Enjoy music? Think you have what it takes to compose something? If only there was a free way to give it a try.

Rosegarden homepage: http://www.rosegardenmusic.com

Christmas 2007

For Christmas my parents bought James, my son, a small guitar. He was thrilled until he realized you just down strum the thing and produce nice music. Since my in-laws had both been music teachers, my wife Anne and her brother John know how to read music and play many instruments. Anne hadn't played the guitar before, so John gave her a few lessons, and we eventually bought her a full sized guitar so she could try to teach James. Not wanting to be left out, and hoping to encourage James to want to play music, I decided to buy a keyboard.

OK great I have the keyboard now what? Obviously I wanted to learn to play the thing. To that end I bought one with light up keys and multiple teaching modes. I quickly learned that 100 songs scattered across every conceivable genre only yields a few songs liked by any given random person. Don't get me wrong, I can't even play those that I liked. It also doesn't take long to realize that if you listen/play/butcher the same song over and over again, you end up liking it even less than when you started.

The keyboard I bought does come with a USB based midi interface that just shows up under Linux. That was a nice surprise. I just plugged it in and it worked. I also found out that the keys are light corresponding to notes played on the first two midi channels, one for each hand.

Looking for a MIDI sequencing program for Linux

Rosegarden tops the list. It is obvious looking around that it's a very complete package. I started working with it before getting the keyboard, to figure out which one would work with Linux. Problem is that Rosegarden works MUCH easier and better with a real MIDI device. That means I had to do a lot to get it working before I bought the keyboard.

Once I had the keyboard, I simply plugged it in and redirected things with "qjackctl" to play on the keyboard. Learning a little about qjackctl actually helped out quite a bit, as it's easier to map midi channels in jack than by renaming them all in Rosegarden.

On my Fedora8 laptop I had to do the following:

yum install rosegarden4 qjackctl perl-XML-Twig lilypond

RoseGarden on the web:

• homepage http://www.rosegardenmusic.com
• tour
• docs

Run order for products:

1. jackd -b alsa
2. qjackctl
3. rosegarden

Things not to miss

1. Double click on a track to see the sheet music
2. record from midi device
3. printing sheet music