing and it worked great. I soon upgraded the wireless NIC to a Wi-Fi 5⁴ capable device and upgraded the display.

I have been very happy with my modded T430 and the Arch Linux installation, which has matured over time. However, 12 years after initial production and release of this notebook model there are too many shortcomings related to the hardware design and standards at that time. Now it’s time to try modern hardware and have fun learning its improvements and coping with any disadvantages.

A new arrangement

While working on the documentation of the Arch Linux installation on my new notebook, I realized that it may be time to reflect and adapt details of my preferred configurations to newer concepts. One of this adaptions is a Sound server setup based on PipeWire only instead of dealing with also with a JACK server for pro audio. The reason is simplification. From my experience PipeWire is now mature enough to substitute JACK at all and as its development seems to be stalled, it’s reasonable to ommit JACK.

Zero barriers

In addition to using PipeWire, I decided to rely on CC0 or public domain licensed samples for drums, piano and other virtual instruments. This way I am absolutely allowed to share every single asset and the full history of a project along with the resulting music by working on a song as if it was a code and commit the changes via Forgejo, a self-hosted software forge. By this, you are able to not only use the same tools for creating music but also follow the way I produced it or even fork a note, a sound, a melody, a track, etc. and eventually become a FLOSS musician by yourself.

Birthday (acoustic) draft

Inspiration for a new mindset

The autumn has always been a season of rearranging and setting sails for me. This year I’d like to use this energy to finally start music production over again.

T series comparison table in the ArchWiki ↩︎
Article on Intel’s Management Engine by EFF. ↩︎
AES instruction set in the Wikipedia ↩︎
Wi-Fi 5 in the Wikipedia ↩︎

Just in time

Fri, 31 May 2024 15:55:24 +0200

The last weeks have been stressful. A lot is going on at work and in my private life. However, now and again I can take some time to extend the docs.

Lately, I started documenting my computer setup. The plan is to finish the more basic guides on building an Arch Linux system and get to the more specific guides on professional audio. For example:

Installing and booting a Real-time kernel
Tweaking system settings to avoid xruns
Understanding the role of an audio server

Since my living situation has also changed recently, I’m confident to actually create music soon.

Taking off, nailing down

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 10:58:34 +0200

Hi! If you wonder why my website looks different, this article is about why.

If you already know about the background of this site you may want to jump to the section Know why, know what, know how.

The history of this site

Since I started the this.ven project in the fall of 2017 and created the website in the following year, the purpose of these pages and the services I am running has changed.

Taking off with Tor on a netbook

In the beginning, I just wanted to share my music (drafts) and some of the details related to it. For this reason, an old netbook with a 700 MHz single-core CPU, 512 MB RAM and 4 GB SSD running Debian 9 (Stretch)¹ has been sufficient to serve static HTML files via an Apache 2 webserver over the Tor² network. To connect the site to the clearnet³ I resorted to a proxy together with a link shortener service. This way the visitors could access my onion site by navigating to a clearnet address.

The last screen (kernel panic) of the netbook in Oktober 2022

Though this solution induces that visitors had to trust the free proxy service since the end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) Tor traffic is terminated at the exit node (before the proxy node), at that time I didn’t have enough resources for another option. Additionally, I didn’t want to register at a service, share my personal data, such as the place of residence and phone number, due to the legislation in my country.

Migration to Uberspace

However, as the need for E2EE instant messaging (IM) became more urgent, and I was looking for options to run other web applications without being dependend on Tor I gave Uberspace a try. I migrated the website files and extended it in the following years. I used a Prosody⁴ server for IM with my family and friends, and registered a domain in order to setup DNS records against my concerns. I setup and tried out many other services for blogging, collaborative writing, file sharing, instant messaging, streaming, and audio- and videoconferencing. After some time I learned that there’s a high price to convert fellow people for Internet politics and digital rights this way. I cancelled the domain and most services. Unfortunately, some friends didn’t manage or didn’t want to switch to another protocol (Matrix) and fell back to SMS.

A more private Uberspace

As of 2019 the Uberspace evolved into a more private resource to allow myself to be more independent from GAFAM, which I—kind of—celebrated in November 2020 when I organized to do a live miniconcert using a streaming setup backed by Icecast. However, I still wanted to share my experiences and knowledge to support other people on their way to digital sovereignty⁵. I started a wiki using DokuWiki⁶ documenting my infrastructure.

Startpage of the discontinued lar.ven wiki

In addition to instructions on how I tweak my services at Uberspace to achieve more security and privacy I also wrote articles about setting up a Tor relay with the netbook that was providing the onion site before and VoidLinux⁷ as a more lightweight OS until the hardware finally died. It was replaced by a Raspberry Pi 3 A+, but due the lack of a wired NIC I switched to a Snowflake proxy⁸ very soon. If you want to support the Tor network, donate to the project and have a look at the:

Browser Snowflake proxy

Site building overhaul, handy features, and a new design

At the end of 2023 I reconsidered my infrastructure and website content. If the intent is to share my music and knowledge together, there is no reason to separate the contents. Furthermore, I was getting tired of manually maintaining the static HTML files. I browsed the Uberlab guides to find a content management system that has already been proven to work. A few of my requirements were to write Markdown files and a Git repository for version control and site building automation.

Know why, know what, know how

Hugo is what I have found to be a sufficient solution to address the aforementioned needs. I migrated the content of the former site⁹ and added new documentation on graphics design, for exmaple, while I was recreating the color scheme, logo, and profile image. This way I can share my experiences and knowledge together with the music I am able to create absolutely independently through the people contributing to software freedom.

this.ven

FLOSS musician, tinkerer, and privacy advocate

In the next months I will focus on my music projects, further document how I am approaching in the docs, and keep you updated via this blog.

Stay tuned.

Debian Stretch release page ↩︎
Tor Project website ↩︎
Clearnet (networking) in the Wikipedia ↩︎
Prosody website ↩︎
Open Standards background page of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) ↩︎
DokuWiki website ↩︎
VoidLinux website ↩︎
Snowflake project page ↩︎
Former website in the Internet Archive wayback machine ↩︎