Getting Started with Digital Music Recording: Part 2

A continuation from part 1 of this two part post. This post will continue discussing getting set up for doing audio recording. At this point, you probably have all of the gear you need to get started, but there are still some technical hurdles that you may need to jump through to get everything working right.

In the first post, I covered getting the right gear, hardware, and software get up and running. This post will continue talking about audio driver issues, learning about the software, and diving into the fun world of sound fonts, banks, and other intersting ways to improve the sound quality of your compositions.

Hopefully this will help people thinking about getting started doing audio recording. I added a little sample I made with what little I know. Hopefully you can get up a running in no time!

Audio Driver issues

Something I don’t see much in posts about audio recording is the amount of driver bugs that happen when you use audio software. Sometimes it works, other times it turns off and you can’t get it back working. The audio recording software just seems to ignore the drivers and instruments sometimes.  This was the most frustrating part for me when I first started working with this new hardware. Some things that work for me to conquer these bugs are:

1. make sure your drivers are up to date
2. waking your computer up from sleep seems to really confuse the audio interface. Best to turn your computer off and restart it if it goes to sleep
3. When you start the computer, unplug the interface USB cord from the computer or it might not recognize it
4. After the computer is done starting up, insert the audio interface cord to the computer
5. start the audio editing software and cross your fingers

That seems to be the magic formula that has worked for me under Windows 7. Not sure if other people have those issues, but it seems like something a computer would get confused about.

 

Learn the software

The software is installed, but it won’t take long to see that you have no idea what you are doing. There are a thousand buttons and outside of hitting play, pause, and stop, most everything else is going to seem weird. What I did was grab a copy of the user manual for Cubase LE and put it on my Kindle. These manuals aren’t that exciting, so I would read a little, then try and apply that knowledge tinkering around with the software. After about 30-40 hours of going back and forth between reading and playing, you should be getting pretty familiar with the ins and outs of what the software can do. Different software has different featues, but I am sure most of them share the basic functionality. The last part of getting started is by the most difficult, but also the most fun.

Sound Banks and Sound Fonts

Unless you have a uber expensive synthesizer, a lot of the sounds probably won’t sound that convincing. Synthesizers have decent sounds that come with it, but if you try and record something and ask someone, they will probably tell you that it usually doesn’t sound that real.

Sound Banks and Sound Fonts to the rescue!!

Sound Banks are more of libraries that have tons of sound effects and one-off type of noises. Sound fonts are usually people playing instruments and mapping each note to a key on the synthesizer. Sound banks are more like sound effects, and sound fonts are more like extra instruments.

There are some AMAZING sounding sound banks and fonts out there. So much to the point that you really believe you are listening to a symphony or a rock concert. After all, real sounds have to be digitized anyway before they go on a CD, so it is really just techniques to reproduce that.

You can pay beaucoup bucks buying these sounds, or there are some pretty good free alternatives if you don’t have much money for more professional tools.

It is important to find out how to install these sound banks and drivers. For Cubase, they have these “VST” insturuments where there is a GUI that is mapped to the sounds and processing effects you can do with each one. There is a specification for sound fonts like SFZ. Some of the sound fonts have DLL files that help the program create an interface and give it functionality. There are creators like this one ( http://audio.clockbeat.com/sfZed.html) or this ( http://carrieres.free.fr/sfz.htm ) that can help you create your own sound font.

As you can imagine with the internet, there are always FREE stuff out there for sound fonts. A few good resources to get started are the following:

http://sso.mattiaswestlund.net/ - Great compact symphonic library

http://vst-plugins.homemusician.net/ - has a bunch of VSTi plugins

Audio stuff gets pretty technical, so it is a good idea to learn more about things like oscillators, LFOs, Resonators, Reverb, and other audio tech speak. When learning about them, it is just as important to actually hear what they as it is to read about them.

There are a bunch of premium sound fonts and software to create crazy good sounds like

East/West

Vienna Symphony

Spectrasonic

M-Audio Prosession

There are are a bagillion of these things out there. To find out what professionals use, I picked up a clearance book at the now closed borders for a few bucks. Complete Guide to Game Audio. It is more of a business book about the audio industry, but it has a bunch of great interviews with professionals who explain how they set their studios up.

This is definitely the “kid in a candy store” part of the process.

Studying and Arranging

I read a book on music composition as well as reading through a book on arranging. One of the things that I am seeing more is how important it is to actually hear and try what they are talking about. You can read a book cover to cover, but still not really grasp what is going on. Knowing how to build up tension and actually creating a song is a very hands-on approach. Some things like timbre and the range of an instrument can really only be understood by actually grabbing an instrument or listening to it.

Here is a quick orchestral type of song I made in a few hours.

I don’t know if I would want to do this for a living, but it sure is fun as a hobby. Does anyone have any other tips on getting started? What about some Virtual instruments or sound font resources that you have really liked?