Enough about set-ups. Up to this point I hope I cleared some of the confusion about what to get for this and that in the studio. Now it's time "to get to business" :)
There are 4 areas of expertise you need to learn and experiment with in order to produce music:
- SOUND SYNTHESIS and THE USE OF EFFECTS
- TECHNICAL STUFF dealing with the use of hardware and software that make-up your set-up
- MUSIC COMPOSITION
- MIXING and MASTERING
SOUND SYNTHESIS is an art in itself. The art of generating and sculpting the sound. For an electronic musician I believe it's very important. As important as the composition. Some producers tend to ignore this side of production and use mainly presets or samples. It is their way, of course, but my opinion and others is that they will lack personality and the stamp of uniqueness. Anyway, the sound designer is a professional in his own way. The use of effects (mistakenly taken as sound synthesis), completes the sound synthesis precess, adding the last touch on the sound created.
"THE TECHNICAL STUFF" is the learning of how the tools work and getting the flow of production as smooth as posssible. It takes sometime, but the clearer you are about the set-up, the faster it will be because you will not waste time changing and learning different tools that you'll eventually drop in the process. (It took me more than 4 years ;)
MUSIC COMPOSITION is the area at which all producers look for when starting production, but unfortunatelly it's kind of a long way until all the pieces of the puzzle are put together, so finally they start making some music. One reason for this blog is this. I want to help you get as soon as possible into the real music composition, waisting as litlle time as possible on trial and error about what to get and learning stuff you will not use in the end.
Finally MIXING and MASTERING. In order to make your music sound good, and I don't mean only texture and composition, but getting a clean, full mix, you have to learn the art of mixing and of course mastering. These have to do mainly with volume, panning, equalizing and compression.
So, first you have to learn your chosen tools as good as possible and to create a workflow which makes you comfortable. In time, the more you will work, the better you will get. At the begining you'll have to experiment quite a bit.
Next in line is making your sounds. For that you'll have to learn some sound synthesis which is not really hard in the basic phases, but you'll need patience and if you want to get advanced at it, let me tell you: that's no easy task. There are endless possibilities with synthesis, but that's the beauty of it anyway. Also you'll need to learn what does each basic parameter from each effect and also how a sample is edited in sampler. These things will prove invaluable in the process of production.
At this point you'll be ready for the actual composition :) Some music theory it may help for certain, but there are numerous producers that learned a lot just by trial and error. I would advice on a combination of the two above methods. At composition, it's a matter of both talent and experimentation. For these there is no one that can teach you, even though basics taught by someone to you can speed up the learning process. The main idea at both composition and sound synthesis is not to settle for mediocrity.
The final step is the mixing(& mastering) process. Here a professional would be of great help, at least until you learned the basics and how to use effectively your ears. The main idea at this stage is to give each sound enough space in the frequency spectrum, so not to overlap with the other sounds. This can be achived with the use of volume control, panning and equalization. Also of great use is side-chain compression. Finally you need to use compression to make your mix sound full. Nowadays, the compression is overused, especially with the electronic, club music, and yes, sometimes for the better :)
Good luck and enjoy your journey!
miercuri, 28 octombrie 2009
marți, 6 octombrie 2009
BASIC TOOLS FOR ELECTRONIC MUSIC PRODUCTION:
- Sound generator (synthesizer)
- Sampler
- Sequencer
- Mixer
- Effects rack
- Multitrack recorder & Monitors
THE SOUND GENERATORS
The Synthesizer is the basic tool used for sound generation in electronic music production and live shows. There are 3 types: analog synthesizers, digital (virtual-analog) synthesizers and software synthesizers (vsts).
In the begining there were only analog synths. They generally produced a very full sound and all electronic productions of the past were made only with them. The problem with analog synths was in their limitations. Most of them were monophonic and single-timbral. So in order to have more tracks running at the same time in real time, you needed as many synths as the number of sounds that you wanted to play. Pretty expensive business :) Also it was hard to take them to a live show, because they were heavy and many! But it's them that created so many legendary sounds. Nowadays there are very few producers of true analog synthesizers.
After the"fall" of analog synths, digital synths appeared, but most of them were sample play-back. Something that analog synths brought in was missing and many felt that. As a natural evolution the virtual-analog digital synths appeared. They use the same synthesis building blocks as their analog counterparts, some of them even surpassing the old synths in the quality of sound generation and mostly in the diversity of synthesis. Some of them are the equivalent to as many as 16 synths playing at the same time;)
The VSTs or the software synths are software programs emulating real hardware synths, some of them getting very close to the original ones. Most of them cannot get close to the analog synths of the past, not even to the virtual-analogs, even though there are a few plug-ins that are pretty good, being capable of a large pallete of interesting sounds. Their main advantage is the price (cheap to even free) and also the way they integrate with the main software program. Also I have to mention that they can be opened and used simultaneously as many times as the producer likes..., so many synths in just one VST.
Controllers... Sequencers... Samplers.... Synthesizers.....
THE SAMPLER
Another tool for sound generation is the sampler. One reason it was not discussed in the chapter devoted to sound generators is that actually the sampler does not generate itself sound. It only samples (records) sound fron different sources and than modifies it using special parameters like envelopes and filters. Actually this is its special quality, that of recording sounds from a great variety of sources (sounds from nature, voices, drums and any other instruments).
The most known type of sampler is the digital workstation. Everyone knows the casio keyboards for example. In fact all these cheap keyboards are sample playback devices. They contain pre-recorded samples (sounds) that only can be played. These devices are not real samplers. They cannot sample sound and they can't modify it either. Software samplers in generally fall in this category too, the main difference being that they can modify the sound of the samples that are inserted into them.
The other type of sampler (the real sampler) is the one which samples and sculpts the sound. In this category fall the very known and used workstations from Korg Triton series or Roland Phantom series. Also in this category go the Akai MPC series, with one difference: they use pads instead of a keyboard.
THE SEQUENCER
What is this device and why we need it? The machines are playing an important role in our lives more and more. In music one such machine is the sequencer. We can write and play music with it. The are a few advantages using it: first of all all music can be quantized if we want that, we can play more instruments (sounds) at the same time, even to a very high bpm and all that in perfect syncronization.
All these can be done using MIDI messages. Messages that contain the information needed by the instrument to be played. Simply put the sequncer plays at some extent a certain instrument for us, so we can concentrate on other things during production or at a live show. Also the main difference between a midi track and a audio track is that we can still modify the recorded sequence after the recording is finished without being necessary to record it all from the begining.
Especially for electronic musicians, the sequencers are one of the main tools. They fall in 2 categories: software and hardware. The hardware sequencers usually are very precise but because they are missing a great visual interface and because of a bunch of other limitations, they lose the batlle with the software ones. At this moment software sequencers are far ahead.
If we think only of the great visual interface and the endless number of tracks that can be sequenced with them and still they win over their hardware counterparts.
THE MIXER
The mixer, exactly like its name implies, mixes the tracks (the instruments) used in the song. Each instrument needs at least one channel, so of great importance is the numer of channels the mixer has. We can divide the mixers in 2 categories: analog or digital, hardware or software. The capacities of the mixer are proportionally with its price. More expensive mixers have more channels and more controls (like volume, pan, eq, sends and so on). Hardware mixers range from 2-4 channels to 32 channels to professional desks of 100 or more channels. One of the big advantages of software mixers is that the number of channels and controls are as in a professional desk mixer, having the price much much cheaper. The disadvantage is mainly in the physical control, meaning that you have to control everything with the mouse, which is not the best way of mixing. The alternative is the use of a dedicated controller for that.
For the process of mixing, the mixer is of invaluable importance.
THE EFFECTS RACKS
Electronic music without effects equals an impossibility :) One of the most important things in production are the effects. Some example of effects: delay, reverb, flanger, phaser, distortion. The list is quite large. Of course they can be found nowadays as hardware or software. Hardware effects are important in all kinds of music. Again the advantage of software is in the price and portability. One hardware effect can be from 100$ to 1000$ or more, so having dedicated effect racks for each channel would mean very many thousand of dollars and a lot of rack space. All this can be achieved easily with software plug-ins. Like the hardware effects, the software ones can be from very good to worthless. So it all depends of the plug-ins used, some of them being quite good.
THE RECORDER AND THE MONITORS
The recorder is the device that records the actual sounds. It is also known as a multitrack recorder from the number of channels on which it can record simultaneously. The hardware multitrack recorders are pretty expensive and almost extinct. At this time software recorders rule for very many reasons: from price, to interface and the possibilities they offer. Of course here we got recording programs for hobbists and recording software for professional recordings and it's a big difference between the two. If we record using a software program, 2 things are essential: a good, stable computer and a good external soundcard. Also, if we plan to record many external sources simultaneously we need as many inputs on the soundcard as possible.
- Sampler
- Sequencer
- Mixer
- Effects rack
- Multitrack recorder & Monitors
THE SOUND GENERATORS
The Synthesizer is the basic tool used for sound generation in electronic music production and live shows. There are 3 types: analog synthesizers, digital (virtual-analog) synthesizers and software synthesizers (vsts).
In the begining there were only analog synths. They generally produced a very full sound and all electronic productions of the past were made only with them. The problem with analog synths was in their limitations. Most of them were monophonic and single-timbral. So in order to have more tracks running at the same time in real time, you needed as many synths as the number of sounds that you wanted to play. Pretty expensive business :) Also it was hard to take them to a live show, because they were heavy and many! But it's them that created so many legendary sounds. Nowadays there are very few producers of true analog synthesizers.
After the"fall" of analog synths, digital synths appeared, but most of them were sample play-back. Something that analog synths brought in was missing and many felt that. As a natural evolution the virtual-analog digital synths appeared. They use the same synthesis building blocks as their analog counterparts, some of them even surpassing the old synths in the quality of sound generation and mostly in the diversity of synthesis. Some of them are the equivalent to as many as 16 synths playing at the same time;)
The VSTs or the software synths are software programs emulating real hardware synths, some of them getting very close to the original ones. Most of them cannot get close to the analog synths of the past, not even to the virtual-analogs, even though there are a few plug-ins that are pretty good, being capable of a large pallete of interesting sounds. Their main advantage is the price (cheap to even free) and also the way they integrate with the main software program. Also I have to mention that they can be opened and used simultaneously as many times as the producer likes..., so many synths in just one VST.
Controllers... Sequencers... Samplers.... Synthesizers.....
THE SAMPLER
Another tool for sound generation is the sampler. One reason it was not discussed in the chapter devoted to sound generators is that actually the sampler does not generate itself sound. It only samples (records) sound fron different sources and than modifies it using special parameters like envelopes and filters. Actually this is its special quality, that of recording sounds from a great variety of sources (sounds from nature, voices, drums and any other instruments).
The most known type of sampler is the digital workstation. Everyone knows the casio keyboards for example. In fact all these cheap keyboards are sample playback devices. They contain pre-recorded samples (sounds) that only can be played. These devices are not real samplers. They cannot sample sound and they can't modify it either. Software samplers in generally fall in this category too, the main difference being that they can modify the sound of the samples that are inserted into them.
The other type of sampler (the real sampler) is the one which samples and sculpts the sound. In this category fall the very known and used workstations from Korg Triton series or Roland Phantom series. Also in this category go the Akai MPC series, with one difference: they use pads instead of a keyboard.
THE SEQUENCER
What is this device and why we need it? The machines are playing an important role in our lives more and more. In music one such machine is the sequencer. We can write and play music with it. The are a few advantages using it: first of all all music can be quantized if we want that, we can play more instruments (sounds) at the same time, even to a very high bpm and all that in perfect syncronization.
All these can be done using MIDI messages. Messages that contain the information needed by the instrument to be played. Simply put the sequncer plays at some extent a certain instrument for us, so we can concentrate on other things during production or at a live show. Also the main difference between a midi track and a audio track is that we can still modify the recorded sequence after the recording is finished without being necessary to record it all from the begining.
Especially for electronic musicians, the sequencers are one of the main tools. They fall in 2 categories: software and hardware. The hardware sequencers usually are very precise but because they are missing a great visual interface and because of a bunch of other limitations, they lose the batlle with the software ones. At this moment software sequencers are far ahead.
If we think only of the great visual interface and the endless number of tracks that can be sequenced with them and still they win over their hardware counterparts.
THE MIXER
The mixer, exactly like its name implies, mixes the tracks (the instruments) used in the song. Each instrument needs at least one channel, so of great importance is the numer of channels the mixer has. We can divide the mixers in 2 categories: analog or digital, hardware or software. The capacities of the mixer are proportionally with its price. More expensive mixers have more channels and more controls (like volume, pan, eq, sends and so on). Hardware mixers range from 2-4 channels to 32 channels to professional desks of 100 or more channels. One of the big advantages of software mixers is that the number of channels and controls are as in a professional desk mixer, having the price much much cheaper. The disadvantage is mainly in the physical control, meaning that you have to control everything with the mouse, which is not the best way of mixing. The alternative is the use of a dedicated controller for that.
For the process of mixing, the mixer is of invaluable importance.
THE EFFECTS RACKS
Electronic music without effects equals an impossibility :) One of the most important things in production are the effects. Some example of effects: delay, reverb, flanger, phaser, distortion. The list is quite large. Of course they can be found nowadays as hardware or software. Hardware effects are important in all kinds of music. Again the advantage of software is in the price and portability. One hardware effect can be from 100$ to 1000$ or more, so having dedicated effect racks for each channel would mean very many thousand of dollars and a lot of rack space. All this can be achieved easily with software plug-ins. Like the hardware effects, the software ones can be from very good to worthless. So it all depends of the plug-ins used, some of them being quite good.
THE RECORDER AND THE MONITORS
The recorder is the device that records the actual sounds. It is also known as a multitrack recorder from the number of channels on which it can record simultaneously. The hardware multitrack recorders are pretty expensive and almost extinct. At this time software recorders rule for very many reasons: from price, to interface and the possibilities they offer. Of course here we got recording programs for hobbists and recording software for professional recordings and it's a big difference between the two. If we record using a software program, 2 things are essential: a good, stable computer and a good external soundcard. Also, if we plan to record many external sources simultaneously we need as many inputs on the soundcard as possible.
The importance of good monitors cannot be emphasized enough. No matter how good the tools that are used are, no matter how good producer you are, if the monitors are less than great, you'll not be able to mix and master well the music you have produced. So, good monitors are a must. They will bring you the real picture of what you have created. Good monitors will be neutral, meaning that they will not color at all the sound and will not fatten the lows or any other modification that commercial monitors do to sound.
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