for a long time, i’ve had to deal with occasionally jagged, hard-to-read fonts when viewing webpages, because i ran my xfce desktop without any font antialiasing.

i’ve always hated the way modern desktop environments try to “fool” my eyes with antialiasing and subpixel hinting to convince me that a group of square pixels can be smoothed into round shapes. turning off antialiasing tends to make the rounder fonts, especially serif fonts, look pretty bad at large sizes, as seen here:

my preferred font for the desktop and the web is verdana, which looks pretty good without antialiasing. but most websites use other fonts, so rather than force one size of verdana everywhere (which causes flow/layout issues), i turned on antialiasing for my entire desktop, including my preferred browser, and started disabling antialiasing where needed.

before and after font settings:

i tried the infinality patchset for freetype, but unfortunately none of the eselect configurations produced the crisply rounded antialiased text the patches are known for. i rebuilt freetype without the patchset, and went into /etc/fonts to do some XML hacking.

while eselect-fontconfig offers painless management of existing presets, the only way to customize one’s setup is to get into nitty-gritty text editing, and font configs are in XML format. this is what i ended up with:

$ cat ~/.fonts.conf

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font">
    <edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
        <bool>false</bool>
    </edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
    <test name="size" qual="any" compare="more">
        <double>11</double>
    </test>
    <edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
        <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
    <test name="pixelsize" qual="any" compare="more">
        <double>16</double>
    </test>
    <edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
        <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
</match>
<match target="pattern">
    <test qual="any" name="family"><string>Helvetica</string></test>
    <edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
</match>

let’s step through the rules:

first, all antialiasing is disabled. then, any requested font size over 11, or anything that would display more than 16 pixels high, is antialiased. finally, since the common helvetica font really needs to be antialiased at all sizes, a rule turns that on. in theory, that is — firefox and xfce both seem to be ignoring this. unless antialiasing really is enabled at the smallest sizes with no visible effect, since there are only so many pixel spaces available at that scale to “fake” rounded corners.

a test webpage shows the antialiasing effect on different fonts and sizes:

besides the helvetica issue, there are a few xfce font display problems. xfce is known for mostly ignoring the “modern” xorg font config files, and each app in the desktop environment follows its own aliasing and hinting rules. gvim’s monospace font is occasionally antialiased, resulting in hard-to-read code. the terminal, which uses the exact same font and size, is not antialiased, since it has its own control for text display.

the rest of the gtk+ apps in the above screenshot are size 10 verdana, so they have no antialiasing, being under the “size 11″ rule. firefox doesn’t always obey the system’s font smoothing and hinting settings, even with the proper options in about:config set. unlike user stylesheets, there’s no way to enforce desktop settings with something like !important CSS code. i haven’t found any pattern in what firefox ignores or respects.

also, i haven’t found a workable fontconfig rule that enables antialiasing only for specific fonts at certain sizes. i’m not sure it’s even possible to set such a rule, despite putting together well-formed XML to do just that.

* * *

to sum up: font management on linux can be needlessly complicated, even if you don’t have special vision needs. my environment is overall a bit better, but i’m not ready to move entirely to antialiased text, not until it’s less blurry. i need crispy, sharp text.

fonts on my android phone’s screen look pretty good despite the antialiasing used everywhere, but the thing’s pixel density is so much higher than laptop and desktop LCDs that the display server doesn’t need to resort to complicated smoothing/hinting techniques to achieve that look.

as a general resource, the arch linux wiki page has very useful information on font configuration. there are some great ideas in there, even if they don’t all work on my system. the gentoo linux wiki page on fontconfig is a more basic; i didn’t use anything from it.

for the 55th disquiet junto, two screws.

the task was to combine do and re by nils frahm into a new work. i chopped “re” into loops, and rearranged sections by sight and sound for a deliberately loose feel. the resulting piece is entirely unquantized, with percussion generated from the piano/pedal action sounds of “do” set under the “re” arrangement. the perc was performed with an mpd18 midi controller in real time, and then arranged by dragging individual hits with a mouse. since the original piano recordings were improvised, tempo fluctuates at around 70bpm, and i didn’t want to lock myself into anything tighter when creating the downtempo beats.

beats performed live on the mpd18, arranged in ardour3.

normally i’d program everything to a strict grid with renoise, but for this project, i used ardour3 (available in my overlay) almost exclusively, except for a bit of sample preparation in renoise and audacity. the faint background pads/strings were created with paulstretch. my ardour3 session was filled with hundreds of samples, each one placed by hand and nudged around to keep the jazzy feel, as seen in this screenshot:

this is a very rough rework — no FX, detailed mixing/mastering, or complicated tricks. i ran outta time to do all the subtle things i usually do. instead, i spent all my time & effort on the arrangement and vibe. the minimal treatment worked better than everything i’d planned.

piano improvisation and ambient recordings for the 53rd disquiet junto, ice for 2013.

the assignment was to record the sound of ice in a glass, and make something of it.

the track picture shows my lo-fi setup for the field recording segment. i balanced a logitech USB microphone (which came with the Rock Band game) on a box of herbal tea (to keep it off the increasingly wet kitchen table), and started dropping ice cubes into a glass tumbler. audible is the initial crack and flex of the tray, scrabbling for cubes, tossing them into the cup. i made a point of recording the different tone of cubes dropped into a glass of hot water. i also filled the cup with ice, then recorded the sound of water running into it from the kitchen tap. i liked this sound enough to begin the song with it.

i decided that my first song of 2013 should incorporate the piano, so with the ice cubes recorded, i sat down to improvise an appropriately wintry melody. the result is a simple two-minute minor motif. i turned to the ardour3 beta to integrate the field recordings and the piano improvisation.

it’s been awhile since i last used my strymon bluesky reverb pedal, so i figured i should use it for this project. i setup a feedback-free hardware effects loop using my NI Komplete Audio6 interface with the help of #ardour IRC channel, and listened to the piano recording as it ran through fairly spacious settings on the BSR. (normal mode, room type, decay @ 3:00, predelay @ 11:00, low damp @ 4:00, high damp @ 8:00). with just a bit of “send” to the reverb unit, the piano really came to life.

i added a few more tracks in ardour for the ice cube snippets, with even more subtle audio sends to the BSR, and laid out the field recordings. i pulled them apart in several places, copying and pasting segments throughout the song; minimal treatment was needed to get a good balance of piano and ice.

working environment in ardour3. laying out hardware FX and tracks.

title reference: Job 37:10

prepared improvisation for the 50th disquiet junto, morse beat.

the assignment was to encode a word or phrase with the Morse method, and then translate that sequence into the song’s underlying rhythm.

i chose the meaning of my name, “the Lord is salvation.” i looked at the resulting dashes and dots and treated them as sheet music, improvising a minor-key motif for piano, using just my right hand.

with the basic sketch recorded, i duplicated an excerpt and ran it through a vintage tape delay effect, putting it in the background almost like a loop. i set to work adding a few notes here and there, some of them reversed, running into more tape delays; contrasting their sonic character with the main melody. the loop excerpt repeats a few times, occasionally transformed by offset placement with the main theme, or reinforced by single note chord changes.

from a very few audio fragments, a mournful story emerged. echoing piano lines and uncovered memories. i did my best to vary the structure while keeping the mood and emotions, but this is still pretty hasty work; i only had a few minutes to arrange this piece before the deadline, due to software issues with ardour 3 beta. ardour crashes every time i attempt to process an audio clip, such as reversing or stretching it. i had to separately render those segments with renoise, then import them to ardour.

reworking music from three netlabel releases, for the 48th disquiet junto, fraternité, dérivé.

a last-minute contribution to this junto. i was in a car wreck a couple days ago, so abruptly my planned participation time was reduced to just a day and a half. i could only spend a little while per session sitting at the DAW. the track’s title is a reference to that event.

everything was sequenced with renoise, as seen in the screenshot.

the three source tracks were very hard to work with; this was easily the hardest junto i’ve attempted. i had to make several passes through the tracks, pulling out tiny sub-one-second sections here and there, building up percussion, or finding a droney passages that would work for background material.

for the percussion, i zoomed in and grabbed pieces of non-tonal audio, gated them to remove incidental noise, and checked playback at other speeds for useful sounds. some of the samples were doubly useful with different filter and speed settings. most of the percussion sounds were created after isolating one channel or mixing down to mono; this gave a sharper, clickier sound. occasionally, some of the hits/sticks were left in stereo for a slightly fuller sound.

the melody/drone passages were all pulled from the “unloop” track. i chopped out a short section of mostly percussion-free sound at the beginning of the song, isolated one channel, and ran this higher-pitched drone into paulstretch, stretched to 50x. i played with the bandwidth and noise/tone sliders to get the distinctive crystalline sound, rendering it a few more times. by playing this tone at different speeds using renoise’s basic sample editor, i was able to layer octaves, fading different copies of the sample in and out for some evolving harmonics as desired.

a signal follower attached to the low-passed kick drum flexed the drone’s volume on the beat, adding some liveliness, resulting in a pleasant low-key “bloom pads” effect. i don’t go for huge sidechain compression; just a touch is all that’s needed to reinforce the rhythm. a slow LFO set to “random” mode, attached to a bitcrusher, downgraded the clap sounds with some pleasant crunch.

calf reverb and vintage tape delay plugins rounded out the FX, with the percussion patterns treated liberally, resulting in some complex sounds despite simple arrangement. the only other effect was a tape warmth plugin on the master channel; everything was kept quite minimal, for aesthetic and time reasons. given that i only had a day or so to work on the track, i knew i couldn’t try for too many complicated tricks or melodies.