Hi, I am new to music production and would like to try to use a sort of digital soundboard to record sounds and mix them with Ardour.
So far, I saw drumgizmo is a plugin that can allow me to what I want but only via mouse clicks.
Is there any way to load some pre recorded samples and use my keyboard as the keys to play those sounds and experiment more ? Possibly with the option of recording a said “session” ?
I hope such a thing exists, maybe I’m just missing the lingo to find it.
“digital soundboard” doesn’t really convey any precise meaning. Please describe more about what type of device you’re thinking about.
If I understand correctly as a first step you would like a way to generate MIDI events from your computer keyboard.
Virtual Midi Piano Keyboard may help with that:
http://vmpk.sourceforge.net/
Drumgizmo is primarily for percussion samples, some phrases to search for would be “sampler plugin” and “synthesizer plugin,” although we would need to know what operating system you are using to know which specific plugin formats apply.
Do you mean you want to load up a bunch of sampled sounds to a device and to be able to trigger them by pressing a physical button ?
I don’t know if there are anything like this for Linux, but a couple of commercial devices comes to mind:
Ableton Live software + Launchpad hardware (expensive + very versatile):
You can load your own sounds to a “samplepad”. This one has also percussion sounds built in:
You could use one of the Multi-Sampler plugins from LSP-plugins: http://lsp-plug.in/?page=manuals These allow you to load samples which can be triggered by midi notes. There are several variants of the plugin allowing different numbers of samples and different output options.
Another option is to create an SFZ file you can play with linuxsampler. SFZ is a text-based sample format which can be played with Linuxsampler which would also allow you to play a sample triggered by a midi note.
If you are totally new to linux audio I suggest looking at some tutorials on http://libremusicproduction.com particular describing Jack using Ardour with midi.
From looking at your suggestions it seems that the Multi-Sampler plugin from LSP-plugins is exactly what I had in mind. I will try to get that working.