I’m a hobby musician thinking of trying my hand on home electronica production. The basic question is: What do I need, and what’s the best place to start?
I know pitifully little about what tools musicians use these days, and how they tie together. I know you use a sequencer to build tracks, similar to sheet music. I know that the most mature program share the VSTI “virtual synth” interface for plugging in software synthesizers.
I’m not really familiar with synths, but I know a little about audio waveforms and the physics of sound. I’m going to invest in a MIDI keyboard, so that I have a real keyboard for playing; but I don’t have the budget to go for an actual synth, hence my wish to produce everything on a computer.
What is a good sequencer choice? I know a lot of people use Cubase. The only sequencer-like app I’ve actually used is Acid, back when it first came out, and that’s strictly speaking a multi-track loop sequencer, I believe; but it was very pleasant and simple to work with.
A final note: I’m on a Windows box. Software recommendations should be made with this fact in mind.
It’s been some time, but I think my problem with it was that while the rack interface is impressive, it doesn’t really seem have been designed to be a sequencer.
Also, emulating a vintage synth or drum machine is fine if you already know and love that particular box; but that box had a really crude interface for a reason – it was a physical device with hard-wired circuits. On a PC, I don’t expect those interface limitations to exist.
I prefer Sonar as I used Cakewalk for many, many years. Some new to the game find the learning curve in with Sonar to be quite steep, but it has been able to handle every thing I demand from it - and I demand ALOT! I think it is worth learning.
I use a mixture of hardware and software synths and drum machines, sometimes running as many as 10 hardware keyboards, 3 drum machines, 20+ sample lines from Gigasampler as well as 10 or more audio tracks. Sonar handles it all without a glitch.
I’ve also not had it crash on me. Well, it did when I used some older drivers for my MOTU 828mkII. But, after that was cleared up it ran solid. This is on Windows 98 and 2k. I’ve not tried it on XP. —I still use 98SE in the studio because that machine has been running stable for years and I’m not in a hurry to change that. The 2000 machine is used mostly for larger audio recording projects (30+ audio tracks). The 98se machine can handle it, but the 2000 machine is faster and can process events quicker. I’d convert it all over to the 2000 machine but Sonar and Gigasampler won’t talk together under 2000. It’s a quirk Gigasampler is working on for the next release.
Sonar allows “piano roll” editing, so you can easily alter gak notes or tweak volumes, sustain, etc. It supports multi-in/outs for audio, allows you to define outputs to different midi devices, and has natural sounding quantize functions.
The only complaint I have with Sonar is VST’s are handled by another Cakewalk product to tie Sonar and VST’s together. Not that it has been a problem, but I with is was handled natively. That said, think this is fixed in the new version.
I use Cubase SX, and I love it. Of course, I’ve used Cubase since '98 or so, so it’s what I’m used to, and I think the software has grown wonderfully with PC technology.
One thing to be careful of - the features like track count, number of simultaneous plugins and VSTi’s, etc that Seven mentioned above are entirely based on your hardware - how fast your hard drives are and how they’re set up, your FSB speed, the power of your CPU, etc., and now on the software you use.
Check out demos of the major contenders - Cubase SX (or ST) and Cakewalk’s Sonar. They’re similar, but you’ll find one you click with. In reality, all of the major sequencing programs - Cubase, Logic, Digital Performer, Sonar - are neck-and-neck in features. It’s like a horse race where it’s always a photo finish.
One thing that you may or may not know is that in order to get these programs to run correctly, you’re going to need a professional audio card or interface - something that has ASIO drivers. Check out the Emu 0404 or the Echo Mia for a basic PCI audio card that will give you this support. You need ASIO drivers in order to get the low latency required to play software synthesizers rather than just programming them.
Indeed. Given the hardware constraints, do these programs, similar to graphics-editing apps, offer a lower-quality editing mode with the option to “render” the full-quality sound in less-than-real time?
I hadn’t thought about that. I suppose these programs will run with my current, non-professional audio chipset, but that they won’t scale to any sort of serious composition.
The products you link to are full-blown interface cards, though; seeing as I’m not going to be mixing external input or outputting multi-channel output, I just need one with hardware-accelerated mixing and some DSP-based effects processing. Right? Still, the E-MU 0404 looks like a good match; more importantly, at $99 I can actually afford it.
No. MIDI controller? Can’t you do MIDI over USB these days?
I am also starting (well actually, did a little a few years ago then stopped, but if I started again I’d basically still be on a novice level,) some home electronica, but alas, have to do all my sequencing through the computer since my keyboard of choice is so old the connections have rusted out and I have to record it on analog. (But it’s a great kybd, that’s why I keep it: over 15 yrs old and still has 40 drums, 100 voices and rhythms, programmable rhythms and melodies and ability to create 5 new voices using the synth: man that was the best $140 I ever spent.)
Now, what I want to know is, are there any free or really cheap tools out there that do that “voice correction” commonly lamented in the last 10 years? It’s been around for so long one would think it would be out there, but I haven’t been able to find it, maybe I just don’t know where to look.
And how does this tie into home electronica? Cause unlike the other styles I have tried to create on my synth/guitar/computer, I don’t think voice correction would sound too bad in an electronica setting.
where it automatically changes your pitch to a previously-imputted melody line, no matter what you actually sing. (I hear they now have devices that can do this on the fly, but I wouldn’t need that, just something that can do it to previously recorded tracks.)
Sure, it comes out sounding hollow and artificial but thats not necessarily bad, especially since when I try to do it on my own (by guessing at how much a certain section has to be corrected,) you can hear the breakpoints something fierce.
I use a Creamw@re (or is it Cre@mware?) Luna II card, Cubase, Reason, and Sonic Synth, which is a software synth that comes up as an instrument in Cubase. I run it on a Dell of 2000 vintage or thereabouts. I love Sonic Synth. Reason works so well with Cubase that I haven’t really bothered using anything else. I use Cubase for the sequencing and audio and Reason for rhythm programming, mostly. I like reason’s drum machine interface (I’m a drummer, btw). It’s a hell of a lot easier to program than a standalone drum machine. There are also any number of kits you can load, and any number of machines you can run at the same time, as taste and hardware allow.
One thing I like about reason’s rack mount interface is that you always know where your module is. You don’t have a dozen different windows covering each other up.
Frankly I can’t think of a better package to get the budding electronic composer up and running than Reason. The sequencer should be fine for whatever you throw at it at first.
Fruityloops is fun, too, but I find Reason’s drum machine to be more useful.
Some of the software packages that Freejooky mentioned have scaled down ‘lite’ versions in addition to their flagship packages.
Whatever you choose to do, don’t be discouraged when you throw the switch and it doesn’t work like you thought it would, especially with virtual synths. You’ll bump up against the limitations of your machine in fairly short order, but once you get everything tweaked and in good latency-free condition you’ll be a happy camper. If you’re going to use soft synths a low-latency sound card is a must. Midi goes over USB.
**Ludovic ** and Gentle, there are a few crucial differences between vocoders and pitch-correcting software. However, they have a similar effect, and many people use them together.
Pitch correction, which is what Ludovic is looking for, is its own entity. Antares’ Auto-tune was the big breakout product in pitch-correction, and they remain the “industry leader.” They’re on Auto-tune 4 at the moment - check it out, and download the demo. One irritating thing is that Antares stubbornly refuse to embrace near-8 year old VST technology - the only windows versions of Autotune are DirectX. This is fine - they’ll run - but DX effects tend to run clumsier than their VST cousins. Pitch correction does what you’ve heard in songs by Cher, Madonna, Daft Punk’s “one more time” - it takes whatever melodic input you run into it and “bends” it to whatever scale (or midi data) you input. If you set it to hard-quantize the pitches, you get that " hard-stepped" sound like you hear in those songs - a very synthetic, vocoder-esque quality.
Vocoders involve a synthesizer sound in the process, rather than just manipulating the audio directly. In a vocoder, the audio input (your vocal) is used to make a synthesizer sound assume the “shape” of the input - so you make the synth “sing.” You change pitches by playing the keys, so you get that hard-stepped, “robotic” change in pitches.
There are a glut of good, free, USB midi controllers on the market. I love my Oxygen 8, but you might want to check out the new controllers coming from Alesis like the Photon x25.