Transcripts
1. Introduction: Setting up your
DAW is essential. It's like setting
up your palette for your canvas when
you start painting. A lot of people, once they realize how many different digital audio
workstations exist, they're like I don't
know where to start. The most important thing is ultimately to
start somewhere. My name is Dom McLennon, I am a musician, a vocalist, recording
artist, producer. You might have seen my work from the Boy band Brockhampton. I've also been
behind the scenes, helping musicians and
producers learn more about ways that they can express themselves as creative artists. What we're learning
about today is digital audio
workstations or DAWs. We're going to be
explaining what a digital audio workstation is, how it works, what components go into making sound
come out of it, how MIDI works, what a VST is, and what programs
that you'll need to download to start from
the very beginning. By the time that we
reach the end of it, you'll have a better
understanding of what goes into making
music on computers, and feel much more
confident and comfortable in a creative environment.
Let's get started.
2. Defining a Digital Audio Workstation: What's a digital
audio workstation, most commonly
referred to as a DAW? That would be the program
that you are using for your music-making experience and your music-making journey. For starters, what
we'll do is we'll go into a more entry-level
program like GarageBand. I'll walk you through what
they have inside of there. From that we'll go to Logic Pro; GarageBand being
your free program, Logic Pro being your
premium program, so you can see the
differences between the two. Then we'll go into Ableton, which is my personal favorite. Then we'll go into where
we are going to be settling for the
rest of this class, which is FL Studio. I'm picking FL Studio
because I feel it's the best entry-level
digital audio workstation to be able to get
the best grasp, all of the nooks
and crannies that come into digital
music production. Let's begin with GarageBand. As soon as you open up your
GarageBand application, this will be the first
window that you see. It'll tell you to
choose a new project or an existing project. You're going to choose a
new project and then see these options that say
choose a track type. You will have three different
types of audio formats or sound formats that
you'll be able to use inside of your digital
audio workstation. The software
instrument uses MIDI, your audio instrument will use any recording software or
hardware that you have; an interface, your guitar,
your microphone, etc. That will be an audio track, and then your
drummer track gives you a loop that you
will be able to play along with that you can
use to build a song from. I'm going to create a
software instrument. Once your tools open up, this is essentially going to be your arrangement
view for GarageBand. You'll see all of your controls, all of your different
forms and ways that you can
manipulate this sound, and what this is that
you are opening up and viewing would
be called a VST. We'll be getting into
that in the next lesson. For now, what we're going to do is we're going to move
on to another program, Logic Pro, which is the more advanced
version of GarageBand. GarageBand is the free thing
that comes on your Mac, Logic Pro is the thing
that you have to purchase. When you open up Logic Pro, you'll see a lot of the
similar things that you've seen inside a GarageBand. You have a section
for your instruments. Your software
instruments will be your computer-based sounds
and then your audio will be anything that
is recorded from your microphones or from
an audio interface, the same drummer track that we saw inside of
GarageBand as well. But the big difference
is that there are even more controls and
options at your disposal. This is the user interface
that exists in order to make Logic Pro as
intuitive as it can from advancing
from GarageBand. Now, where we're at is the digital audio workstation that is called Ableton Live. I'm a big fan of Ableton, this is my native digital
audio workstation at the present moment. First and foremost when
you open up Ableton, there will be two views
that you'll be met with. Traditionally, you'll be
met with your session view. Your session view
will list all of your tracks out in
an individual form, and then from the
individual form, you'll be able to make
different pattern clips inside of it to control what your sounds look like and feel like for each
individual playlist. Now, if you want to get out of that individualized
playlist view, there's an arrangement
view as well. This is what you'll see most
producers traditionally using whenever they open
up their Ableton sets. In that arrangement view, you're able to lay
sounds down across a grid timeline that you can use to control your
drum programming, your MIDI programming,
all of your VSTs, and sound design things. But ultimately the main gist of Ableton is being able to
play sound on the grid directly in a way that's a little bit more free form than some of the more rigid things that GarageBand or Logic
Pro might limit you to, so Logic Pro and GarageBand, very similar, Ableton a
little bit different. Great. Now that
we've gone through a couple of different DAWs, let's focus on FL Studio.
3. Sequencing Drums in FL Studio : Now that we've talked
a little bit about digital audio workstations, we're going to
specifically dive into FL studios user interface
so you can have a better understanding of
how the program works and what you'll be doing inside
of it to make your own music. When you open up FL Studio, the first thing that you'll see is this channel rack which has a step
sequencer inside of it. A step sequencer is where
you program sequences and rhythms to be able to
develop rhythmic patterns, create your own drum loops, create your own pattern
loops, things of that nature. You can also do
harmonies and melodies instead of the step sequencer. But for now, we're going
to focus on drums. We're going to look at our channel rack inside
of our step sequencer, and you'll be able to
see that there are 16 buttons per each track that
are highlighted right now. For example, we have our 808 kick sample here
inside of our sampler channel. When you press "Play," after inputting on your
step sequencer, you have one kick drum play at the one of your
beat like this. [NOISE] Now if you turn
your metronome on, that's next to your tempo, you will see that the
beat is counting 1,2,3,4. I'm going to slow this
down a little bit. It's a little bit
easier to follow. If you got a 90
beats per minute, and you have your
kick drum on the one, and you put a clap on a two, and you put H1 on three, and a clap on four,
It'll sound like this. Now let's turn the
metronome off. Now what we've done here is we've
created a basic loop that we can then program
and re-sequence. This is where you get to have
a little bit more freedom, a little bit more fun. What we're going to do is I'm
going to grab a couple of drum samples from
some friends of mine. We're going to replace them with the samples that
were originally here. Those being the stock samples that were inside of FL Studio. Now we're going to add
an extra sound in by dragging it and dropping it
underneath our channel rack. That's going to
add a new channel inside of our step
sequencer that can program sounds with this
new channel that I've added to bring a little bit more diversity
to our sample selection. Now I'm going to add
a shaker sound to replace this 808 hi-hat
that was originally here. I've shown you how
to add sounds. Now I'm going to show you
how to take sounds away. The left-click, you
add your sounds in onto your channel rack. With a right-click, you can
take those sounds away. Let's do that by taking away the second kick in our pattern. That's the original
pattern with two kicks. I'm going to take the
second kick out now. Now going to take a
second shake out. You see how this adds a
little bit more diversity to our rhythmic pattern, yes. Now that we've got a
little bit of groove gone, inside of our pattern selector, if you click and drag upwards, you have pattern 2, some brand new pattern
that you can build more arrangements out of. You can also right-click on this pattern. I'm
going to clone. You'll be able to take
the same pattern from before and add it
to a new pattern, for example, pattern 1, we'll have our two kicks on it. Pattern 2, we'll
have one kick on it. We've been able to do is we have a step sequencer that has
pattern 1 and pattern 2 with the slight variation
in the ear drum programming. So far we've been going into our general step sequencer and just putting in our samples. But what you also could
do is right-click this sound and you can send
it to your piano roll. You have even more
granular control of how you want the sound
to be displayed. For example, we can
pitch up and down our shaker sample inside of the piano roll by using
MIDI to say, hey, this middle C that the shaker
is normally playing on, I'm going to bring this
up three semitones, down one more semitone, down a couple of more semitones, and back to its original. That sounds like this. Inside of our channel rack, now you can see the
metadata from the shaker that we've added
instead of it just being a dot inside of
our sub-sequencer. Now that we have two patterns
that we've established, what we can do and has gone
through our playlist view, which is located right next
to your pattern selector. Now we'll open this window up. You can select your
patterns right here and then draw them into your playlist and be
able to make an arrangement. We're going to put pattern 1 for the first three bars
of our arrangement. For the fourth bar
of our arrangement, we're going to use pattern 2. When you start to
make these patterns, and when you want
to see what they sound like inside of
your arrangement, you're going to
have to switch from patterns to song mode. Pattern and song mode are
located directly to the left of your Play button inside of the FL Studio transport window. Let's switch the song
mode and see what our arrangement sounds
like so far, 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, 2, 4, 2, 3, 4, back to 1, 2, 3, 4. Now that we've gone
through the basic overview of the UI and UX of FL Studio and how programming
patterns and it can work, you should be able to make
your own drum patterns inside of FL Studio with the
stock samples or with your own samples that she can drag in from your
sample browser that's located to the left of everything on your
FL Studio window. We're going to get a little
bit more in depth with MIDI and VSTS so you can expand your sound range even more inside of your digital
audio workstations.
4. Discovering MIDI + VST: Now that we've gone through a little bit more of
our user interface, and we've talked a
little bit about how to program inside of FL Studio, I figured it'd be a really
good moment to explain exactly what's
happening inside of the program while
you're using it. The way that I figured would
be a great way to start this is to explain
what MIDI data is. MIDI would be a Music
Instrument Digital Interface. That'd be the technology
standard that is utilized to communicate and transmit audio technology and information from an
instrument to a computer, to a digital audio workstation. You will use MIDI data to
program all of your sounds, and all of your sequences inside of this digital
audio workstation. Within that, you'll be able
to have more control over exactly the parameters that each individual MIDI
instrument can control. What these MIDI programs
traditionally look like? They would be considered VSTs. So VST is virtual
studio technology. Virtual studio
technology is what powers a digital
audio workstation. Now that we've explained
exactly what MIDI is, we're going to dive a little
bit more into the world of how that data
programs a sound. Your MIDI data communicates with virtual studio technology to be able to generate the sounds that you will hear
inside of your programs, so for example when
you open up FL Studio, all of your specific
sampler channels inside of your channel rack are
technically VSTs. When you put data inside
of the step sequencer, that is also MIDI data as well. You can use that same
MIDI data inside of a step sequencer to
program your drums, but also to program melodies. I'll open a VST that
I have downloaded, this one specifically
is going to be contact. If you guys need a free VST, I highly recommend
Spitfire labs. We're going to open up this VST, we're going to go
into the piano roll, and then I'm going to program C, E, and a G, this
is a major chord. I'm going to stretch this
out, so that's a half note. Since that's inside
of Pattern 2, Pattern 1 is going to
have the same thing, but one step higher.
That will be up here. Now, we put this inside of
our arrangement together, it'll sound a little
bit like this. So now we have a better
understanding of how MIDI data and VSTs work inside of our digital
audio workstation, we're going to move a
little bit more into some these drums that you've heard so far
so that we can have a more complete
sequence of music.
5. Programming MIDI: Now that we scratched
the surface on how digital audio
workstations work, let's dive a little
bit deeper based of what we've learned from
Midi and how VST works. It's a programming for our musical compositions
that we'll be making inside of our
digital audio workstation. So far inside of FL Studio, this is what we've
been able to program. We have two specific
patterns in FL Studio right now that are alternating to
create this arrangement. We're going to create a
couple more patterns, add little bit of variation
in each individual one, and then once we
had that variation, what you'll be able to
do is be able to hear how this adds a little
bit more movement, little bit more style, little bit more feeling to the composition
that we're creating. I'm going to make
another pattern where I'm cloning Pattern 1. Once I clone pattern one, you'll see that inside of
our playlist arrangement, what was originally Pattern
2 has now become Pattern 3. That's because when you use
the smart cloning feature, ultimately shifts your pattern
down and then make sure that it still stays in the same place inside
of your playlist view. That way you don't have to rearrange in things
of that nature. Now, we have Pattern 2
which I'm going to enter inside where this
second Pattern 1 was. I am going to add
a little bit more to this VST instruments
that we built with contact. I'm going to go back
into pattern mode so I can program this
specific pattern. We were song mode just now that was why 1
was playing Pattern 1 and then Pattern
2 again and then going back into
Pattern 1, Pattern 3. When you go back
into pattern mode, you'll be able to program your specific section that you're inside of on
your channel rack. I'm just going to be
finding the right notes inside of this melody
to be able to add a little bit on top of this beat and then I'm going to use
that for our Pattern 2. Then on our Pattern 4 that
I'm going to be adding, I'm going to put a little
bit more variation into the percussion as well.
Back to Pattern 2. That note's a little bit off.
I'm going to bring it down. Now, this is a fun
part about using any digital audio
workstation when you start programming midian, you actually can
experiment a little bit, see if things sound right. You might have some
things that come in a little bit off-key.
That's okay. You just move it up, move it
down, mess around with it. Specifically, what
we're doing here is talking about how digital
audio workstations work. If you do want to
learn more about how music theory is
incorporated into these things and
how arrangement of harmony and melody works a
little bit more in-depth, Skillshare has a couple
of more tutorials from different people
like Jacob Collier that you can check out for that. Now, we've completed Pattern 2 inside of our arrangement
that we're programming. I'm going to set it up so
that it goes from Pattern 1 to Pattern 2, to Pattern 3. Inside FL Studio when you're
in your playlist mode, you can click on the side
of your panels where your titles for each
pattern are setup where the piano is little piano icon. You'll see this pattern
clip when you pop up, you can go to Select
source pattern. I'm going to switch
this to Pattern 3 and then I'm going to duplicate Pattern 3 by cloning
it again and I'm going to make the last
Pattern 3 that we had in our sequence that was on the
fourth bar Pattern 4 now. Each bar has a corresponding
pattern for it now. We use Pattern 1 to
introduce our loop, Patterns 2 as a little
bit of variation to it, Pattern 3, we changed
the chord a little bit. Pattern 4, I'm going
to turn it back around so that we can go into our Pattern 1 and it has a
little bit of excitement and a little bit of a fill-in
variation going into that. I'm going to go into Pattern 4. Now I'm going to add a little variation
to our kick pattern. I'm going to go into Pattern 3, add a little bit of variation
on our kick as well. I think I'm actually going
to take a clap out on Pattern 3 as well to see
what that sounds like. Now Pattern 3 and Pattern 4
have a little bit more of a rhythmic variation
to them and Pattern 1 and 2 have their melodic
variations to them. I'm going to add a little bit
more melodic variation in the Pattern 4 just
because Pattern 2 has a little bit of
melodic variation as well too so that we have a little
bit of symmetry going on. This is one of the
fun parts about programming and arranging inside of a digital
audio workstation, you can just click around and
have a little bit of fun. See how things work,
see what makes sense. If it doesn't make sense,
that's totally okay. You can just go
around, change it again, go back to what you had. Nothing is permanent
here, which is awesome. What I would like
you to do is create a couple of patterns of
your own and try to make your own four-bar loop
and see if you'll be able to do a little
bit of variations and a couple of
different changes on each individual pattern so that one sounds different
than the other, but they all move you
through the music. Now that we've covered
some programming, we're going to dive
into hardware and the studio environment and how that incorporates itself into your digital
audio workstation.
6. Choosing Your Studio Hardware: Now, what I wanted
to do is talk about the external hardware that
you might see inside of a studio environment that's communicating with a
digital audio workstation. Some of the things that you
might commonly see would be your audio interface
and a MIDI controller. The audio interface
is a device that communicate all of the
data that is being transmitted via audio out of your computer
into analog outputs. When it came to MIDI and VST, that all is happening inside of your digital
audio workstation, specifically on your computer. Now, if you were to output raw audio out of your
computer and if you wanted to have raw audio come into
your computer that you could then record into your
digital audio workstation, that's what you would use
an audio interface for. For example, if you had an acoustic guitar or an electric guitar that
you wanted to plug into an amplifier and then run that into your
audio interface, you would be able to do that, you can either plug directly into your audio
interface from the guitar, or you can plug a
microphone into your audio interface
and hook it up next to the amplifier so you
can record the room tone from your guitar going
through the amp. What I would like
to do now is talk a little bit more about how a MIDI controller
would work inside of a music recording experience. What I have here is
an Ableton Push. This communicates specifically
with my favorite program Ableton Live that
I've been using for production for a
couple of years now. I'm able to control different
components and aspects inside my digital
audio workstation with this MIDI
controller specifically. Different MIDI controllers
have different purposes. You have some MIDI controllers
that are keyboards, that you use just specifically for playing instruments
that you can assign through your digital
audio workstation as VSTs, some MIDI controllers actually have turntables on them
and you can use them for controlling
specific software that revolves around deejaying, then you have other MIDI
controllers like these, which are small,
all-in-one workstations. The samples that I
have put inside of my Ableton Push would be like the channels that we would put inside of our channel rec, and then I'd be able
to arrange them on a step sequencer the same way that we saw inside of FL Studio. When I press on this top half
of this MIDI controller, this specific layout
that it's in will start turning it step sequencer up. This is going to be the one. We have it moving through
our grid now at the time. Now I've put a one on each
individual beat right here. We're going to put a hi-hat
on the off beat for each. Then we can actually add
a little variation in it, the same way that we
were adding variation inside of FL Studio as well. I'm using the same knowledge
and experience that I got from programming
drums inside of FL Studio to be able to use this step sequencer and have it lay out the exact same way, and having the exact
same understanding of it than I did in a computer. This is the really cool thing
about MIDI controllers, because what it does
is it gives you a more expansive toolset and palette to be able to be expressive with how
you make music. Sometimes you don't even
necessarily need to be looking at your computer to be able to achieve more creativity inside of your
digital audio workstation.
7. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you made
it to the end of the class. You should have learned
a little bit more about digital audio
workstations, a little bit more
about the terminology behind what powers digital
audio workstations, and maybe have a foray into picking your first one and finding a way to
make your own music. Really excited for you guys to be able to take
this information into the field and see exactly
how you set your doors up. I would love to
see how you've set yours up inside the
project gallery. Take a screenshot,
share it below, let's see how we're all going to be able to make music together. See you in the next one. Bye.
Dom McLennon, Producer, Recording Artist
