Making music has never been so cheap and it's only going to be cheaper.

You'll need the following:

• a computer
• an audio interface
• a controller keyboard

and also

• a DAW
• plugins
  

The Hardware

Since you're reading this, you already have a computer. For audio interfaces - what they do, what they are - see this post.

The controller keyboard is essentially a dummy keyboard; generally, it does not have its own built-in sounds. This can make it cheaper to manufacture, and compact and light-weight.

Sometimes, however, a secondhand keyboard or synthesizer may be cheaper; those however lack some options that make controllers useful, like sliders and rotary knobs that send out MIDI messages. They can also not be connected to a computer via USB, so you need something like this.

Even if you can't play, a controller has advantages; one of 'm being that you can play a chord properly (with a mouse you can't). Yes, there are on-screen keyboards and there's software that turns your QWERTY keyboard into a controller, but those are stopgap solutions and they're not useful in terms of expression. A velocity-sensitive controller can play back sounds louder when you hit the keys with more force.

All of the above is relatively straightforward. The more nagging questions come with what's below!

The DAW

A DAW (digital audio workstation) is the heart of the modern studio.

It's also basically a fancy name for either a software package like ProTools, Cubase, FL Studio, Logic, Ableton Live, Sonar, etc. or the total of the computer + software + audio interface. In this case, I'm using the term only for the software.

A DAW has the following tasks:

• record audio (what you hear)
• record MIDI (what you play, to send to either hardware or software synths)
  
• mixing the end result
• hosting plugins (synthesizers, samplers and effects)
  

The latter may not be so obvious at first; after all, several plugins work in standalone mode. What you don't see is that those plugins have a very thin and simple shell around them. Other plugins come in the shape of a .dll file and that's it; there's no way to open them.

Here's how it works:

So, assuming that you went the really cheap route of ASIO4ALL and a screen keyboard, you probably might not have any cash left for plugins either. So, here's what you do:

Get Koreplayer, ShortCircuit, Synth1, PolyIblit and Proteus VX (you'll have to sign up for it) and a copy of Reaper and you're pretty much good to go. See what you can jot down in terms of ideas for music - then you can start looking at the bigger packages (if you even need to, because Reaper is pretty awesome by itself).

Especially ShortCircuit is a great find. Get yourself some neat free samples here and you'll be able to build a drumkit of choice, add Audacity so you can cut up samples and loops - and start to work with it.

DAW Choice

The choice for a sequencer package is mainly based on having invested time to learn it - or to work around what it can't do. The more time you invest, the harder it is to switch; because you've gotten used to the workflow.

Workflow is everything. All other questions (Mac/PC, analog/digital, hardware/software, chocolate/vanilla) pale in comparison to it. Your choice of a sequencing package should be based on workflow; if you feel that the software's philosophy matches yours, you're good to go; if you feel that the program is working against you (this doesn't count if you have no idea what you're doing), get rid of it.

You have an idea in your head. You'll want to commit this idea as soon as possible to a permanent medium. For that purpose, I was really happy with my Palm Tungsten which had a small sketchpad. Since the pen wasn't that accurate, I wrote down melodies like A1 E2 A2 E2 G2 E2 D2 C2 (where 1 or 2 denotes the octave) - no duration included. Because I could write my ideas down pretty much whenever and whereever I wanted, I could keep 'm, try 'm, and I could commit them to an even more permanent medium (harddisk or e-mail).

Why is this important? Inspiration may strike at any given moment. Even if it's a fragment, you're gathering these shards and concepts of songs - and when you finally have time (like in the weekends) to work these ideas out, you have a veritable treasure trove at hand. Any software package that holds you back is like a tool not used to its fullest.

So, see if you can find demo versions of the sequencers and try them one by one. Spend 2 weeks or so using them; then see if they fit with what you do.

Plugin Choice

Of pretty much every plugin there's a demo version. They stop working after a while, emit random bursts of noise, or drop the volume to zero from time to time.

Do you need the biggest, latest, most expensive plugin? Consider this first:

• Demo 1
• Demo 2

Which is the best plugin of these two?

The answer is : none. They're the same (free) plugin; Xhip. It's just that nr. 2 has several effects on it; not even special ones, either, just the standard ones in Ableton Live. Also, the filter cutoff parameter is automated. Since Xhip's interface has several points of improvement, I rather use Synth1, but with that you can achieve a very similar result.

Makes quite a difference, doesn't it? This is why it pays to learn how to use the synthesizers and effects; otherwise you're going to pay once you run out of factory presets every time, and that's quite an expensive hobby.

link to this article | published : 2009-02-13 23:02:50

Your computer most likely came with an on-board soundcard when you got it; or if it's really old you had to order the SoundBlaster 16 Value Edition separately. Soundcards like these however are not fit for music production, and that's why we call 'm soundcards instead of audio interfaces. The reasons:

They don't have enough inputs

If you don't have a mixing desk but you do have multiple instruments, you have to buy an extra mixer or you have to use a patchbay. Ideally you want all your tracks to arrive in your computer separately so it's easier to put effects over 'm or to touch 'm up a bit with an EQ or compressor.

Inputs aren't in the size you want 'm in

Your synthesizer has 2 jack outputs. Your microphone has a single XLR output. Your guitar has a mono jack that needs a Hi-Z input. None of these things fit in a mini stereo jack plug that's only good for cheap computer speakers and headphones/earbuds.

Their drivers aren't optimized for audio

This results in latency (a noticeable delay between pressing a key on your controller keyboard and the sound) and crackling/stuttering when too many sounds play at once. While latency can be remedied with ASIO4ALL (and its OS X equivalent, Core Audio), it's still not an ideal situation, because it does not solve the issues mentioned above.

Noisy and cheap converters

The insides of a computer are an electromagnetic storm, and noise from harddisks, fans and everything will contribute happily to degrading the quality of your signal. Furthermore, when it has to be translated from analog voltages to zeros and ones, the cheap converters won't do a good job. On-board soundcards are cheap and use cheap parts, which is nice if you have cheap PC speakers or speakers built into the monitor; good enough for Youtube-audio, on-line radio and the DING-sound every time someone gets online, bad for everything else.

So, enough reasons to get something better. But what? The music stores are filled to the brim with several kinds of audio interfaces. Here's a few steps that'll keep you sane.

1: Determine your budget

An audio interface last as long as your computer - or two of 'm, provided your needs don't change. Pick an amount of what you're willing to spend, and mention this if you ever ask this question on a forum; nobody has an idea of what "cheap" means to you.

2: Determine your needs

Do you want to hook up a microphone? Then you need an audio interface with an XLR input and a mic preamp.

Do you want to hook up a guitar? Then you need a Hi-Z input.

Do you want to hook up 4 stereo synthesizers? Then you need 4 x 2 = 8 inputs (and so on).

Do you want to have it look like a mixer? This is convenient if you don't want to buy a separate mixer or fader-controller.

A lot of audio interfaces will give you 1 MIDI input and 1 MIDI output for free - sometimes even more.

It's a simple matter of counting what you have in your studio and picking the interface that matches your budget.

3: Which computer do you have?

For laptops: USB, Firewire, PC-Card. Desktops: PCI, PCI-X, USB, Firewire. The PCI(-X) cards may have a dedicated cable with their own protocol leading to a break-out box (a little box with all inputs and outputs that could not be crammed in your computer anyway). Laptops with Firewire may have the small plugs, so see if you're getting the right kind of Firewire standard on the interface.

4: Arrested Driver Development

People generally won't have 3 or 4 audio interfaces at the same time, so it's really hard to make comparisons. You'll have to follow the reviews - but more importantly, check out the user forums and see if the company is responsive in terms of keeping their drivers bug-free. If your budget is such that you're not able to afford the top of the line interfaces, worrying about miniscule converter differences when you have a lot of stuff to hook up is wasted time.

Any company that dragged its behind in updating drivers when Vista was announced - subtract points. Any company that still doesn't have a Vista driver; remove from your list. While it may still be the near future, 64-bits driver development is telling too; are they just happy to put something in your hands that's going to be unusable in 2 years? If so, skip. Any driver that got off to a rocky start and still has problems? Skip.

There's no better way to find out, I'm afraid.

But I'm poor!

We all are. Check out the E-mu 0404 and the M-Audio 2496 - these can be had (secondhand) for not much and they're workhorses that'll do the job for you. Both come with MIDI I/O and are therefore good cards to start with.

link to this article | published : 2009-02-04 20:02:33

MIDI. Mysterious, complicated, lots of abbreviations like CC and NRPN, hexadecimal numbers in the back of your gear's manual, and you probably won't see the word at all unless you're looking for a MIDI controller. Here's a quick introduction.

MIDI is not audio

MIDI is to audio as sheet music is to a CD. MIDI tells you what to play, but doesn't tell you what it sounds like. A CD tells you what it sounds like, but not how to play it.

MIDI does not make a "sound"

When someone says a song sounds like MIDI, what they really mean is that the instruments sound like they come from the General MIDI soundset. On-board soundcards have a (wrongly named) wavetable of 128 instruments that are used to play back MIDI files with.

On-board soundcards are cheap; therefore, the instruments sound cheap since there's only very limited memory in there, but it's not as bad as most mobile phones, which have an even more basic wavetable.

MIDI Controllers do not make sound

Unless they have a sound source built in them and it's mentioned specifically, these things are remotes only - and following the analogy, they tell your computer only what to play, not what it sounds like. A set of pads on a controller will send the same kind of notes as on the keyboard; there's nothing in there that says that you want to play a drum sound. To make it so, you have to filter all the notes coming from the keyboard and send the notes of the drumpads to a different synthesizer or plugin. This is of course easier if you make the pads send notes you won't use anyway - either the highest or the lowest ones.

Other uses of MIDI

You can use MIDI to send sounds to synthesizers. To understand why this does not contradict what's said above here, the first thing to explore is how synthesizers store their sounds.

Let's take Synth1 as an example:

It sounds like this.

When we save (write) this program, it's not the sound that is saved. The plugin knows exactly all the buttons and knobs it contains, and it asks them one by one what their current position is. For knobs, it's a number between 0 and 127 (even when the knob's actual displayed range goes from -64 to +64!). For selection buttons like the waveform, it can still be 0 to 127 - it is just interpreted differently, so any values above 0 but below 32 will be seen as "oscillator 1 sinewave".

It's not that different with a hardware synthesizer; there's a fixed number of settings and writing them all down allows you to save a sound.

So, the most common assumption you should make when there's no user-made samples is that sounds are just a bunch of information repackaged in MIDI, as so called System Exclusive (SysEx) messages. When samples are involved, you're still not storing the sound - you store its basic building blocks and again a whole load of settings.

Furthermore, this also shows why you can't just load a sound from one synthesizer in the other - unless they use a very similar structure. A DX7 sound won't fit into a D50 because a D50 does not have the possible settings of a DX7 and vice-versa.

On the other hand, even synthesizers with similar structures may still not read eachother's sounds, because the known list of settings was put in ROM. To upgrade that, you'd need to overwrite the ROM which was not a trivial task back then. It still isn't now, but making it possible to connect your gear directly to the computer using USB, it's easier.

To actually get a sound on synthesizer A to sound the same as on B, you have to recreate it - if it's even possible. Recreating within different types of synthesis is not an easy task, and you can't automatically translate from say, FM synthesis to plain subtractive synthesis. Even if you recreate it on a different synthesizer with the same type of synthesis, you have to keep in mind that oscillators and filters may not sound the same, so you're left with an approximation of the sound.

link to this article | published : 2009-01-31 16:01:31

You see this question pretty often on forums - people new to music production assume there's a plugin for every genre, preferably one that'll immediately sound like a hit record without much effort.

I can imagine how they got the idea; after all, a setup containing an Akai MPC, a Korg Triton and if budget permitted it, a Studio Electronics module for the fat bass was the thing to have if you made hiphop. Likewise, a JP8000 and pretty much every other virtual analog synthesizer ever made was the requirement if you made anything resembling trance.

This lead to the idea that there were hiphop synths and trance synths, and this belief has carried over to software synthesizers.

The answer is that there is no such thing, if we conveniently ignore ReFX Nexus for a moment. The actual answer is that there are instruments and plugins which are used often for particular genres of music, and that there are instruments which come with a lot of presets geared towards a genre.

Basically, the only thing you could reasonably claim as a "trance plugin" would be the aforementioned Nexus, but this omits a simple truth:

Nobody is forcing you to only use it for that.

Let's not forget that while it contains a lot of sounds heard in a certain genre, these sounds are usable for other genres too. Let's also not forget that (well, maybe not so much in the case of Nexus) these plugins have buttons and knobs, which aren't just there for decorative purposes - you can actually change the sounds.

The next part is going to be a tutorial written for Synth1 to show that buying a big expensive library that you'll only use for zapping through the presets is a waste of money (or at least, time), and that it's more fun if you have an idea of what you're doing. Thing is, the only remotely capable tutorial on synthesis is a 25-page document that doesn't have a lot of information on dance sounds, so I hope to remedy this.

link to this article | published : 2009-01-28 22:01:08

Hardware studio samplers are pretty much dead, in the sense that there's no longer a separate rackmount unit that is just a sampler. Instead, they are incorporated in grooveboxes such as the Electribe S-series, or they are thrown in for free when you buy a top-of-the-line workstation, such as a Motif or Fantom. The last hardware sampler was the Akai Z-series; after that, the line of machines that got so big in the 80's and 90's ended.

The role of the hardware rack sampler is replaced by the following:

• for percussion, a dedicated drum module, drum machine, (software) phrase sampler
• for vocals / soundscapes, the sequencer's own audio track feature is used
• for playing back libraries, a software sampler is used; not only can they load many formats more, they also don't suffer that badly from the long load times, and there's no real limit to internal memory since most of 'm can stream from disk.

In the 90's this was different. The hardware sampler was an expensive workhorse piece of kit. This change to software, of which I'm not that regretful of, to be honest also changed the way we use our samples.

One technique I think I salvaged from the 90's is as follows. The problem: you want a complex, almost FM-synthesis like sound, but you are not skilled/motivated enough to learn FM synthesis, or you don't have a plugin that does the job.

The solution: use what's in your sampler.

What you do is the following; pick a noisy sample (like a cymbal). Open it in your softsampler. Move the loop points really close together and let it loop.

You have to look for the right loop points. With a bigger loop, you get a more complex waveform that'd take ages to make in any FM synth - forget subtractive in most cases, even, but it won't kick that hard. With a smaller loop, you get something that resembles a basic waveform, but the pitch will go up, so you have to play lower notes or transpose it.

I personally recommend Vember Audio ShortCircuit for these duties on the PC. IMHO, it has a really great transposing algorithm that avoids aliasing (which is what you get when you play the loop too fast on a lower quality sampler. Even Ableton's own Simpler suffers from this for the higher notes, but since this is reasonably simple bass duty, Simpler (or NN-19) should be able to do the job.

The result sounds like this.

link to this article | published : 2009-01-24 02:01:37