New Ardour Logo

Ardour is an application for recording, editing and mixing music. It is licensed under the terms of the GPL 2.

The upcoming 3.0 release seemed like a good opportunity to take another look at the logo I designed in 2006. A selection of drafts from back then, ending with the final design:

I had to ask myself: Is this logo (still) appropriate for Ardour?

The upcoming 3.0 release will be a digital audio and MIDI production application, available for Linux and Mac OS X. It is designed for frequent and prolonged use, being able to deal with huge amounts of material, complex signal pathways, precise and intense editing. Reliability, correctness and precision are of utmost importance.

The logo should take a matching stance, be sharp and have a strong presence. I think the old version does a fine job in this regard. It also happens to be well established and liked by the community (of course not by everyone). Back then I decided to use a free-form wave shape, less stylized, more realistic. Now I think a shape with even subdivisions will make the logo appear more precise.

I worked my way through variations of the curves that describe top and bottom of the wave, the number of teeth, their shape, relative height of the type and its consequences on letter spacing:

PDF of above image, in case you’d like to take a closer look.

Application icons, first column are the old ones. I reduced the number of teeth for the smaller versions, keeping them at least 1 pixel wide.

The new logo is already in use on the new website that went online about a week ago. I helped a bit with color selection, made a few suggestion and provided 3 icons:

Music: Gleshnor

Sugar-coated electronic rasp.

This project started as a test of Ardour 3’s new MIDI and synth-plugin features (still in beta). In this role, it served in uncovering and fixing a number of issues and grew into something a little more ambitious over time.

The kick, bass and lead all come from instances of Calf‘s Monosynth.

When thinking about what I could draw as a cover image, Driddee jumped into my mind. Similar to the music, creating this image was a test run, with Krita. Took a bit to get comfortable with it, but now I’m rather pleased. I need more practice, obviously 🙂

Other formats, the entire Ardour session as well as a track-by-track export (wavpack format) are available via archive.org.

Gleshnor and Driddee by Thorsten Wilms are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Get on Board the Blues – Guicussion Remix

Dave Phillips recently published a great Blues track in a not so great mix and made the material available on request. Since others covered the gentle just bring out what’s there (by Fons Adriaensen) as well as tasteful addition of drums (by Jason Jones), I just had to do something a little different.

Online player, choice of different formats and the entire Ardour session packed up on archive.org.

All additions are created from the original material, no samples added. Both the original and remix have been produced with pre-release builds of what will become Ardour 3.0.

Lyrics

More music from Dave
More music from yours truly

Aubio Logo 4

The author of Aubio liked the 2nd type variant from the last set best. More work keeping that in mind:

Aubio Logo

I have been asked for a logo for aubio, so let’s start with a few ideas:

Compressor Plugin GUI

Sampo Savolainen asked me to design an audio compressor plugin GUI. This triggered a thought process with a first result that is guaranteed to be far way from what he had in mind, but before I may head in a more conventional direction, I just have to explore this 😉

Background info on dynamic range compression.

I wondered how one could express what each control of a compressor as the one written by Sampo does. Giving an idea of the signal path and relations between controls. Ideally without labels, even.

Full size

The controls provided are:

• High-pass filter on/off for the analyzed signal. Left side. Here I neglected that the signal is split in 2, one for measurement, the other to apply the effect on.
• Treshold. Green line in the graph. Should be draggable from the whole grap area.
• Ratio. Blue fader with round knob, synchronized with the blue line/dot in the graph.
• Markup gain. Fader with red arrow. The graphics show the relation to the first graph.
• Attack and Release time. Below the stop watch icon. I’m worried that the chart below the faders is rather hard to get, so it might be best to drop it and to add labels.
• Dry/wet amount. Right side. The output touching the right corner and the fader handle for this are one.

High-pass switched off: