There aren’t a lot of good tutorials on how to set up your midi keyboard in Ubuntu. Here is how I did it.

• Get a midi keyboard (duh!). Mine is an M-AUDIO Oxygen 61.
• Install Jack Audio, it connects your keyboard with your synthesizer software.
• Install Bristol, it provides a good set of synthesizers.
• OPTIONAL install monoBristol, it provides a GUI to Bristol to start up other instruments.

This should give you all you need to start playing your keyboard. However, you would need to start up Jack Audio and Bristol separately every time and also connect your midi keyboard to your synthesizer software and your software to your speakers via Jack Audio each time. Fortunately it is easy to script this in Linux, since there are command line equivalents for all steps.

Here is my script that fires up a Hammond Organ and a Rhodes Bass Piano at the same time 🙂

start_hammond_and_rhodes

O, and off course all this costs EUR 0,00 because the software is open source…