Okay fellas, I am getting in a creative mood and I want to make music! I have been able to play the guitar and sutff off and on for a couple of years now, and I have some tunes that I may like to flesh out, but I would like to do it completely on my computer. All I have is an electric guitar, AMD Athlon 2700XP, 1 gigabyte of Ram, and about 20 gigs free space.
My inspiration for this is the guy who made Four Tet, he produced a really cool album completely on the PC. You would never guess this.
Is there a Midi keyboard that is designed specifically to work on computers. I would like a cheap one and I figure one that had no ability to play without a computer would be the cheapest.
What Programs would I want? Ideally I’d like to have some nice program that lets me set up my Midi keyboard to play samples and record them to a track of a virtual recorder. It would also be nice to be able to put effects and have looping, etc.
I don’t want to work with the programming-like nature of mods. Plus I don’t think they sound so good.
I would also like a program that would allow me to make my own synthetic sounds. That would also be cool
Of course a drum machine would be cool too. Electronic of course.
Would it be possible to get a program that lets me plug my guitar directly into the PC and get some decent sounds? Do I need a mic and an amp for that business?
Okay, so give me your advice, folks, I am sure the SDMB has something perfect for me.
PS. I have been able to use highly complicated programs like Photoshop with some skill before, so I am good at learning logical, but complex programs. But unnessecary complexity isn’t good.
I can help with keyboards, if not with the music itself (I just deal with other people’s )
Yes, there are keyboards specifically for the purpose you describe - PC World stocks several. But they’re not necessarily the best or cheapest option. As long as space isn’t a prime concern, it’s almost certainly cheaper to buy a regular keyboard (anything with 61 keys should do what you need, smaller ones may start to feel limiting) with a MIDI connection (as they almost all have). EBay or regular second-hand sources are a good option for this. This then connects either via the joystick/MIDI connection on a soundcard, or via a USB MIDI adaptor.
There’s definatley a panoply of free software that does all sorts of nice tricks with samples or with creating sounds…I guess if you’re interested in playing around with such things, start with www.download.com and work from there. No doubt there’s specialist sites, too.
This is true; lots of people into recording tend to obsess over having lots of expensive equipment, and still don’t record anything particularly impressive.
These are called “MIDI controllers”. They are a keyboard sending unit, but they must be hooked up to some MIDI synth to make any sounds. All they do is send MIDI signals, they do not have speakers or headphone jacks at all. I have an Evolution MK149, it cost $120 and is velocity-sensitive. If you want hammer-weighted and/or aftertouch keys, expect to pay a lot more.
Home Studio 2002 will do all that. It will run separate tracks (there is no internal limit I think, but how many is practical depends on your PC hardware, expect maybe 20-30?) You can use MIDI or audio tracks together, convert MIDI to audio, run effects on individual tracks, and it has some track automation (you can have a particular track adjust some prameters to a pre-arranged level automatically during a song, so for example–you can have the volume of just one track go up and down when you want, or have the stereo pan left and right, or both).
The easiest way to do this IMO is to use a Creative soundcard, and use SoundFonts. A SoundFont is a sound bank file, similar to a MIDI bank of sounds, but free from many of the technical limitations of MIDI banks. There are already tons of SoundFonts available online for free of most any instrument you can imagine, and you can create or edit your own (or someone else’s) with a free program named Vienna Soundfont, that is a free program from Creative. You can use soundfonts if you have a particular DXi synth (a software plugin) but Creative soundcards include the ability to run Soundfonts directly. I also note: Vienna does not allow you to create the sounds, it is only for compiling them into SoundFont banks that you can use like a MIDI bank. Home Studio itself is capable of some sound-effects that are built-in, but stand-alone audio programs tend to have way more effects available.
And lots of people think the Creative soundcards are great for running soundfonts, but not great for recording audio on, as their audio circuits are noisy. You can have more than one soundcard in a PC, with no problems–you just get a “Y” adaptor for the speaker outs, so both feed to the same PC speakers. And you set one as your system default. And you have to set up the separate recording inputs and soundfont outputs in your studio software (see “reading instructions” below). Once it is set up it doesn’t need messing with at all; the PC will know to record-audio-in on one soundcard and play-audio/soundfonts-out on the other. Win98 did it, WinXP does too.
I have the Yamaha DD-55 “cheapo” electronic drums, bought 3? years ago. These were the “best” of the low-end electronic drums I could find. It is a stand-alone instrument (it “makes noise” on its own) and a MIDI controller. It is supposed to allow you to program each pad to send any MIDI note you want, but that feature does not work properly on mine. I play it using the standard drum set (of sounds) while recording off the MIDI notes to PC and then reassign the MIDI notes in the track to whatever I want afterwards. This works just fine, but I can’t really hear what I’m playing while I’m playing it. And I can’t really play drums for squat anyway, so that hardly matters. It still does save lots of time–using drum pads (like this) is way easier than trying to program drum beats with a keyboard or putting them in manually by mouse.
There are amps specially for that; the $70 Midiman Audio Buddy is one, maybe the most well-known one. It has dual XLR (mics w/phantom power) and 1/4 inputs (for guitars), and a stereo amp that bumps them up to line-level input. For a guitar you can also use any direct-input box if you have one already, to run a guitar into a soundcard line-in jack. —Or you can use any amp that your guitar hooks into, that also has a headphone-out jack. You just connect the headphone-out jack to the soundcard’s line-in with a patch cable. Start with both the [external amp] and the soundcard recording level at zero, and turn both up until you get a useable level on the PC rec meter. Do not overadjust the signal too high, you can damage either/both !!! (-6 to -3db signal is the absolute maximum what you want for recording digital)
As a sidenote, there are also “guitar-centered” programs available. Cakewalk made one called Guitar Studio. It has a few more features of interest to guitar players (the main one I know of being an electronic tuning analyzer feature) and is missing a couple of Home Studio’s features. I last loooked a couple years ago, so I’m not sure what’s available now.
Get used to the idea of reading instructions; it took me a few hours casually spent over a couple weeks to get the Home Studio program to record anything–even though I only had one soundcard at the time, and everything worked. Once you know what needs to be set where it’s easy though.
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There’s a great little program called leafDrums. I’ve found that it’s really easy to use, and works rather well. Especially if you hunt around at http://www.findsounds.com for high-quality drum sounds.
There’s a decent (and cheap!) mixer & sound editor at http://www.goldwave.com that I’ve used.
Your best bet (IMHO) is to blow the bucks on an effects unit and run it (or your amp) into the line in on your pc. I found an old Digitech RP-1 real cheap, and it’s been great. A quick search on ebay reveals 4 of them going for $20.50 - $75.00.
Couple of bits of potentially interesting freeware:
Anvil Studio - a Midi recorder/composer/sequencer/player
Audacity - a multi-track sound editing/mixing application (works on wave/mp3 type files, not Midi though, so you’d probably use it more for mixing levels and so on for the final cut).
It really is very good and the latest release has addressed the biggest problem I had with it, which was stability.
We used Audacity extensively for editing pre recorded material for the community radio project I recently took part in and it performed brilliantly. We also used it to capture the station archive, which means recording and manipulating sound files 24 hours long, which it handled with ease.
I think it is compatible with VST plugins, so it should be able to do anything that a commercial editing program can do.