Welcome to Shelljam!

Mission Statement

• When you buy a computer, it ships with a non-touch-sensitive musical keyboard and a two-axis MIDI controller. Colloquially, they are also known as 'Keyboard and Mouse'.
• Shelljam helps you return these devices to their inherent purpose and lets you make music with them.
• This is done by turning your hardware input into MIDI signals so fast you don't notice any latency. Shelljam's MIDI Port may be connected to any synthesizer, sampler or other sound generator. A little filtering is also added to let you make high-end music with cheap keyboards. (glitch correction)
• Before you buy MIDI, try Shelljam!

What's new

• You can now use really cheap keyboards thanks to the new glitch tweak:)
• A great mouse controller combo added for use with ZynAddSubFx
• Example added using the new mouse features.
• The web site font is now big enough to be readable :)

Features

• Play live or record with nothing more than a computer
• Safe: No window switching or other accidents during playing
• Flexible: Control anything that has a MIDI input with Shelljam.
• Economical: Depending on the type of music you make you might be able to do without specific MIDI hardware. I do!
• Stable: Extremely simple code using well-tested libraries.
• Keep it simple: Less cables, no driver issues, less to carry
• Speedy: Written for speed in C++, which, contrary to popular belief, is anything as fast as pure C.

Screenshots

• Shelljam on the command-line.
• Shelljam with its looks-like-a-crash-but-is-safe X11 input window, and amSynth and QJackCtl in the background.

Examples

• New! Nature's breeze. A bass tone carried to layers and layers of overtones with the new mouse controller. I love this one :) Uses ZynAddSubFX with a simple additive patch as a bass note. The Shelljam mouse controllers alter both filter parameters, one of the things digital synthesizers are actually better at then their analogue ancestors :). Was also recorded in pure MIDI form with Seq24.
• Get'cha Groove On. A funky bass line played with Shelljam and rendered with ZynAddSubFX using this patch.
• Jazzchords, played with Shelljam and rendered with ZynAddSubFX using this patch.
• Bounce. Drum loop, played with Shelljam and rendered with ZynAddSubFX using this patch.

Get Shelljam

Requirements

• A linux low-latency workstation with QJackCtl and a good sound generator such as ZynAddSubFx or the Om synth is recommended. Shelljam works very well to record with Seq24, especially when assigned to a key-combination in your favorite window manager. Mine is XFCE.
• ALSA, 1.0 or later, with the alsa-seq module loaded, if using linux. (Other operating systems not tested as of now)
• libgii, 0.9.1 or later.
• RtMidi, 1.0.2 or later. (only for source version)
• To build from source: The scons build system, 0.9.6 or later.

Installation

• Install libgii. (RtMidi is statically linked in the executable itself)
• Download and untar the latest binary archive (has '-bin' after the version number.)
• Copy the file 'shelljam' to a useful place such as /usr/lib/bin and run it.

• Install libgii, portmidi and scons.
• Do the following with your archive:
  
  tar -xvjf shelljam-0.0.3.tar.bz2
scons
strip shelljam

  
• Copy the resulting binary shelljam to a useful place such as /usr/local/bin and run it.

Manual

1. Get a working low-latency linux audio workstation.
2. Start up your instrument, load patches if necessary, and connect it to the MIDI-Through port of your sequencer.
3. Start up shelljam. The looks-like-a-crash-but-is-safe window appears.
4. Start playing with the Shelljam Keyboard.
5. Move the mouse or touchpad left and right to change the Sound Timbre controller, or up and down for sound brightness. In ZynAddSubFX, this way you can control both parameters of an Analogue filter in real time, and that sounds really sassy on a Saw Wave, for example :)
6. To quit, press and hold the ESC key, then press the RETURN key.

The Shelljam Keyboard layout. (as text)

Known issues

• The X interface spawns a non-drawing window. It will look like a crash, but it's fine. Just ignore.
• Keymaps are hard-coded. There is currently no way to change them without a recompile. However, the keymaps read scancodes and should therefore work the same on all keyboards.
• Mouse support is X only.

Get involved

Bug reports

Feature requests

The Author