Welcome to Linux Multi Media Studio (LMMS) The computer that you are using should have installed

on it the most recent version (update) of Linux Multi Media Studio. What is LMMS? LMMS is a free digital audio workstation (Alternative to FL Studio, Garage Band etc.) in which you can produce music on your computer. This is done by the creation of beats, melodies, mixing of samples, synthesis of sound and use of synthesizers. It is my hope that everything works right the first time for you. Unfortunately, there was a problem that was identified during the install on some of the computers. I tried to fix it, but it is possible that it may still exist. The problem occurs with the sound being distorted or incorrect. Here is how to fix the problem. This is the first thing that you should do(regardless) 1. Open LMMS and click on the Edit drop-down menu. Click Settings and a pop-up window will appear.

2. Click on the speaker (audio settings) icon. Change the Audio Interface to SDL (Single DirectMedia Layer) and click OK. (It may say something like Please note that most changes.. Click OK, close the program and restart it. This should fix the problem.)

To verify that this workedClick on the My Samples icon on the left side of the work space. You will see several folders. Click drums and then click on one of the files. You should here a sound that resembles a bass drum, cymbal, snare drum etc. Not distortion.

Tempo

Time Signature

Work Space

64 - Channel Mixer

Effect(s) Editor

(The Following Tutorial was taken from the Linux Multi Media Wiki. The full text can be found at http://lmms.sourceforge.net/)

Your First Song

LMMS is a tool that can be used to make music effectively without very much hassle. To showcase this fact, if you follow these step by step instructions you should be able to make your own songs very quickly. If you are using Windows, double click the icon on your desktop or go start menu - programs - LMMS to load your version of the LMMS program. If you are using Ubuntu, open up a terminal (CTRL+ALT+T on version 11.04), type in "lmms" (without the quotation marks), and press enter. When you first load the program you will see several boxes with various titles and a toolbar at the top left. Looking at the upper to middle left side of the screen you will also see some small icons. These are important as most of these are where you select your sounds.

Your First Melody

Choosing the instrument
You've got the default screen in front of you, with the Song Editor, Beat + Bassline Editor and Project Notes open. First, click the Presets icon ( ) on the Side Bar to open up the list of preset sounds. Double-click on the TripleOscillator or click on the plus symbol on its left to open this folder and you will be presented with a diverse range of instruments. You can hold the mouse button down on any preset to hear a preview of its sound.

For now, let's drag the "Xylophon" preset onto the space in the middle of the Song Editor. When you drop it, a new track will be created with that preset as the instrument.

(If this were a percussion-type instrument, we might be better off dragging it to the Beat+Bassline Editor instead; you'll see why in a second. We really want to give this instrument a string of notes (or a Piano Roll) to play, though, so Song Editor it is.)

Making the melody

We now want to add notes to make the melody. Left-click in the first bar of the Moog track and a new piano roll segment will appear ( the Piano Roll Editor will appear, allowing you to put notes into that newly-created segment. ). Double-click on that and

The first note

Now click in the black square just to the right of the 'A4' note (which is three lines, or semitones, down from the note marked C5). This will create a new crotchet - a note one beat long - starting at that time.

However, this is too long: we need notes half a beat - a quaver - long. To change this, we simply move the mouse pointer to the right-hand edge of the note, until the cursor changes into a left-and-right arrow. Then we hold the mouse button down and drag the end of the note left two 'blocks' (each block being one sixteenth of a bar).

After this, the new notes we put down will be the same length, because the Piano Roll Editor default is set to Last Note ( ) -But you can change that in the drop-down. However most of the time you will work with the 'Last Note' setting, but if you suddenly cant create notes in the length you expected, its because you accidentally made a change to this drop-down.

More notes
Continue creating notes in the pattern shown:

To place a note, you need to aim for the line at the start of the beat; LMMS will recognise a small fraction of the area left of the beat line as being closer to that beat than the previous. You can control this with the 'Q-setting'. Default 'Q' is correlated to note-length. That is 'Note-lock'. But again you can change that 'magnetic-point' in the Q-dropdown. If you make a mistake placing a note, you can move it to its correct position by clicking on the middle of the note (where the cursor turns into a four-way cross) and dragging the note to its new position. LMMS will play the note that you're dragging onto as an aide to correct placement. You can move notes horizontally (in time) as well as vertically (in pitch). If you need to delete a note, simply right-click on it.

Copy and paste

We now want to repeat those seven notes at the start of the bar in the next bar. There are three ways to do this.

The first and worst way to do it is to simply click the correct notes. But this is tedious. Let's use some of LMMS's features to speed this up. The first real way to do it is to use the duplicator tool. First select the notes you want to copy. Hold down Ctrl and make a selection rectangle around the notes you want to copy. Next, hold Shift and drag the newly selected notes. You are now dragging a copy of the selected notes. You can place these where you want them to go.

Alternatively you can use good old copy and paste. Again, use Ctrl to select the notes you want, and then press Ctrl+C. Press Ctrl+V to paste the notes at the beginning, and move them to their new location. To select all notes you can press Ctrl+A. We can now press the play button ( ) in the Piano Roll Editor window to play the melody back. When it gets to the end of the last bar in which there are notes, it will automatically repeat back to the start of the first bar.

Oops!
When we play the melody so far, we realize that the melody actually starts on the wrong beat. The second A4 note is really supposed to be the start of the bar, and the two notes before it are leading in from the previous bar. However, we can't go further back than bar 1 in our piano roll. We need to move all the notes forward. Press Ctrl+A to select all the notes. Then you can click and drag to move them all over in order to have the first note start on the right beat (see picture below).

The first 'four' bars

If you're confident, you can now continue adding the notes of the tune to make the first four bars (up to where the main melody repeats). Here's what your piano roll should look like at the end of this:

More structure
We can now close the Piano Roll Editor and go back to the Song Editor. You will see that the track segment that we initially double-clicked to create the melody has expanded out to fit the notes that we've added. We now want to copy that segment to create the next four bars. The easiest way to do that is to simply hold down the Ctrl key, then drag the initial segment. This will drag a copy of the segment to a new location, which must be outside the initial segment. This process will look like this:

Drop the segment on bar 6. This is actually one bar too late, as the first three quarters of a bar of this segment is empty, as is the last quarter of the last segment. Fortunately, segments can overlap and their notes will play simultaneously. [3]. Drag the second copy so that it starts at bar 5. You can now play this using the play button in the Song Editor. You will hear a short pause as it counts the first three beats of silence, then the melody will start. It should play smoothly through the two repeats. The Song Editor should now look like this:

Variation 2
We can now go on to create another piano roll segment and fill in the next four bars:

Due to the way that the segments overlap, you will have to create the new segment in a new bar (e.g. bar 11) and then move it into position over the previous segment. Note that there is a slight oddity in the Piano Roll Editor that causes you to start editing at bar 2 when opening occasional new segments. Check which bar you're writing notes into before getting to far! Your Song Editor should now look like this:

Your First Beat

For our first sound we are going to select the small box on the left side with the music note. This box is your sample collection that comes standard with LMMS. When you Click the My Samples box a list of folders should appear, one of them labeled "drums". Double clicking the box will show a list of percussion instruments. Click on them to hear the different sounds of the instruments. If you look at the open boxes one of them should read "Beat and Bassline Editor. Locate that box before going forward. If you have closed it by chance it is located on the left top toolbar. Going back to the cool samples you just heard select the bassdrum_acoustic02.ogg, click that file and drag it to the beat editor and a new tab should appear in box with that same label. do the same thing to the instruments hihat_closed04.ogg and snare02.ogg (scroll down). If it is done correctly you should have 3 instruments in the beat and bassline editor box (from here this editor will be called bnb box). Push the play button located on the bnb box. you should hear silence. if you press on the small tombstone like icon on the bassdrums instrument line you should eventually hear the drum with a flash from the the instruments sounding bar (it only lights up when it is being played.) For this part 0 will mean that the instrument bar is left blank. 1 will mean that the instrument bar is active. Your first Bassdrum line will be: |1 0 0 0 | 0 0 1 0 | 0 0 0 0 | 0 0 0 0| Your first HiHat line will be: |1 0 0 0 | 1 0 0 0 | 1 0 0 0 | 1 0 0 0| Your first Snare line will be: |0 0 0 0 | 0 0 0 0 | 1 0 0 0 | 0 0 0 0| When done correctly this will make a simple drum beat.

Drum Pattern (examples)

(work in progress) (figure.1) (example) step.... Bass drum snare drum 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 | X - / - / - / | X - / - / - / | X - / - / - / | X - / - / - / | | / - / - / - / | X - / - / - / | / - / - / - / | X - / - / - / |

closed hi-hat open hi-hat

| X - X - / - X | X - X - / - X | X - X - / - X | X - X - / - X | | / - / - X - / | / - / - X - / | / - / - X - / | / - / - X - / |

X=note on ; /=silence above in (Figure.1) we have a simple 4 beat pattern using 16ths or 16 segments within our pattern. You can see from "Bass drum" that there is an X (note on) at 1,5,9,13, ,this gives us the typical beat used in most techno/trance or house style music. Next is the snare drum at 5, and 13, which gives us a swing type feel to the rhythm. And finally the open and closed hi-hats to compliment the rhythm. now that you have the general idea these patterns can be applied to your songs in LMMS using the "beat + bassline editor" (which uses the 16ths/16 steps to 1 bar or 4 beats).

below are some examples for you to try out and perhaps use in your songs. (1) Amen Break - [this was a drum solo originally performed by Gregory Sylvester Coleman, but has been heavily sampled and pitched up for use in drum and bass and jungle styles]

Crash/Ride Cym. : Bass/Snare Dr. :

| 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - | 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - | 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - | 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - | | R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R- | R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R- | R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R- | R-R-R-R-R-C-R-R- | | B-B-S--S-SBBS--S | B-B-S--S-SBBS--S | B-B-S--S-SB---S- | -SBBS--S-SB---S- |

(2) Typical Break-beat - [by moving the Bass drum out of regular 4/4 timing we create a "break-beat]

step.... Bass drum snare drum closed hi-hat open hi-hat

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1 X / X /

2 / / / /

3 X / X /

4 / / / X

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5 / X X /

6 / / / /

7 / / X /

8 / / / /

| | | |

9 / / X /

10 - / - / - / - /

11 - X - / - X - /

12 - / - / - / - X

13 | / | X | X | /

14 - X - / - / - X

15 - / - / - X - X

16 - / - / - / - /

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