linux blog, music and life. a day in the life of wayne ward…

Well i aint blogged on this 4 a while what can i say??

Quality. Buy one.

In my local music shop (promenade music) i was looking at tube type amps when i fell over nearly! what appeared to be a practice amp! small blue nice looking thing so when i went to pick it up to check for valves in the back i realised it was a good nit of kit with the weight etc! anyway its a full tube 15/ 28w amp with 10″ celestion 30 watt speaker!! dual channel and comes with solid little footswitch that switches the spring reverb and lead channel. You have a overall treble middle and bass with a master volume for the 1st channel then you carry across the equalisation to the lead channel and you also get a gain a contor and a master on the lead channel!!! now thats not it on each channel you have various switches for mid and high sweeps which add massive modifications to the sounds you can get with this little amp! You get a D.I output and a send and return with a mix volume control. The tubes consist of 3 x 12AX7 (ECC83) tubes on the preamp and a EL84 matched pair for the output tubes. I checked the serial and the amp was made in 2002 and the tubes were original so I had a word with george dennis and he said swap the preamp tubes and soon do the out put tubes. So popped into promenade and the tubes i needed and bearing in mind these are groove tubes are like £13 each !! so popped them in and hell big power increase and added a nice warm feeling to the overall sound! Gigging wise i run this amp between 2 and number 3!!! it kills my 60w triggerman!! These amps are quality better build quality than the roland / epiphone and marshalls DEFO. But why has he discontinued the blue beetle combo!!!???!!!! Madness!!!
Check out the george dennis site if you are a serious lead guitarist and you dont want to be like all the other clones!!! dont want a laney / fender /marshall!!! get a life!!!
http://www.george-dennis.cz/

This was one of our extra meetings we added on the third week of the month as we had a home demonstration on linux audio on editing on 64studio by andy at his place.

Present : ken – dave – wayne – andy – mark & richard

Andy showed us audacity – qjackctl – ardour & rezound

I missed the first half hour or so but seems we had a demo on the jackd server and how qjackctl controls it.

Also they discussed the firewire hardware connected to the latop which we can connect various external connections including a balanced microphone connection (XLR) with phantom power and a jack socket connection for guitar also has a spdif connection for digital audio. Then we just connect this into various programs using qjackctl.

We did some simple editing with audacity and rezound. Then we opened the amazing adour and put some guitar and multitrack drum down. Then we sent the these two tracks to another bus and added effects to the two tracks a bit of reverb and some flanger and panned the tracks a bit to add the stereo feel !!

The demo was very good and andy explained this very well !! We also may be looking at extending the demonstration in a month or so and adding the midi functionality to what we was doing tonight !!!

The plugins we were using were ladspa plugins and are available through apt. read more for info…

Ladspa plugins available

mcp-plugins – LADSPA plugins designed for Alsa Modular Synth
caps – C* Audio Plugin Suite
swh-plugins – Steve Harris’s LADSPA plugins
tap-plugins – Tom’s Audio Processing LADSPA plugins
blop – Bandlimited wavetable-based oscillator plugins for LADSPA hosts
cmt – Computer Music Toolkit (cmt) a collection of LADSPA plugins
fil-plugins – parametric equalizer LADSPA plugin
omins – a collection of LADSPA plugins aimed at modular synthesizers
vcf – audio EQ biquad filters for LADSPA

apt-get install mcp-plugins caps swh-plugins tap-plugins blop cmt fil-plugins omins vcf

64studio is a linux – debian based distro setup for video / audio editing out of the box more information here

http://64studio.com/

Ive been that busy that I havent had time to blog!!!
Well a quick summary
Joined the morecamabe bay mini club – which is club for proud owners of the retro minis and they are also open to people with new style minis!! (uughh!!) any way im going to be doing the website which is available at
www.morecambeminiclub.co.uk

Ive also just got rid of one of my expensive basses to buy myself gear required for the new year – I managed to get hold of a JD 1984 bass from chester – a brand new 70’s style USA stratocaster – a pair of EV speakers – the new alesis desk with ipod docking and a old roland bolt 30 amp!! which i think needs re-tubing! That was a big bundle to swap for one guitar!!

Ive also been laying with class act duo and decided its good but not my thing so talking of things – ive put together my band natural thing again – we will be hitting lancaster hard again in the new year so watch this space. Im also working on a new duo this is called the revival and we are playing – oasis – beatles – coldplay and other quality tunes we will be out playing live in the next month or so!!!!!!!!!!!!

So keep tuned in ill blog on all the music equipment..

Lancaster Linux Meeting
September 3rd 2008
People present
ken – dave – wayne – andy – chris – matt a.k.a trout – mark
Various talks on laptops and virtualization using virtualbox. We had a quick talk on 64studio and jackd and the power it has for connecting devices and programs together.
Matt & trout talked about devel and kernel processes and running linux X programs in vista using a module im not sure what he used to do this if anyone has information this could be quite handy for someone… we also had some entertaining chat on older versions of linux including quite a bad bad bit of patching in redhat 6.3!!
We had a look at various laptops that run windows and linux out of the box andy has one from linux emporium which come pre-loaded with ubuntu. WE looked at dell’s latop offerings and HP. running suse and activation and talked about finger print security
Matt talked about doing a talk on coding and were to start. Which raised a lot of intrest.
We also may be taking a visit to access space sheffield were they have open source discusions and projects. www.access-space.org
If anyone is intrested in a visit this please let us know.
We may be holding some of our talks at the basement single step penny st. They have a projector and is ideal for giving demonstrations.
It looks like the lug websites maybe coming back into action this week and me and dave will both be getting access to the webspace etc. We will be making changes to the content and would like any feedback on items you might want to see in the new lancaster lug website.
We still need to confirm who will attend the 64studio demo at andys house on the 17th of september.
Thanks for coming we are now up to 7 turning up to the meeting which is pretty good for the second meeting!!!!

Im looking for events and acts for gigseek
I did knock the music agency on the head because acts were going direct to the event and cutting me out of the action so I decided to restart the bookings but either with a contract or with the understanding i will strike the act off if they go direct or visa versa!!
So if you need a band – karaoke – duo – single act or DJ
Or if you are looking for gigs goto

www.gigseek.co.uk

I just ordered my new stratocaster USA
I have a squier strat which is a indonesian one and to be honest its a bloody good bit of kit!! it lacks balls on the pickups and slightly looses tuning if you bend strings like crazy man! so a pickup replacement and some sperzel machine heads would fix this up nicely for around £100 and it would be a great guitar – its ideal for a strummer!!
Any way i wanted a real USA job so went into promenade music my local music shop and got them to look into the 70’s classic for me .. now this fender has a big headstock based on the70’s look and is around £1000 and has the nice big 70’s headstock! but i noticed it has the U shaped neck as it did in the seventies like! well gary said for a bass player im fussy when it comes to guitar neck shapes ha ha! but i dont want no fat guitar neck i want C shaped ! nicer profile… any way rossi said what about highway one strat 70’s re issue?..
Any way you can get a fender usa stratocaster highway one 70’s style with big headstock in sunburst with a c shaped neck for just under £500!!! no case like it comes with a gig bag but has jumbo frets etc! grease bucket electronics and life time guarantee on electronics! so i ordered one of those. The finish on the highway one isnt like a normal usa it is designed to wear faster so after a year of abuse of me it will have that retro look im after awsome – I only have to wait a week to get this axe plugged in!
All it requires now is a S1 scratch plate pickups and electronics and a graph tech nut and sperzel tuners and its then a top notch axe which will only set me back around another £250n and will void my warranty on the lifetime electronics

To install the kolab groupware server on debian etch go here
http://wiki.kolab.org/index.php/Kolab2_Installation_-_Overview

Now i see there is problems when installing on lenny all though it does work

Now my two main problems and i see other people having the same problems when I google’d it was cant login to the horde webmail and not being able to send emails.

Right so you got it all boot strapped using the above install instructions
now when you did the boot strap did you call your mail server the same as your local hostname?? no then you wont be able to log in to the horde webmail system my mail server is called mail.lancastercomputers.co.uk which i entered into the bootstrap now you must have that added to your local host line in /etc/hosts so you line reads
127.0.0.1 localhost mail.lancastercomputers.co.uk
Now horde will work!!!

Cant send emails? go into the manager Url and settings and simply enable accept internet mail and save settings and try again if this doesn’t work then you have the problem i have clam isnt building right im just waiting for a update so i can compile it from source – anyway just untick Amavis Email Scanning (Virus/Spam) and apply and test again.
That should be working now!