As you may be aware, the whole process of music production has taken a giant leap forward in the last 10 years. This is all due to the increase in computer technology, and we’d be silly not to take advantage of it. The few times I have paid for recording sessions, I have never ever been happy with the result. I put this down to a few factors..
- Time – When you book a studio session you are restricted to getting all your ideas out in that time-frame.
- Money – You have to pay for the time, so you may feel inclined to rush and knowing that there is a hefty bill at the end of your day/week may make your performance / creativity lack somewhat.
- Engineers – Love ‘em or Loath ‘em, unless you can afford a proper ‘named’ producer you may be issued with an Engineer, who, although they may be brilliant at engineering, will a) normally have to put up with terrible bands 5 days a week; b) not be into your type of music or c) both.
- Spontaneous creativity. Suddenly you may wake up at 4.14 a.m. with the next ‘national anthem’ in your head or killer melody for a drum ‘n’ bass tune. It’s difficult to keep up the momentum if you have to wait to record your ideas.
- You might get a better Idea a couple of days later, then you’ll have to book another session to see if it works or not.
This is where Home Recording will save the day and get you maestros making the noises you’ve always wanted!
You will need:
A PC (or Mac) with a sound card and speakers
A sequencer (program for recording music)
An instrument / microphone
A cable to plug your instrument into the PC
Speakers.
And that’s it. I trust most people reading this will have most things on that list already. Obviously the more money you spend on equipment, the better the result, but I started out with a £300 PC and a free sequencer that came with my sound card, a £20 microphone and some desktop speakers. The point is, that quickly getting a rough sketch of your music can be much more valuable than spending oodles of cash. Start small and work up. There are plenty of free sequencers around on the net (try www.freebtye.com/music) , so getting started shouldn’t be hard. I use Cubase SX 2 which I will use to demonstrate many things in these articles and I will be doing Cubase specific tutorials later on, but the principals will be the same on all platforms. In these tutorials, I will just be describing techniques you can use to make your music come alive regardless of whether you use Cubase or Protools or FruityLoops or whatever.
MIDI
Ok. You have your sequencer installed. Now what? Well the first thing I recommend you do is to lay down some sort of MIDI drum track. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and allows you to assign the notes on a keyboard (or Virtual keyboard) to play any sound/sample you have on your sound card or hard disk.
A MIDI Drum track will keep you in time, is infinitely better than a metronome, and will not argue like a real drummer ;o)
Open your sequencer and create an empty (new) project. Next, You will first have to add a MIDI track to your sequence and assign it to a drum kit - Your sound card will have a built in MIDI drum kit but you can assign it to any that you buy or come bundled with your sequencer. MIDI drums are traditionally held on channel 10, so you might need to change the channel.
The picture below shows the main window of your sequencer. Time runs left to right with the bar numbers indicated on the black ruler at the top. I have selected bar 1 and have right-clicked the window to add a MIDI track and named the track ‘DRUMS’.
Once it’s assigned to a drum kit, you need to tell the track that it will be used in drum-mode rather than music mode. In Cubase SX2 this is done by clicking the little drumstick icon (highlighted blue below under the red ‘record mode’ button). Then you will need to ‘draw’ a bar into the window with a pen/pencil tool thus.
Now you have created a singular blank bar in which you can add your beats. Double click the grey box and it will take you to the drum editor. The picture below shows the drum-editor in Cubase SX 2. MIDI drum maps look virtually identical, no matter what sequencer you use. On the left are the drum sounds (and which key each sound is assigned to) and on the right is the graph-paper. Time runs from left to right and I have programmed a very simple beat which is 4 bass drums and 4 hi-hats playing crotchets at the same time.
(please click the AUDIO MP3 buttons to hear demonstrations)
Once you understand how and where to place beats, you can be more adventurous. Below is a slightly more complex pattern with 8 hi-hats playing quavers and bass drum and snare playing alternate crotchets and sounds like a traditional ‘four on the floor’ rock beat:
Now you have your simple beat, close the drum-editor; select and copy the bar using CTRL-C, move the cursor to the start of bar 2 and then paste it using CTRL-V. You can then highlight both bars and copy them into bars 3 and 4 giving you a total of 4 bars of drums. If you keep doubling this process you will get 8 bars then 16 then 32 etc.
Once this is done you will have a sequence that looks something like this:
You can edit each bar of drums as necessary, for example adding crash symbols, shakers, tambourines, or putting a drum fill in after, say, 4 bars. I will go more into compositional techniques in other articles and just concentrate on the methods here.
Right, we’re happy with our drum part. Now we need some music!
While we’re still talking about MIDI, I will demonstrate how to use the Piano-roll function found in most sequencers. First add another MIDI track- this will appear directly below the drums- and, for this example, assign it to a bass guitar sound. Note that the drumstick button is OFF and therefore in music mode. Then draw another blank bar in bar 1. Your sequencer should look similar to this depending on the program you’re using:
Now double click the bar you have just created and you will arrive at a screen that looks like this.
Again, time runs left to right but this time the left hand side is a representation of a piano keyboard rather than drum sounds. Using a pencil tool, you can draw in notes of any length and of any pitch on the keyboard. A simple bass line could be written down as:
This is a very simple bass line in C. I will now extend the bass track copying the music from bar 1 into the next 5 bars, like I did with the drums. Next I modify bars 3 and 5 to play a very simple 6 bar sequence in C, F and G. This will look and sound like this:
Right, we now know a tiny little bit about MIDI programming, I will come back to MIDI later on in this series but for now I’ll leave you to play with it as it will be a lot to take in in one go. Next time, I’ll be adding real instruments to the track and dealing with a few effects and processes to get your tracks sounding pro.
Please, if you have any questions regarding this or anything else in this series, don’t hesitate to ask and I’ll try my best to answer them as best I can.
more articles by James Mulvale
- Killer Finger Exercises 1
- Get your licks and riffs up to speed!
- Home Recording Techniques Part II
- More Music Stationary (Manuscript / SATB / Piano / Strumming Charts)
- Blank Stationary for Guitar / Bass / Mandolin / Banjo
- How Music Works part I
