I run on a Linux system – Ardour for a DAW – but mostly trying to avoid the computer for music. Ardour runs great, but has a full blown feature set which is overkill for what I need to do most of the time.
With my current setup I’m trying to just have a simple hardware solution that i can turn on and practice at any time with no fuss. If I have to plug in my laptop, reconfigure software and plug in keyboards/audio – I’m just less likely to practice. I’m often practicing by taking 15 minute breaks from my regular work – so the laptop has to do double duty and switching back and forth kills a lot of my practice time.
My practice rig is just Mojo Suitcase organ and a Beat Buddy drum pedal into an HX Stomp effects (minimal extra effects in this usage – mostly using it for a simple mixer and a little Amp Sim if I want a dirtier sound) Plus I have a small midi looper so I can record raw midi and just loop a 12-bar blues pattern for instance and in combination with beat buddy create my own backing tracks. What I’ll probably do is try to emulate the audio backing track as best I can with looper and beat buddy – that way I have tempo control over the combo. The looper can take regular midi files on an SD card, so I figured if you already had them, I could just load them instead of trying to recreate them mysefl. I’m probably fine with simple backing tracks, more complex are probably beyond my skills at this point.
What I will probably do for now is just run the organ in mono and stick the backing track in the other side of the stereo input from my phone. I might be able to run it in stereo into the beat buddy as well – it has an input for guitar so you can mix the drums with live guitar.
No biggie – just figured I’d ask.
I’m going to try and set up a thread in the practice forum.