Getting Started with Ardour

Howdy,

Welcome to Winston's Ardour Tutorial. This blog focuses on giving you a basic introduction to producing tracks in Ardour.

Ardour is an open source Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that allows amateur and professional producers alike to record, edit, mix, and master their records. We will be using Ardour on Linux and Mac. But, don’t worry! Ardour is available on Windows too! You can download Ardour and get started here.

The first thing you must do is download Ardour and an Audio/MIDI engine. Today we'll be using JACK, which is a popular Audio/MIDI management solution. It works very well with Ardour.

Once you've downloaded them, it's time to open Ardour and make your project.

Ardour will show you previous projects you've worked on recently as well, but in this case, let's click "New Session" to start a new project.

Before you get started you'll also want to set your time signature and BMP for the project. These can be found in the top bar right beneath the playhead clocks...

For this project, I've set my BMP to 160 and my time signature to 4/16. This is up to you, and should be based on your musical preference and the type of music you want to create.

Now you've got a blank Ardour project to do with what you will. Looks confusing, right? Well don't worry! Follow along with the next few articles as we create a simple beat in Ardour and you'll be producing your own tracks in no time!