Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey everyone, welcome to Intro to Music Production. Master. It's called masterclass because it is huge. There's like a 140 videos in this thing. Um, and the reason I did that is because I wanted to take kind of each concept that I wanted to introduce and I wanted to tease it out a little bit. So what this class is designed to do is give you a foundation. So the idea is, you may have very little or no experience using these tools, the tools we use to make music production. You might not even know what these tools are. And in this class, I'm going to introduce you to the tools here to you about the theory behind them. Teach you how to use those tools. Take you all the way up through sound design, mixing, and ultimately making a truck. Okay, so by the end of this, you'll be making tracks. Now this class doesn't go all the way. There's a lot more to learn after this. But what this class is gonna do is it's going to get you to that point where you can start making music and it'll sound good. After that. You'll know what else you need to work on. Maybe you need to work more on mastering your platform, like your audio software. Maybe you need to work more on sound design. I'm mixing, mastering, whatever it may be. But this class is going to make sure you know exactly everything you need to do to make music and then where to go after that. So this is a really huge class and really happy with it. This is the same curriculum that I'm using in my college courses, just in online video format. So let's dive in and let's start make it.
2. What We Will Cover: All right, So let's dive in and talk about what we're going to cover in this class. So in this class we're going to talk about everything you need to know to get into electronic music. And that means recording, producing, mixing, even live recording we'll talk a little bit about. But we're really just going to skim the surface and talk about some of the hardware of things you need, some of the software things that you need, how some of the software works, what you can do without, and what is absolutely essential. Super important. Do not go out and buy anything yet. Just wait. Because let me walk you through everything that you need or might just want and kind of tell you what to look for and give you some pointers. I'm not getting paid by anybody to recommend certain stuff. So I'm just going to tell you the things that I think are really important and good products that I use in my home studio on that I would recommend. So we're not going to go super deep into any specific topic, but deep enough for you to understand what avenues you want to go further down later on. And if you're just interested in exploring things and, and doing a little tasting menu of music production, then this is the perfect class for you. We're gonna taste a whole bunch of different things. So moving on, I did say that no one's paying me to endorse any specific product or anything like that for this class. But I do have a relationship with the software company able to in, and I want to talk about that in the next video. So off we go.
3. What is an Ableton Certified Trainer?: So I am what is called an Ableton certified trainer, which just as a sidebar is a really interesting thing for me because in a lot of communities where I'm working, I have a PhD in Music, like that's the top, top degree you can get in music. And yet people are more impressed that I'm an Ableton Certified Trainer. And to be fair, they should be because it was I would venture to say almost harder to get than the Ph.D. PHD took more time. But the exam to be enabled and certified trainer is no joke. It was a two-day long process. It's a whole ordeal. It's not it's you can only get it from Ableton. It's not like I went to some weekend class. So what this means though, and when you see someone who's an Ableton Certified Trainer, it doesn't just mean that they are really good at using the program able to him. It means that they are really good at teaching how to use the program able to. And that is actually what the Ableton company is certifying, is that you are a certified teacher, meaning you are in their mind, one of the top features of this thing, of this program in the country or the world. There's only like a 100 Ableton certified trainers in the US. I think there's a kind of roughly 1000 worldwide. So it's fairly rare. I'm telling you all this because this thing, Ableton, this word I keep saying is this software that's on the screen here. And it's a software we use for music production, and it's one that I use every day. And I'll be walking you through some of the elements of it and how it works. But it's not the only software out there. There are other pieces of software that are great. Fl Studio, Logic, Pro Tools, Reaper, reason. There are a lot of great ones. So you don't have to fall in love with live in this class. But I am going to be using it for a lot of stuff, but I'll also show you things in other programs as well. Shortly, we'll talk about software and the pros and cons of the different platforms that you could choose to use. So, like I said in the last video, don't go out and buy anything yet. But just know you're taking a class with one of the top people in the country. And I also have a PhD.
4. How to Use This Class: Okay, One last thing before we dive into the real meat of the class. How I would recommend that you use this class? First? Go slow, enjoy it. There's no rush to get through this class. Watch the videos, pause them. Pop open a browser Explorer the concepts a little bit more, if you like. Use all of these topics as a jumping off point to learn more, you can certainly look for more classes on each topic if you want to go further down that rabbit hole. I have almost a 100 classes available, most of which are further details on some of the topics we're going to be talking about here. So feel free to take your time, pause the video, look things up if you want to go back to the videos and just use them as a jumping off point to learn more and more about the particular things that you're interested in. This is kind of what we would call it my university job at a survey course, right? It means we're going to survey the landscape and see everything that's out there. And then at the end of it, you're going to say, that was fun. But this one thing, That's what I want to go deeper into. And then you're gonna take more courses in that if you want to. Okay. So I just wanted to point that out there just you have full license to take your time through this. There's no rush.
5. Analog Audio: Okay, so let's start off talking about analog sound and how early recordings were made. And that'll kinda move us into digital sound, which is primarily where we're working now when we make music and when we record music now. But when technology to record sound first came into being, it was only analog sound that we were able to record. What is analog sound? Well, sound itself is just waves moving through the air, right? I talk, my throat makes sound. My lungs push air. And that generates a wave. And it's going like this. It's at the pitch that I'm speaking. These waves are probably about this long, roughly a foot or so long. And there are real physical things going through the air. It's just pressure in the air. And those are going to if you were standing here with me, they would be going to your ears and that wave would hit your eardrum and push it in just the right ways that you would be able to hear the sound. So if we want to capture that, right, like we want to take that wave and put it in a bottle and want to capture it. How do we do it? It's, it's actually kind of a phenomenal thing to think about. Like you've got this wavelength through the air and we need to capture it somehow. And if you think about it, there are these waves going through the air, not the only kinds of waves going through the air, right? There are tons of different kinds of waves going through the air. The example I like to give is if those waves or the waves of my voice or probably about this long. But if they were smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and they got to be like a measurably small, like incredibly small. Those waves we would interpret with our body as light, right? T waves. We interpret with our eyes. Waves this longish. We interpret with our ears. But there are even longer waves. There are waves that are miles and miles long. There are waves that can wrap themselves all the way around the earth there that long. We typically interpret those waves as weather. Same kinda waves. Just much, much, much bigger. So it depends on how big those waves are, depending. In order for us to interpret them. If they're the right size, we interpret them as sound. If there are different size, there are light. If they're much bigger size there, whether or something in between. So the way that we first came up with we, meaning humans, Not me, I was involved in this. The way we were able to capture sounds was using a process or using something called analog sound. So analog, you know, it comes from two Greek words, meaning Anna, which meant according to and logos, which meant a relationship. So analog sound means it's according to an a relationship with the sound. We have another word in English that is analogous, meaning like to things that are very similar to each other. And that's what analog sound is. In other words, analog sound has captured that waveform in a way that is this seen as the actual waveform. So if we look at a vinyl record and we zoom way we re in, what we would see is little wave forms because a vinyl record is analog sound. So we would see these little wave forms on there. That's how analog sound works, is we capture those waveforms, were able to chart out those waveforms. And then using a little needle on the record and a big speaker, we can recreate those same waveforms. So when we say a sound is analog, it means we've captured the waveforms in a way that you could, you can actually see the wave form. But it is the same waveform captured onto some kind of media, a disk or something like that. So that's an analog sound. Now, just for fun, let's talk about some of the oldest analog sounds that were ever recorded. And when analog sound first came to be.
6. The Oldest Known Recording of a Human: Okay. Do you know when the first audio recording was made? Before you answer that, let's think about this. Prior to this, we have no idea what humans sounded like. This would be the oldest recording of a human being, right? Of the human voice. We have no way of knowing what people sounded like even prior to this. So what does the oldest record we have of the human voice? Of the humans, of humans doing anything actually. So take a guess. The correct answer is 1878. And that first recording we have is Thomas Edison. But there's a little asterisk next to it because recent well, it because in the last decade or so, another recording has been found to predate Edison. So Edison, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, which is the first way we had to record sound. But there was somebody else before him. So 1878, Edison invents the phonograph and records himself reciting the words to Mary Had a Little Lamb. But in 1857 there was a French typographer who was working with graphite like pencil, and found that he could do a cool trick where he could hook a big horn to a pencil. And then he could yell in it. And he set up a contraption that would scribble, right? It would just like scribble the waveform that he yelled into the big cone. Right? So that was neat. It was, it could just scribble away form. It's all it could do. But it was never designed to be recreated, right? Like we went over, we can hear it. It was just pencil on paper. But with computers we can. So some scientists have taken those scribbly waveforms and put them into a computer and interpreted those waveforms so that we could hear them. So this comes all the way from 1857. Now remember this is pencil on paper. This is not high-quality audio, but it sounded like this. That's it. That's all we got. So that is supposedly this French typographer whose name I'm not going to attempt to pronounce because it is a very French name. But that is a rendering of his pencil on or a graphite on paper recordings. How? But commonly, we think of the first analogue recordings being 1878 made by Thomas Edison. And that is the first recordings where we can really hear somebody talking. And it happens to be Thomas Edison. It sounds like this. And that was it. So 1878 we get our first recording. Now you may have seen floating around the Internet, this idea of this ancient Mayan pottery and audio recordings made from them. Similar idea to the French typographer. Where the idea was, when you make pottery, you're spinning clay on a wheel and you take some kind of stick. And while it's spinning, push it onto the wet clay and you pull it down in order to make a groove all the way down the pot, right? That dries. And with computers, we could extract out of there the vibrations, we very, very, very subtle vibrations of the wave forms created embedded in the clay that would capture the sound in the room. You can find audio recordings of this around online. However, before you get all too excited, this turned out to be a hoax. This was just not possible. The, the minutia of those waveforms is too delicate to be captured in wet clay. I suppose it's still possible that with conceivably that with computers we could pull out some waveforms from that could be hidden in something like that. But presently, it has not been done successfully yet. So if you see something around online like that, if you have a friend tell you actually ancient Mayan. The audio exists. Now, doesn't it? A hoax. Um, so don't fall for that. Because I totally did. When it came out, I was like, Oh my God, this is amazing. And then I read more about it. And it was actually the audio file that's going around and the story about it, it was actually released on April Fool's, and it's just totally not real. So I fell for it. Anyway. So our earliest known recordings.
7. Edison: So of course, now that we've heard the sound that brings us to talking about Thomas Edison and what he invented. Now Thomas Edison did not at first create the first phonograph to look like a record as we know it now, a little a vinyl record that is a disc. What he did was he created something that looked like a cylinder and it looked more like this. It was a cylinder and it spun. I'm not going to it's spun on its side like this. I can't do it, but there's actually water in here. Okay. It's been on its side like this. And an a needle sat on top of it and red side to side. The reason that he eventually switched it to being more like a disk is because when he first invented it, the story goes that it wasn't designed to be mass-produced ever. These were designed to be like ways to hold documents, MIT, ways to preserve languages that were dying, ways to preserve historic moments. And we wouldn't, you would ever want to mass produce the things they would always just kinda be sitting in a vault somewhere. But I'm not too long. People found that this idea of having music in their house Without performers was kind of amazing. They could use this contraption to play music. So Edison started making these with music on them. And that was like kind of a crazy idea. And then the idea came to mass-produce these things. And Sullivan, and he in fact did. And Edison studio was the first record company that existed. But these cylinders add this problem, but they were very difficult to mass produce and they were very fragile. So went back to the drawing board and eventually came up with a disk. The disk could be made into a stamp so that they could just like stamp them out and make them very fast. Whereas the cylinder, being more three-dimensional, couldn't be made into a stamp. And therefore it was very hard to mass-produce. The disk was also a lot more durable than the cylinder, although the early disks were a much thicker vinyl and they did shatter kind of a lot. I have a collection of really old records that are kind of half shattered. But as we kept developing it throughout the decades, throughout a century and a half, the vinyl record became much more durable. It is still somewhat fragile, but and we also develop other ways to access analogue recordings like tape. There is analog tape that we use for recordings. But at some point, practitioners of recording started to look for a way to Record at a higher fidelity and get away from this idea of an analog recording where it was just a representation of the waveform on the thing, on the piece of media. And luckily for them, there was this newfangled thing called the computer. And that made a whole new kind of audio possible. That was digital audio. So let's go to a new video and talking about the origins of digital audio.
8. Bell Labs and Max Mathews: So in about 1957, there was a guy named Max Mathews. Max was a scientist at Bell Labs. Bell Labs was at the time the phone company. It was big, big company and it was the one and only big monster phone company. It was kind of the apple of its day. Except it had very little or possibly no competition. Remember, this is in 1957, phone was still a pretty new thing. At Bell Labs. They had a research wing and that's where Max was a scientist. His job was to find a way to get more voices down a single wire. The way the phone worked at the moment at this moment in time was an order for me to talk to my grandma. I have to have essentially a wire connecting me to my grandma and nothing else can go down that wire at the same time as I'm talking for me to my grandma. Now we facilitated this through a switchboard system so that someone could patch me to grammar without running a wire directly from me to her. But still, only one voice could go down that wire at a time. One conversation could go back and forth in that wire at a time. So with Max, they said, we need to not run millions and millions of wires from every house to every other house. There's gotta be a better way. Find a way that we can get many voices down a single wire. So that's what Max is working on. And what he came up with was this idea that he would create a special kind of phone that would deconstruct the sound and break it down into little tiny pieces. And then it would send those as data throughout the wire, down the wire. And then it would get to its destination. And a special phone would then get all of that data and put the sound back together and you would hear it. So this didn't really work very well. It didn't sound very good. But that concept of taking a sound and breaking it down into little tiny bits and then putting it back together is effectively the origins of digital audio. That is how digital audio works in exactly to this day. So we credit the invention of digital audio to Max Mathews. He's really fascinating guy. I had an opportunity to meet him once at a conference. He actually knew this was 1957 and he didn't die until relatively only like a decade ago or so. He actually passed away. He was really, really old. But I had an opportunity to meet a very, very old Max Mathews, fascinating guy, did some great works. He actually was known as an amateur violinist. And he would go into Bell Labs supposedly. And program has computer to make little sounds, little bleeps and bloops is 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, stuff like that. And he would bring his violin late at night when no one was looking and who played duets with his violin and the computer. Which was kind of like mind-blowing at the time, right? Because people would be like, Wow, robots are making music. The end of the world is near, was probably the way a lot of people interpreted that. But it all worked out. And digital audio came to be. People took that concept of breaking the sound down into little bits and putting it back together and built tools around it. And that's where we have software, hardware and all kinds of stuff that have been developed using that fundamental principle of taking tiny little nuggets of the sound, representing it as data, and then putting it back together as audio. So you can think Max Mathews, for all of that.
9. Advances Since Mathews: One really interesting thing to consider about digital audio is that there have been hundreds of thousands of different tools for using digital audio. There have been different formats, different file types, different audio programs, plugins, all that stuff. The fundamental principle of digital audio is pretty much the same as it's always been. We change the way in which we take those little snapshots of sound. And we've changed the way that we put them back together, which changes the way that we send them across, that we move them, we change what we can do to them while they're, while they're in their little grains of data. But the fundamental principles that Max created on how digital audio works hasn't really changed. It's kinda the same as how the fundamental principle of how analog audio works hasn't changed since Edison. We've added a lot to it. But those core principles are still what we use to run kinda everything when it comes to audio. Okay, so let's talk real quick. Last thing in this section about what this all means. What is the difference between analog audio and digital audio from a practical standpoint.
10. The Difference Between Analog and Digital: Okay, so I have here a digital audio file. It looks like a wave form, right? Could be analog, could be digital. Okay, Now, it can't be analog because it's in a computer. Computers are capable of dealing with digital sound. Humans are capable of dealing with analog sound. Okay? Like period, There's no ifs, ands or buts about that. We cannot deal with digital sound. We can hear digital sound. There is no organ in our body that will interpret digital sound for us. In order for us to deal with sound, it needs to be converted back to analog in order for us to hear it. And our speakers do that. And another thing that we'll talk about later, Let's just say our computer does that for us. We'll get into more detail about that soon door. But when our, when this program sends a message to the speakers, it's sending this data as digital sound. And by the time it gets to the speakers, it gets converted to analog sound so I can hear it. If there's no speakers connected, I can't hear it, right. Humans hear analog sound. Computers deal with digital set. Okay, That's the biggest difference. You cannot hear digital sound. There's no such thing. Let me show you these little pockets of sound. If I zoom in. Now I'm looking at the waveform. Zoom in even farther, zoom in even farther, zoom-in even farther. Keep going. Keep going. Boom, there we are. We're down to dots. Right? Now. These dots are important. Each one of these dots we call a sample. And that is the little nugget of sound that we use, right? We take all of these little nuggets of sound, or we put it back together and then we can hear the sound. But you'll notice one of the key things that's different between analog and digital is that there are space, there is space between these dots. If I zoom in, this is as far as I can zoom in. Here's a sample, here's a sample. There's empty space between them. This is the biggest argument for analog sound being better than digital sound, because an analog sound, there's no space between the dots because there's no dots. Analog sound is analogous, right? It's constant. Wave, the same as it is in the physical world. But in digital sound, we have space between the samples that makes it less precise. You would think this is an argument that people have been having for a really long time. And it technically is true there is space between these samples. However, this amount of time is, let's see, it would be 144100th of a second. So it's, it's a fraction of a millisecond. I mean, it's not even a fraction. It's a fraction of a fraction of a millisecond. It is an unbelievably small amount of time. It's completely an audible, but it is something it is some amount of time and there are a lot of them if you look at it. So those are the biggest difference is between analog and digital sound. Analog is sound we can hear and it's constant and smooth. Digital is only sound computers can make and it has holes in it. Can we hear them? Probably not.
11. Mac or PC?: Okay, so let's talk about hardware. Now. What I'm talking about here is if you want to get into recording or music production, what kind of hardware should you have at your disposal? Hardware meaning physical things, right? Computer's microphones, stuff like that. So the first question, which is a question as old as time it has stumped philosophers for millennia, is, should you get a Mac or a PC to make music with? Or should you have a Mac or a PC? Well, this can be a very controversial answer and a highly opinionated answer. So let me first tell you that when it comes to speed and computing power, processor power, graphics power, all of that stuff. At this point, this wasn't always true, but at this point, any computer will do just fine. Really, doesn't matter. Acc is fast enough, a PC is fast enough and off the shelf PC is probably fast enough to do everything you wanna do. So that really doesn't matter. Though. It does matter if you're thinking about what software is available for the the type of computer that you're going to use. For example, I like to use Ableton Live for a while. That wasn't available on the PC. It was Mac only. It is now available for the PC also. So if you want to use Ableton Live, It doesn't matter. Off the top my head, the only professional audio program that is not available on both Mac and PC at this point, is logic. Logic is owned by Apple, so it's only available for Macintosh. So if you want to use logic, then you're on a Macintosh. All the others have a Mac and a PC version. Now this, this thing about Mac and PC is really, actually really interesting. Because if you go back to the late nineties or so, when people were really starting to do some of this work outside of big recording studios. Even in the big recording studios. You almost always saw Mac in those studios. And the reason for that was really just because the software that was available for a Mac was at that time superior. When it comes to audio production, to the software that was available for a PC. The early versions of Pro Tools and things like that were only available for the Mac. And probably because the Mac was seen as kind of the creative computer or the computer for the creative artist. Or the PC was seen as the computer you get to do your taxes. Now, obviously those things aren't really true anymore. And like I just said, both are fine. However, there still is a stigma attached to using a PC in a professional studio. A little bit, a little bit. If I went into a professional recording studio and I went into the control room and I sat down and I fired it up and it was a PC. It would give me a little bit of a pause. It just would. It's much, much more common to have a Mac in those situations. I probably because of tradition, really, it's definitely not because of computing power or anything like that at this point. Mostly because of tradition. There's even a little bit of genre preference. Like I know a lot of like the people making dubstep and trap are more into pieces then Max. I don't know why that is. It has it has no bearing on like the software or the power of the computer. It just it, it's probably because PCs are cheaper. That's for sure. There's no debating that. So all of that being said, I learned how to use computers by using Pro Tools. So I've been a Mac guy ever since I got my first computer. So I'm a Mac guy. I like Apple stuff. But that doesn't mean you have to be. So if the question is, should I get a Mac or a PC? The answer to that is, first, how much money you got if you're on a tight budget, get a PC, fine. And if story, if you've got a little more money, then sub-question, how cool do you want to be? If you want to be cool, get a Mac. If you have a lot of money and you don't care about being cool, and get a PC and then save the rest of your money for something else for the software you're going to need to buy for that thing. So that's how I answer that question. How much money you got and how cold you want to be? That's not a very fair way to answer it, but it's true.
12. Laptop or Desktop?: Okay, Next, let's talk about a laptop computer or a desktop computer. Again, this is really kind of a question of preference because perhaps it was true at 1. Well, it was definitely true at 1 that a laptop was less powerful than a desktop. And you needed a desktop to do some of the high-end audio processing that we need to do when we're working with audio. That's not true anymore. A lacked a lot of laptops are just as fast as desktops. And often you can get a laptop faster than a desktop. It's surprising, but it's true. So, but like I said before, even an off the shelf laptop is probably going to be fast enough at this point to do everything that you need to do in order to produce professional music on it. So it's not really a matter of speed. It's more a matter of convenience. Do you sit in one spot and work all day long in a room? Like I am in now. If so, then a desktop might be good. Or do you run around and go work at coffee shops in multiple places and embed and all of these other things, then you probably want to desktop. One thing to think about is, how many things are you going to plug into it? I have like 15 cables coming out of my computer. So I have a desktop because I'm almost always working in this room and I have a ton of stuff plugged into it. I don't want to unplug that and move that around for walking around and go into the coffee shop. I have an iPad and I also have a laptop. So how many things you're going to plug into it is a consideration. Another thing that maybe is what other purposes are you going to use this computer for? Is it just going to be dedicated to music and therefore not leave your studio room, then maybe a desktop is good. Or are you going to also do your schoolwork on it and some some of your job work on it, stuff like that. And you're gonna have to take it back and forth to the office than a laptops, probably better. I don't know. Last thing to consider with that is that a laptop can always act like a desktop, right? You can always take a laptop and just put it in a corner and hooks stuff to it and not move it. But a desktop cannot act like a laptop. You can't just take your desktop, hike it down, strap it to your back and hike it down to the, to the coffee shop if you want to. So I think at this point, most people get laptops and work on a laptop because you can always hook more screens to a laptop. You can extend the capabilities of a laptop. But you can also unhook everything and just use it like a laptop, a desktop. You can't. It's a big burly thing that's got to stay in the corner of a room. So I use a desktop because I'm always working in this room and I need a lot of power. But because I do video editing and things also on this computer, so I have a exceptionally fast one. But if you're not doing that, then get a laptop. You can carry it around and it can always pretend to be a desktop. And that's just fine.
13. The ADC and the DAC: Okay, so there's one piece of hardware that you might want to get. That is the one thing that most people don't know that they need. It's an extra little box that is just designed for professional audio work. So before I tell you what it is, and let me explain why we need it. So let's say you want to record something on your computer. Your computer probably has a microphone built into it, right? So you've got a little microphone built into your computer somewhere, but that's not a professional microphone. That's really just designed to pick up your voice for you. No, video chat and things like that. If you want to use a professional microphone, you're gonna get one that looks like this. And it's going to have a cable coming out of it that looks like this. Now this is called an XLR cable. And one end of it looks like that. It has three pins. So now you're going to look around your computer and you're going to find a spot for you to plug this kind of a cable into your laptop or desktop and you're going to come up empty. No computer that I have ever seen has the ability to plug one of these directly into. It just doesn't happen. But perhaps you have a computer and it has a little eighth inch microphone jack in it. So you could get some adapters and plug into that eighth inch microphone input. If you have a PC, it might have this. So hypothetically, let's say you get some adapters and you plug your microphone into that little microphone input. Going through adapters is never a great idea when it comes to professional quality sound, but let's just roll with it for a minute. What's happening now? We have that analog and digital problem, right, that we talked about earlier. So this microphone is analog. Okay? My voice is analog. Microphone is picking up an analog signal when it goes down that wire through your adapters and into that little eighth inch jack on your computer. Still analog till it gets to the computer. Once it gets to the computer, your computer has a little chip in it that's called an ADC. Can, ADC stands for analog to digital converter. That little chip is designed to convert an analog signal to a digital signal. Simple enough, once it's a digital signal, it can roll through your computer and get into your software and do whatever we need to do with it. Now the problem is, what's built into your computer is cheap, little ADC thing. It's not very good for professional quality audio. We need a bigger, more robust, and more accurate analog to digital converter because that conversion of analog to digital is important. How we convert that signal is really important because you can lose a lot of fidelity on that conversion if you don't do it very well. And the things built into your computer, whether it's a Mac or a PC, thirds, not very good. They're not designed to be professional quality. So what we do is we get a separate box. We get a box. It looks like this. This is an analog-to-digital converter, and it's so much more. But let's start with analog to digital converter. So we can plug in a microphone. So that solves that adapter problem, right? We can plug in a microphone here, or here, we can plug multiple microphones in. That solves another problem that we'll get to down the road. And then we can plug this with USB into our computer. Now this box is an analog-to-digital converter. It's going to convert that signal into a digital signal with much more care than your computer's going to do it. These are designed to be fairly good. Right? Now. There are cheap ones of these, and there are very expensive analog-to-digital converters that you can get. Talk more about that in the next video. This has another function too though, because when you plug in headphones to your computer, you get that same little eighth inch adapter right? Now. Headphones to your computer is fine. But that same process, but backwards has to happen. Somewhere in your computer, there's a little circuit called a DAC, digital to analog converter. And that is also not professional quality. It's cheap little one that's built into there. And yes, it sounds fine when you're listening to Spotify and things. But when you're really mixing music and you're listening close to music, you want a high quality digital to analog converter as well. And this does that to one box is an analog to digital converter, meaning we can plug a microphone into it and send it to the computer. And a digital to analog converter, meaning we can plug our speakers or headphones directly into it and listen to our sound, converts both. So if you want professional quality sound, you need one of these boxes. We don't call it a digital and analog to digital converter. And a digital analog converter. We have one word for these boxes and it is an audio interface. That's what this is. It's an audio interface. So let's go to a new video and talk about what to look for in an audio interface.
14. The Audio Interface: Okay, there's a few things you're looking for when you're shopping for an audio interface. This one is by a company called M audio. This is called a profiler 6 ten. There's a reason that I just had this one laying around. It's because I don't really like it. I had problems with the computer seeing it and it's old. And it just didn't sound all that great. Um, audio stuff is fairly inexpensive. So if you're on a budget, you might try some of the audio stuff, although it's hidden mess. So what you're looking for in an audio interface is, the first thing is make sure it has the right connection. This one actually has old-school because it's old firewire 400 port. I can't even plug it into my current computer without a bunch of ugly adapters. So USB is fine, but it needs to be USB 2 or USB 3. And then any faster connection cable is fine to lightening or whatever you want. But USB 1 is generally going to be too slow, but USB 2 and 3 are fine. So make sure it has connections for what you have in your computer. The next thing you're going to look for is how many inputs it has. This has actually four inputs. It's got one here, one here, and then what's called a line input here and here. Line inputs like an instrument, like a guitar can plug those in here. They're not XLR cables, but they're just a instrument cables, quarter inch cables. So I can put four things into this. The number of things you can plug into your audio interface tell you how many things you can record at once. So in this case, if I'm using this box, I could record for things at once. I can plug in two microphones, a guitar and a bass. And I could set up four tracks and record those four things separately if I wanted to. But if I wanted to record a whole band, can't do it with this because I can only record four things at once. So how many things do you want to record at once? You're always going to find these things in multiples of 2, 4, or 8. So you'll find a box and audio interface that has two inputs, four inputs, eight inputs, 12 inputs, and then double from there, 24 inputs, 48 inputs. Not sure why that is, but it's always that way. The next thing you want to look for is how many outputs it has. You want at least two outputs because your outputs are going to be your speakers, right? We're going to connect our speakers to this thing. This one happens to have eight outputs. That's all of these. Now having many outputs can be useful if you're trying to do sub-mixes or you're trying to do like a surround sound thing or something like that. You can plug in eight speakers to this if you wanted. Or you wanted to send a click track to someone while they were recording something. You could do that if you have multiple outputs. More on that later. If you're just getting started, unlikely that you're going to need more than two outputs. So if I was you, I would look for something relatively inexpensive. That means in the $300 range, I mean, these aren't super cheap, but you can get fancy ones that go up to 30000 dollars for the really high-end audio converters. The one that I use here in my studio is an apogee Quartet. I think it was around $1500. It's pretty nice. One, it's only got two inputs. That's all I need here. And then it's got four outputs. Now it's got four inputs and four outputs, I think. But I really only need two inputs and two outputs here in my home studio, in the recording studio that I work in, I use a different interface that has 48 inputs and a whole bunch of outputs. I don't remember how many. So these can be cheap or expensive. And audio stuff is okay. If you're looking at that price range, look at Moto and OT you as a company whose stuff? They have some stuff in the $500 range that is quite good. Also focus, right? Focus, right. Scarlett is a unit that a lot of people are using. It's really affordable. We use them all over the place at the, some of the schools that I teach at. And they are, They're great, they're really reliable, they sound great, and they're really affordable. So check those out. Cool. So that is an audio interface.
15. Speakers or Headphones?: Okay, Up next, speakers and headphones. Should you get speakers or headphones? In an ideal world? Both is great. Having a good set of speakers, which we call monitors in the kinda studio lingo. And a good set of headphones. If you can only get one or the other. A good set of headphones will get you pretty far. And what you can get for a small amount of money goes a lot farther with headphones. For a $100, you can get a really good set of headphones. For a $100, you cannot get a good set of speakers. You need a lot more money for good set of speakers. So for headphones, getting a good set of speakers means good over the ear headphones, okay, So not earbuds. And those are fine for listening to music. But for a professional quality work, we really want an over the ear kind of an ear muffs style like this headphone. For a few reasons. One, they supposedly emulate the acoustic signal a little bit better. Another reason is that you might be wearing these for like many hours at a time and you want a comfortable set? I don't like having that thing stuck in my ear. Doing that. It just doesn't feel great after awhile. So these are good and comfortable, stylish. These are the Sony MDR 75 or fives. These are kind of a standard set. There are about a 120 bucks, I think. Anything that's around a $100 range, not anything but most headphones that are kinda in that a $100 range are going to be pretty good quality, good studio quality headphones. Highly recommend. When it comes to speakers. It's kinda of a different story. Speakers. You could spend anywhere from $300 for a decent set of studio monitors. And if you're looking around online, what you want to search for is near-field monitors. That means small, high-quality speaker that you're pretty close to. So you can spend a couple $100 to get a decent pair. You could spend, you know, 30 or $40 thousand to get the top of the line pair. I just got new ones. I'm really excited about the speakers I just recently got in my studio here. I got these focal twins speakers. They were about $5 thousand for the pair. So about twenty-five hundred dollars each. So you know, there are pricey, but they're really good there. That's a pretty high-end speaker. So go around to one of the music websites, search for near-field monitors and see what you can find on the cheaper end. I think Sony has some that are somewhat inexpensive. The k RK rockets are pretty good for their money. And then you get to the high end like gentle acts and things like that. Those are the high-end speakers that are going to be quite expensive. And you can go up from there, get into something like Meyer Sound where you start talking real money. So I really, I don't really like working with headphones as much as possible. I always try out a mix on headphones, but I prefer to work with speakers so that I can just kind of relax and hear things. But you've got to have good quality speakers to do that. And you gotta be able to make some noise. And perhaps you are in an apartment or something where you can't really make some noise. So get a good pair of headphones and you'll be just fine.
16. Microphones: Okay, Next let's talk about microphones. So just like speaker's microphones can be anywhere from $50 to $50 thousand for a single microphone. And it can be insane. In fact, whenever. If you see ever advertised a recording studio and they say this is a 10, $1 million recording studio. Probably 9 million of that is in microphones. Microphones are expensive and a good recording studio has a wide variety of really nice microphones. In order to do professional recording, you need a lot of them for it because they're all specific to different situations. But if you're just learning how to do some stuff and you just want to try out the waters. There's one microphone that I would recommend getting. If you want to buy a microphone, which you don't need to do at this point. But if you're dying to make some sound, let me tell you some stuff. So I have here three microphone's. Hey, this one's a little fancier. This is what's called a condenser microphone. It's going to pick up a lot of sound and beam and be much less focused than some other microphones. Meaning, if I plug this in right now you would here, you might hear like planes flying over and things like that in addition to my voice, but other sound from elsewhere. One that looks like this. This is actually a measurement microphone don't get one of these. This is like to measure the acoustic properties of a room. I just happen to have it sitting next to my desk. This one is your good all-purpose microphone. This is called a dynamic microphone, meaning that it can handle a lot of volume dynamics is what we call volume. They are not very fragile. They can really take a beating. If you've ever gone to a show and a bar or a club, you've seen probably 20 or 30 of these on the stage. This is called a Shure SM 58. Okay. There's also the Shure SM57. Both of those are good. Any recording studio is going to have a drawer full of these things. They are at a standard microphone that everybody has a bunch of there are about a 150 bucks. So for a 150 bucks you can get the same microphone that's in a bunch of recording studios. And they use these in recording studios in some situations. Other situations that are going to use something more like this, which is much more delicate and picks up sound in a much more delicate way. But sometimes they use this. These are great for vocals. These are great for drums, although you need a lot of them to put all over the drums. There good Four amps. If you want to get a guitar sound, throw one of these in front of your guitar amp. You'll get a great sound out of it. So if you can only buy one microphone in your entire life, get an SM58 or an SM57. Look around online, find when used because they're super durable, it'll be fine. That's what I recommend.
17. External Hard Drives: The last thing I'll mention when it comes to hardware is external hard drives. Your computer has a hard drive in it. But some of these sessions that we'll be making get to be pretty big. Gig or two gigs, maybe even more depending on what you're doing. So having an external hard drive is really useful. I'll show you in a minute my crazy hard drive tower. I have a lot of external hard drives. In fact, I can just show you on my desktop right here each of these little circles and these icons and that one. These are all hard drives and these are big, these are 20 terabyte hard drives, which is a really big hard drive. I've named them all after lakes that have been in my life. Lakes in my life. And I was just kinda fun. I grew up at a lake called a point. Chaos means this hard drive is just weird. So I call it my chaos drive. Games is a lake here in Minnesota. Iowa is the lake near my house. Lake Michigan, it's the big one. Lake Superior is another big one. And like Nicole, This is another lake near my house. So anyway, I've named all the hard drives after lakes because I thought it was funny. Portable is one that I pull out and I take back and forth to different studios that I'm working. So I might work on a track, throw it on this portable drive, and then pull it out and take it somewhere else. That's the one I think you should have. Have a portable drive that you don't mind lugging around to other places? This one is probably, I don't know. It's probably 20 gigs or so. So it's not huge. And so you can get these kind of drives for 30 or 40 bucks now. So I would recommend having a good portable hard drive.
18. My Setup at Home: Okay, next, I thought I'd just show you my little setup here. So this is my home studio. So this is what it looks like. Now, first thing you'll notice is that I have a stupid amount of displays. And that's because I've just gotten used to having a million things open at once. So that's how I roll. So off to the left here we have some scores for a project I'm currently working on. Then I have able to push controller. And here I have the Rowley seaboard keyboard to really enjoy. The stream deck, which is like my lifesaver. Maybe I'll talk more about that later. These are my cool new focal twin monitors that I love. Have big TV up here. A little display is down here, not little actually, quite big. Here I have a microphone I use to record my voice for videos on a swivel so I can tuck it away. This is my apogee quartet, audio interface. Other focal twin. Yeah, What else do I have? Here is my computer, so I have The Big Mac Pro tower. And you can see I do have a million things plugged into it. If you go down there and then if we crawl around back, you'd see even more hubs and things. This is my crazy hard drive tower. Or all of those hard drives are the portable one, is this one here because it moves around. But these ones are big, big hard drives and then I've got little ones in all of these little slats. I mean, this one thing myself, I'm really quite proud of it. Anyway. And over here I've got some hardware year and good old-fashioned turntable. So that's it and that gets me pretty much everything I need. This is quite an elaborate setup. I wouldn't suggest that anyone needs this, especially are these displays right away, but rather enjoyed it. So there you go. This is what I'm looking at when I'm filming videos. So now you know what the other side looks like.
19. What is a DAW?: Okay, So the next big thing to tackle is the software. Now when we're doing production or recording, the big tool that we use for just about everything is the DAW. Daw. This stands for digital audio workstation. Now this is a broad term that means any software that's designed to let us manipulate multiple tracks of audio over time. So any professional audio software is going to be considered a DAW. And some not professional software, it would be considered a dot as well. Something like GarageBand. You can think of it as kind of like your Microsoft Word. But for audio, right, like in Microsoft Word, we have the ability to write text. We can move text around and cut, copy, paste, add things, delete things, change the order, makes up things bold, make some things italic. We have kind of equivalent things in the DAW program that you decide to use. And there are a bunch of different dots. I'll get back to that in a minute. So we have the kind of equivalent thing, you know, we can move things around in time, make this part come before that part of it around. We can make things louder, we can make things quiet, or we can make things sound different than the things around it. So it's kind of our main Canvas for working is the DAW. So like I just said, there are a bunch of different ones. What you're seeing here is on the screen is one called Ableton Live. Ableton Live is my personal choice. And typically what happens with people making or recording music is that you kind of pick one and then learn to master it and then stick with it for a long time. I have switched. When I first started doing all of this, I was using a dock called Digital Performer. And I think I started using digital performer because that's what my teacher used. And so it made sense. I switched. So I started using it. And then after a while, I switch to using logic. And then after awhile I switched to using Ableton. So I've switched a few times. And the reason why someone would switch is maybe there could be a few reasons, but none of them are really crucial at this point. Early on. Some features would be in some dogs, you know, some, some dogs could do things that other ones couldn't do. At this point. They can all pretty much do everything that all the other ones can do. It's just a matter of how it's laid out, what it looks like, what it feels like. They all pretty much have the same abilities. With a few notable exceptions. I still use logic a little bit, so I bounce a little bit back and forth between live and logic. I use logic because if I'm collaborating with someone using logic, then it's easier to use logic then to convert the sessions back and forth. That's really hard to do to convert sessions between Dawes. A lot of the time if I'm working on a film project, the film people like logic because it plays nice with some of the video editing software. So I might use it for that. So I'm pretty comfortable in logic and in Ableton. But if someone just said, go make something, I don't care what you do, then I'm going to use Ableton because it's just my go-to thing at this point. So let's talk about what to look for in a DAW, assuming that you haven't made this decision yet. So I'm going to talk about the things that we look for, which are actually not many. But there are a couple of things that will separate the Dawes. So what to look for when choosing one? And then I'll go through kind of a highly opinionated list of what the best-known dogs are really kinda known for. And talk more about that in a minute. But first let's talk about what you're going to look for if you're choosing a dog.
20. What to look for in a DAW: Okay, when you're trying to decide what dy you should use, that are kind of three factors worth considering. And then a fourth that's not really worth considering. I'm gonna tell you about it anyway. So number 1. First and foremost, are you on a Mac or a PC? Because it used to be true that some dogs or work on Mac and some work on PC at this point. And all of the major Dawes that I can think of off the top my head have both versions for Mac and PC. So it's not that big of an issue with one exception, logic. If you want to use logic, you must be on a Mac. Logic is owned by Apple, and so they don't have a PC version and they probably never will. So if you have, if you're on a Mac, you could choose logic. If you're on a PC. Cross out logic, that's not an option for you. But I believe all the other major does have PC versions. There was a NMAC versions. It was a holdout for awhile with fl Studio for a long time, didn't have a Mac version, but they do now. And I think all the other ones do. So that's the first thing to consider, is, is there a version for your computer, which pretty much means, are you considering logic? The second thing is hardware compatibility. So we talked about the audio interface before. That's the thing that you have to worry about. Does that hardware interface work with the doll that you want to use? Not all hardware interfaces will work with all does. But the good news is, most of them will work with most das. So it's probably true that your hardware interface will work with your DAW. The big exception here is if you're considering Pro Tools. If you're considering Pro Tools, then you have to think about what hardware interface you get. Because Pro Tools makes their own hardware interface. And they really like to work with only their hardware interfaces. So if you're going to use Pro Tools, you should get a Pro Tools audio interface. Now they do just recently in the last couple of years they have come out with versions of pro tools that we'll use some other hardware interfaces. So that is possible, but not all of them will work with Pro Tools. Pro Tools quite finicky about the hardware that it chooses to use. So if you want to use Pro Tools and you already have an audio interface, be sure and look up the specs for your hardware interface and make sure that it's compatible with Pro Tools and the specific version of Pro Tools that you get. Because not all of them work with all the different versions of Pro Tools. It's really bizarre and hard to keep track of. If you're not considering Pro Tools, then the odds are that your hardware is going to work with your audio interface. But before you buy any software, it would be good to look up the hardware that you have and make sure it's compatible with the kind of software that you want to get. It probably is, but always good to check before you buy anything. So that's number two. Number three is probably the biggest one, and that is just price. Some of these applications, these software can be expensive and it can be cheap. There are doors available for free, and there are some available for $10 thousand and that range. So that's what you're working with between free and $10 thousand. Most of the applications are in the three to $500 range. I think logic is about $200, I think live is in this 5 $500 range, I think. But they do offer an educational discount. So if you're a student somewhere, anywhere, you can, which you are, you can get it for roughly half price. So that takes it down to two hundred, fifty, three hundred dollars. Pro Tools is the one that gets really expensive. Because sometimes you have to buy the hardware with it and they have big professional versions and it just gets silly. So the price can vary wildly. But you know, there are free applications like there's a program called ardor that is great and it's free. There's things like GarageBand that people use that I wouldn't quite call a professional tool. Garageband is quite limited in what you can do. So it's not really a professional tool. But there's a good amount of things you can do with GarageBand. And it just, I believe it's free if you have a Mac and just kinda comes with your computer. And it's fine for getting started. Um, but if you really fall in love with GarageBand, I would encourage you to upgrade to logic, which is a kind of an easy step up. More on that later. Okay, So price is probably the, the, is the third kind of big factor. The last factor that is maybe worth considering, maybe not. But people do consider it, is hipness. This is a weird thing, but there are certain genres where it's cool to be using certain software. There's not a great reason for it. It's just kind of the cool thing to do. I guess. If you are making techno, bass music, things like that, then Ableton is probably the best thing to consider. You can make all of those genres with any DAW. But the cool people are using able to, I guess, if you were doing big recording sessions, Pro Tools is the standard thing to have. Although you can do that with any of the programs. If you're making big pounding dubstep with real gritty base and stuff like that. Then the cool thing to have is FL Studio. But again, there's no real logic to this. You can make all of these things with all the different programs. It's just kinda of what people are using for really good reason. So if that's a concern for you, that you'd be taken seriously within this genre by having the right tools, then you can consider that. But you don't really need to consider it because it's not very real. But I thought I'd mentioned it. Okay. Let's move on and talk about my highly opinionated list of common ducts.
21. Highly Opinionated DAWs: Okay, I'm going to
go over this list. This is this all changes
fairly wildly, the cost. So look up the cost before
you make any real decisions. This is just what it is lately. There's a couple of
things that I've left off this list just because I didn't think of it when
I was making the list, but now I'm thinking of it. I'll talk about those
in just a second. We're going to go over this list and then in the next video, I'm going to tell you just For the money, here's
what I would do. First, let's talk through this. I've listed here a bunch of the different
Daw applications, what a big summary of their
strengths in my mind, the general cost and
some notes about them. So Ableton Live, I've
already talked about, Its strength is performance
and production. This performance thing
means that it has the ability to if you see
somebody like DJ live, they might be using Ableton Live because it's really the only one that has
that built into it, the ability to use it
as a performance tool. But it's also really
solid for production. The cost ranges between $99.06 99 because they
have different versions. There's an intro version, and then what they call
a standard version, and then what they
call the Site. The site is 699, the intro is 99. If you want to do
professional work, you have to have
the suite, I think. But you can always upgrade. Getting a smaller
version and then upgrading to a bigger
version is cheap, so something worth considering. Next on the list, Pro tools. Its big strength is recording. I find editing and working in
pro tools to produce music, to generate music to be really cumbersome and
somewhat frustrating. But to record, it is the
industry standard right now for a big recording studio. They're probably going
to be using pro tools. It also has various versions, it's between 699 and up to 2000. It usually needs
its own hardware, which makes that
price jump a lot. If you get one of the big
Pro Tools HD systems, it's going to be up in
that 10,000 or more range. The other thing
I'll add about this based on some recent experience, is that Pro Tools. The parent company of
Pro Tools is Avid, AVID. Avid is the company
that owns Pro Tools. I was recently doing
some work with Pro Tools and some
pro tools hardware, and I had to deal with
their tech support, which I was warned against
doing because people had told me how just utterly horrible their
tech support is. But I had no choice, and I
went to their tech support, and I can confirm it was one of the worst
experiences of my life. So I really don't advise anyone
using pro tools anymore, because their tech
support is so awful that I just don't think any human should be
treated that way, to be honest. So Ptol not my favorite.
Okay, moving on. Logic. The big
strength of logic, I think is software instruments. Meaning, if you want to simulate the sound
of an orchestra, Logic is really good at that. It's really good at
making things sound real. You can do that in any
of these programs. But it's really just built into logic that you can
queue up an orchestra, that's going to
sound pretty real. It can handle a lot of what we call virtual instruments
all at the same time. It's quite good for that. The costs 499. I think I
recently saw this down at 299, maybe even 199.
Maybe it was a sale. Note, there's no PC version
because Apple owns it. Digital performer is really
good at MD sequencing. It's good at other stuff too. Digital performer is not very
popular. I don't know why. It's made by a company
called Mark of the Unicorn. It's a great
program. It's great. I think it just didn't make it into any of those
hipness categories. So it's not particularly
fashionable, but, it's a solid program. Ard. Arder is basically
a pro tools clone. It's designed to look
and act like pro tools. It's open source and free. So That means that arder can be a little
tricky to set up, although it's gotten
a lot better. But it's a full
featured program. It's totally free. Check
it out, you might like it. I know people, professional
producers that use arder. It can be a great option. It's if something
is open source, that means that ally, that means that their tech
support might be nonexistent, but there's usually a
really big community of users who are willing to help you if you have a problem. So Check it out. It's worth considering.
I believe it's for Mac and PC and like Linux and
some other weird platforms. Q base. Similar category to digital performer.
It's a great program. I don't have any
problems with it at all. It's not as hip
as anything else, but a lot of people are using Q base and having great results. Check out Q base if you like. Reason. Reason is
a weird program. For a long time, reason only did midi sequencing
and synthesis, but it was really good at
synthesis, and it still is. I think you can do
audio sequencing. Now sequencing means like
moving stuff around in time. But that's relatively new. If you're really into synthesis, then reason is good for that. But It's not very popular because for a long
time it was basically only a synthesis tool and wasn't a full
featured D. Again, I think it is now,
but has fallen to the bottom of the
list because for a long time you weren't able to do projects in it. Renois is a weird one
that I just thought I'd throw on there
because I like it. It's a weird program. It's
really fun for making beats. It's really cheap and I
just wrote that it's new. It needs some time to mature. At this point, I don't really think it's all that new anymore, but it's Garage band. It's good at introducing
people to possibilities. It's free on a MAC, but there's no PC version of it, and it's not really
a professional tool. But it's great for introducing people to what you can do
on a computer with music. But you can't really make professional quality
work on it because it just it's got a lot of training wheels
on it, so to speak. It doesn't let you have full
control over the program. Notably, left off
here is FL Studio, FL Studio is really popular with Dub Step people
and other people, a lot of EDM stuff. It's probably comparable
to Ableton Live. I don't know what it costs, but it's on Mac and PC
now. It's a great program. It works a little
bit differently and I don't know
it all that well. I have poked around
with it a little bit. What I see in the interface
is a little confusing to me. I think it's different
than some other programs, but they're all
slightly different. It definitely has that
hipness thing to it. If you're on a PC, especially, and if you want to make Dub Step or anything similar to that. Then FL Studio might
be your go to thing. But So it's definitely
worth considering. Okay. So this is my
highly opinionated list. But let's go into, let me just tell you
what I think you should get if you don't have anything and you're
just getting started.
22. For the Money...: Okay, So I'm going to break this down by the best free option, the best low-price option, the best mid-price option, and the best expensive option. That might be too many categories, but we'll see. So the best free option is harder, I think. Now, a lot of people have asked me in the past about this program called Audacity. Audacity is a free program as well. You should get it because it's free. Why not? But audacity isn't to me a full feature DAW. Audacity is really good at a couple of things, but I really wouldn't want to make a full track in audacity. I think that would be painful to do. I don't think it's really designed to do that. It's designed to do some things and we will look at audacity in this class. But I wouldn't consider it a full-featured DAW. So hold on to Audacity for a little while. Yeah, We'll talk about it more later. But for full-featured DAW, I'm gonna go with Arther. There's another one that's popular. Right now. It's four letters and starts with an L. I want to say element OP, but that's on it. L, L, M, and S was at it, something like that. A lot of people are using that one and really liking it. I think it's PCA only. So you might check that out. But in my experience, Arther has been better. So best free, go with art or if you're look, if you don't have any money and you're like I just wanted to get in and start making stuff. Try harder. Best, inexpensive. So inexpensive, I'm thinking under a $100. For that I'm going to go with again, this is super opinionated, but I'm gonna go with Ableton little light. That's their intro version. I think that's a really good way to get you started. You can do a lot with Ableton light. And you can always upgrade to the full version from there. So able to enlight. You can get it for a 100 bucks, maybe under a 100 bucks. And you can actually get it for free a lot of time, it comes with hardware and things like that. They like give you a free license. So it's worth considering that best mid-price. I'm thinking in the two to $300 range, I'm probably going to go with logic on that, assuming that it's that 199 price I saw recently is going to stick then and go with logic. If you're on a PC, maybe FL Studio is in the same range. So logic or FL, depending on what the price of FL is. Okay. I just looked up what the price of FL is. So FL Studio right now, comparable to Ableton. So they have an intro version at $99, and then they have a couple middle versions, and then their full version as 737 is what I'm saying. Dollar. So to that mid-range might be logic or the 299 version, which is the middle version of FL Studio, might be a good option. And then the best if money is no option, what should you get? And I'm going to go with Ableton Live. I'm not going to go with Pro Tools just because I can't do it. Ableton Live sweet or logic, the full version of logic, possibly. But for me, Ableton Live sweet as the best one if money is no object. If you're into FL Studio that full version at 737, it's good option as well. So that's what I would do.
23. The 4 Sections in Every DAW: Okay. So regardless of what DAW program you're using, they all kind of work the same. They all have different layouts in different ways. You have to click here and click there to do different things. But there are similarities in all the dots. In particular. They will all have kind of four main areas. You might have to open separate windows to get all those areas, or they might be all packed into one window in Ableton Live here, they're all packed into one window. So those four areas are, number one, the timeline. All of these programs are going to have some kind of timeline. Number to the mixer. Number 3, the Effects section, and number 4, the transport. They're all going to have those four things somewhere. So what I wanna do for the next couple of videos is go through each of those in my idea here. And my hope is that no matter what program you're using are looking at, you'll be able to follow along. I'm going to use live. But you could be looking at GarageBand or ardor or FL Studio and be able to follow along with this next section just fine, because we're not gonna go into the details of how to use any of these programs specifically, but how each of these areas kinda work together to help you make or record music. Cool. So no matter what program you're working on, you should be able to follow along with this discussion on these four sections. Okay, So let's dive in first with the timeline.
24. The Timeline: Okay, so the timeline is probably the biggest part of your program. For me, it's this big chunk of stuff here. What this lets me do is look at all my content K. So it might be audio stuff, might be midi stuff. If I go down to the bottom, I think I have Mideast stuff. Maybe I don't have any midi in this session. Are some note there. That's a midi track, those little dots. That means you're looking at midi information. And these waveforms tells us we're looking at audio information. So you might have many staff, you might have audio stuff. And the key thing here is that you can move it around. Okay, so I've got this that's happening here. Maybe I want to put it there. I can move it around. You know, maybe I just want to copy this part and put it over there. I can do that. I can adjust things and move it around within the timeline. Always in a timeline, time flows from left to right. So if I play this, you'll see what we call the playhead. Kinda moving across the screen. And everything sounds when it gets to the play head. Now we also here have tracks, okay? Each one of these horizontal lines, groups of things is called a track. So each track has its own settings that we can control when we talk about the mixer. But you can think of this as analogous to a musical score. That's really what it's designed to be like, right? In a score we have each instrument has its own line and then we read from left to right. So this works exactly the same. Every instrument has its own line and we read from left to right, or in this case, the computer reads from left to right. Generally, we can make things bigger or smaller. If we want to really get in there and see what's going on. Or we can tuck it away and make it nice and small. You can usually look at your timeline either in terms of bars and beats, which in Ableton is at the top. If I zoom in here, you can see 25 means bar 25. 25, 0.2 means bar 25 beat to 25. 0.3 means beat 3, 25, 0.4 means 25 beat four. And then we get to 26. Stuff in between 25. 0.4.3 means bar 25 before third 16th note, because what that means, and that timing mechanism works a little bit different in each of the programs. They might do this a little similar. You might also just see time in minutes and seconds Live. We have minutes and seconds at the bottom. So here we're at 49 seconds, 49.5 seconds, 50 seconds. You will also in a lot of timelines, be restricted to working on a grid. So you can see here these little blocks, if I try to move this over, it's going to make me land on those blocks. Okay. I can easily turn that off by control clicking and just say off. And now I can move this anywhere. And I'm not restricted to the blocks. But we generally like to be on some kind of a grid so that we know what's going on. But that's how the timeline works. We have content, we can move it around, we can cut copy paste. I'll talk more about how to do that in a second. When we talk about common key commands. And we can just work on our arrangement. That's where the majority of your work is going to be really in the timeline. At least when you're producing music. When you're mixing music, you're going to mostly be in the mixer section. So let's go on and talk about the mixer. Now.
25. The Mixer: The mixer section for me is over here. You might also have it on the bottom. And you might have to open this in a different window. So if you go in your program, if you go up to the menu that says View and then select mixer, can see the mixer. I have a few different ways. I can look at the mixer in live. I can look at it like this over here. Or I can press the Tab key and then look at it in a way that might look more like how it looks in the other programs. So I'm going to stay on this view because most of you are probably seeing something that looks like this. Now there are a few things in the mixer section that all mixers have. The first is the ability to control the volume for that track. Okay, so let's look at this one. Okay, so I can turn it up. I can turn it down. Okay. So I can control the volume of it. The other thing that is common in just about every mixer section is panning. Panning means the left to right balance. We always, almost always working with two speakers, okay, so you have one on the left side and one on the right side. The reason we do that is because we have two ears, one on the left side and one on the right side. We want to kind of emulate that. So with this knob, which is called panning, we can decide how much of the sound goes to the left speaker and how much to the right speaker. When it's straight up. That means the sound is going equally to both speakers. Okay? So if I push this to the left, we're going to hear it moved to the left side. If I push it to the right, we're going to hear it move to the right side. Now, if that was backwards for you, the camera does a weird mirror imaging thing. So I'm not sure if that's going the right direction, but to me, that's left and that's right. So let me demonstrate that by going over to the master channel, which is another thing that all mixers will have a master. This is the last thing. This is a composite of all of our tracks go here. Okay, So this was everything. So if I go all the way left now, it should all the way be in your left speaker phone. Nothing out of your right speaker said my voice. Send it over to the right. Now it's all the way. If you didn't hear that panning, it could be because of the way this video is compressed. Sometimes the panning doesn't come with it and they just get rid of the padding and the video compression. It's weird. But you can see in the meter here, you see two signals. Now you only see the left signal. Now you only see the right signal. So you can tell it's working. Okay. Another thing that is common in all mixer sections is a mute. Mute means turn this track off. Okay, So for me it's this big yellow button in LA. So I can say this one. So now you can see it kinda got grayed out and we're not I'm hearing this. Anyone can get a whole bunch of stuff, commute all the drums. Now all the drums are going. So you can unmute him by turning him back on drums. We also have solo. That's the S for me. Solo means mute, everything else except this track. Okay? So for this thing, the whole thing, I say solo, we're just going to hear this kick drum, right? I can see what's on this. It's here. Turn it up. So solo mutes everything except what we are currently hearing or accept what we've selected solo on. And then the last thing that almost all mixers will have on each track is a record button. This means arm to record. It doesn't mean start recording. So what these always mean is five press record on one of these, it'll turn red. Red is like the universal color for record. So it'll turn red. And then it'll wait for me to press the record button up here. And when I do, it will start recording on that track that I've said to record two. So we call this arm to record mean, meaning when I start recording, we're going to record on that track. If I don't select, if I don't press that button on any track and I just hit record and start recording. There's no track that was actually just recording. So you'll find those controls in every mixer on any program. They might look a little different, but all of those things are going to be in all of the programs.
26. The Effects Section: Okay, Next, there's going to be an effects section. So you can put effects on any track. Effects are things like you might be familiar with, something like distortion. That looks like, well, they're all going to look different. But you know what distortion is probably it's going to add some fuzz to the sound. We also have things like reverb, even AUTO-TUNE. Those are all effects. We're just going to change the sound. Now it's important. Let me actually put one more thing on here just to demonstrate something here. It's important to remember when you're thinking about effects, the idea of a signal flow. Signal flow means that there's always a path that the audio is going to go through your program. Okay? For me, and this is true in most programs. This is my Effects section. And the audio is going to come in here and out here. And it's going to flow through these effects this way, right? That means that this effect is going to come before this effect. And that's important. There are cases when you want the effects in a certain order and you can usually just kinda drag them around to reorder them. But it's important to remember that in this case what I have is distortion coming through and then reverb. So that reverb is going to be applied to the distorted signal. That should be okay, but maybe I want it the other way around. So we get reverb and then distortion so that the reverb sound, the kind of echo sound has distortion on it as well. Both ways could work, but it's a decision I should make. There are other cases where the order of the effect is going to be more extreme. So it's just one thing to think about. Another thing to think about with the effects section is that this is where you're going to put plugins k. So in some programs, they have separated audio effects and plug-ins into two separate categories. That's how Ableton does it, sometimes will all be lumped together. But plugins are typically their own little program. You can think of plug-ins as a whole separate program, but they run inside of your DAW. And they do different audio effects. Or they might be synthesisers or sound making things as well. So these are going to look very different than my effects that are built into the program. The effects built-in to the program or the things made by the program. But these things like, let's grab this guitar rig. So when I load up this guitar rig, it pops open a new window and is a whole separate program. But my signal, my audio is still flowing in and out of that effect on either side. But it is its own really kinda program. I can close it and it'll still work. But plugins are made by other companies. Usually, you can find hundreds of millions of plugins around the internet. And there, some of them are cheap, some of them are free, some of them are expensive. It all depends on what you're looking for. We'll talk more about plug-ins later. But that's the effect section.
27. The Transport: The last chunk that all applications have as some kind of transport section. For me, the transport is this top part. This tells me the easiest way to spot the transport is it's going to have your big play Stop record buttons on it. But there's some other important stuff here too. You might have your loop settings here. This is how I turn on a loops. If I want a section of the song to just loop. This is where I know the tempo of my song. This is where I know the meter. This is a metronome that I can use if I'm recording. So the transport section is probably the easiest section to understand, but it's something that you should not forget about. There are a lot of important things here. They're all pretty specific to each DOD 0. This tells me where my loop starts and how long it is. These are overdubbing controls. So what happens when I record over audio or midi that's already there. And then stop play and record. This is our current position. This means follow along. So if I go back over to my timeline and let me turn off the metronome. If I press this follow along button. Transport is going to stay still, but the music is going to follow underneath it. I generally like it gets kinda relaxing to watch actually. Anyway. So don't forget about your transport section. It is important, but it's also relatively simple.
28. Nearly Universal Key Commands: Okay, when you're working in your DAW, there are a couple of key commands that are newly universal. They're almost always the same in all programs. Now, I'm not a big fan of saying you should memorize thousands of key commands. Like some people are though if you, and if you get really good at a DAW, you will eventually know a lot of the key commands for it. Just because you'll find yourself doing the same thing a 100 times in a row. And then you'll just say, Hey, is there a key command for that just to save myself some work? And there probably is. So key commands are good to know. I'm not a fan of just saying you should sit down and study the list of key commands and memorize all of them. That's not very useful to me. Memorize the ones that you're going to use all the time. But these few that I'm about to tell you are the same and virtually all programs that I've found and are really useful to know. The first and most common is the spacebar. The spacebar in just about every application I've ever worked in, means play and stop. It's a toggle. So I am currently stopped. I put my cursor somewhere and I press the space bar and it's going to start playing. I press the Spacebar again and it's going to stop. Space-bar. Always beans play and stop. Another thing that's a nearly universal key command is anything you can do in a text editor. So if I select something and I'm going to press Command C. Now I want to Mac if you're on a PC, I think it's Option C or control C. But for me it's Command C. To copy something. I can click out of it goes somewhere else. And Command V to paste. I can Command D to duplicate and Command X to cut. So if I just want to get rid of something Command X, that is true in every program I've ever worked with. I'm pretty sure it's the same text editor stuff, right? Like copy, paste, cut, duplicate. Maybe duplicate isn't one of them, but Command D is almost always duplicate. So file those away in the back of your head. Those are probably the most common things you're going to need. And it's really handy to have to. There you go. Nearly universal key commands.
29. Care and Feeding of Your DAW: So a couple of things about working in a DAW that are just generally good practice. The first is I would say, keep your program updated whenever there's new updates that come out, run them. If you're doing professional work and want to be working on a professional level, should always be working on the latest tools. So keep your application up to date. Um, when there's a major update, like when it shifts by a number, like able to intend to able to 11 that you might stop and think about for for a few days to decide when it's a good time to convert. But for little updates, things that are like live 10.2 to 10.3, that would be considered a little update. Then just run them. Run them because they're probably going to make your program more stable and they might even give you some new features. So always just keep everything up to date. Now for those big updates, I also recommend that you work on the latest version. But keep in mind that you can, usually you can't go backwards. So if you do something in Ableton Live 11, for example, you cannot, you can no longer open it. In Ableton Live 10. You can't go backwards, but you can always go forward. Anything you made an Ableton Live 10, you will be able to open and able to live 11. That's true of all software, I think. But I do recommend you are on the highest number, latest version, whatever it's called. Second thing to keep in mind, if you want to be doing professional work, get the biggest version of the program. If you're going to start with something like, like going back to FL Studio, like those smaller versions of FL Studio. That's fine. But make it a goal to graduate up to the highest version. You'll get to a point where you're like, I can't do anything with this program anymore, then it's time to update to the newest version. The more you use it, the more you learn it, the more you'll become aware of the limitations that the lighter version, the smaller version and the cheaper version halves. So always make it a goal of getting to the biggest version as time and money, mostly money allows. With that being said, Let's talk about having a cracked version of the software. Now I know a lot of people are totally fine with working on crack software. That means if you're not familiar, that means you've basically downloaded the software off some website somewhere and you didn't legally buy it. I'm, you know, I'm not a warrior about this. I don't really care about stuff like that. You do what you gotta do. However, let me just see this into your head. Once you make something with that software and you're making money, then by that software. Cool. Can we come to agreement on that? And I probably shouldn't say this, but I'm going to especially true if you are working with one of the smaller accompanies, right? Ableton, for example, is there's no parent company to Ableton, able to make Ableton, and that's how they employ a bunch people. And they're all such good people. So by the software. But if you buy a copy of logic and you know, give apple another a 100 dollars, is it going to change anyone's life? Probably not. So maybe consider that. But there's another downside and that's that crack software often has problems, right? Like if you're into using this kind of software, you've probably encountered problems with it. The biggest problem is that you usually can't update it. And so you're, you're locked into whatever you have. And it might have some glitches in it because of the cracking process, that process of removing the license verification stuff. So I'll just reiterate, you do what you gotta do. I'd rather you were making music than not making music. So do what you gotta do to get the software to make music. But if you ever make something and you sell it, you sell a track. The minute you make $1. With music you've made, promise me, you'll get rid of that crack copy by illegal copy. Or before. Always better to have the full legit version so that you can update it. You can get support, you can get extensions to it. I mean, if you have a crack version of Ableton and you go to Ableton and say I have a cracked version of lives light, can I upgrade the sweet they're going to say no. But if you have a legal version and he tried to upgrade to sweet, then yeah, it's cheap to do. So okay, enough on that. Do what you gotta do. But think about the little people working at the company. Okay, let's move on.
30. What is the Grid?: Okay, up next, let's talk about how we organize sound in our DAW application. Now throughout this whole section, I'm going to be using Ableton Live, but you're welcome to use whatever you want. Everything that we talk about in this section. And actually probably from here on out until the end of the class, unless I specifically pointed out is true and just about every professional die and even not professional die, even like GarageBand, this is probably all still true. So you can use whatever software you want and follow along, you'll be just fine. So we talked about in the last section the kind of four different areas. We're going to focus in here on the timeline, and we're gonna talk about the grid. Every program works on kind of a grid system. So let me just throw something in here. I'm just going to grab a little clip. Let me find like a drumbeat shirt. Throw that on to an audio track. How about right there? Okay. Now you can see that we have these little rectangles here, right? These might look different and the different software, but see that I kind of snap to them. I can't get in-between those two things, but I actually can. We'll talk about that in just a minute. But when I talk about the grid, this is what we're talking about. And it's the way that our software snaps into the grid. Okay, so that snap to grid thing means that we're going to stay locked into different spots here. Now, this is generally good. If you're making any kind of beat based music, you want to be locked into the grid like that. Because that's going to keep everything nice and tight and it's going to sound good as long as you started on downbeats, basically more on that in a minute. If you're not making beat based music, you don't want to be on a grid, right? If you're making more abstract music, may be ambient music, anything like that, you want the freedom to be anywhere you can beat. So you would turn off the grid. This is going to be different in any program, but for Ableton, I'm going to Control click anywhere on the grid, get this menu, and then go to off. Okay, now you can see those grid lines are still there but they're dotted lines. And I can just put stuff wherever I want. And I can zoom way in and just really put things where I want. Now, look at this. This is one of the biggest problems that people do when they're just getting started out. And that is, they think they're on the grid. If they're not snapping to the grid, they might do something like this where sure looks like I'm on the grid right there at that 20. Right. But if I zoom way in, I am not on the grid. So that is going to make problems if I'm doing beat based things. So always zoom way into your grid and make sure you're right on it, even if you're not snapping to it. If you want to be on the grid, get right up on their zoom in as far as you can. Make sure you're right on that line. And I'm going to zoom out, I'm there. Okay, so let's talk about what this grid actually is. So first let's talk about the kind of the horizontal element of the grid, and then we'll talk about the vertical element.
31. Horizontal = Time: Okay, so the first thing I'm gonna do here is I'm going to turn my grid back on. So I'm going to go to this adaptive grid medium. Actually, let's go smaller than that. No. Now we're back to where we were. So we're going to talk about the horizontal element here. Okay, So going across this way, what are we saying? First, let's talk about that thing I just did. So if I go here, I have two choices for my grid. I have adaptive grid and fixed grid. You probably have this your software to. So if I say fixed grid and I say one bar, what that means is we're going to see every bar, each one of these blocks is now one bar. If I zoom way in, we're looking at one bar from dark line, dark line. I'm seeing beats here. But it's going to snap me to every bar, right? It's only going to let me do things on the bar here. Okay? So if I want this drumbeat to start on beat two, I can't do it. I can only start on the first, on this bar or this bar. Okay, so it's a little prohibitive. So let's say half-note. Okay, now we're slicing the barn half. Now I can start on, on beat three of the bar, which is halfway. So if we look here, here's, well, let's go all the way back to the beginning so that it's a little more obvious. There we go. Okay, Here's bar one. Okay, Here's B2, right? So there's a halfway point. So that's why we said half. Half because I've sliced the bar in half. It's a quarter. Now I've sliced the bar into quarters and I can start anything on a quarter note. Now important that no matter how far I zoom in here, I'm only going to be able to put things on the quarter note. If I drop something right here, it doesn't even move. It's either there or there or there. I can't get anywhere in between because that's what my grade is doing. No matter how far I'm zoomed in. K so I can make it smaller and smaller. But if I go to this adaptive grid setting, what this means is what I'm going to snap to depends on how far I'm zoomed in. So let's go to narrow. Okay, so now I'm looking at actually 30-second nodes. So let's zoom out a little bit. Okay, Now I'm looking at 16th notes. So I can snap to 16th notes. Each one of these is a 16th note. Let's zoom out a little bit more. Okay, Now I'm all the way back looking at half notes again. Okay, so I can get out a half-note. I can get on another half note. I can't get anywhere in between. But if I wanted to get more in-between these two spots, I can zoom in just a tiny bit. Non looking at quarter notes. Okay. If I wanted to get in-between these two quarter notes, could zoom in a little bit more. There we go. Now I'm looking at 16th or eighth notes. Okay? If I wanted to get in between these two spots and zoom in a little bit more. There we go. Now I'm looking at 16th notes. If I wanted to get in between these two, zoom in a little bit more. Now I'm looking at 30-second nodes. And I can keep going and going and going and going and going. Now I'm looking at 2048th notes. Okay, so incredibly, incredibly small. So in this adaptive mode, your grid is dependent on what you're zoomed into, Okay? Now not all programs do this next thing, but in able to in you can always tell how far you're zoomed in by looking into lower right corner, right there it says 8th. I'm looking at eighth notes now. Each of these boxes is an eighth note and zoom in a little farther. Now I'm looking at 16th notes, farther, 30-second notes. I go in. Okay, Here's 16384th notes. Pretty quick. Cool. So that's an important element of the grid. I almost always, for my purposes, keep this on adaptive grid narrow. Now, another important element, and the horizontal line of our grid is that we start our, if we have a clip that's beat based, right? So in this audio file, there are, it's a beat, right? Here's what's happening. All right, so the first spot of the clip right here is on a downbeat. And if I set that right, then the rest of the clip is going to be in time. Okay, Here's another downbeat because it's a whole note, a whole number, I should say. And it's right on it, right? It's lined up. So if everything lines up, right, our drum loop here is going to be perfectly on the beat. Assuming it's recorded or adjusted to fit into the beat that we have. We'll talk more about that later. We can stretch something to fit our tempo. Ableton does that automatically for you. Other programs do it automatically for you. There are some settings behind it. We'll talk more about that later. But it's important to know that if my downbeat is lined up right, the rest of the beat will be lined up right. Now we're going to go into, in a minute, we're gonna go into making a beat from scratch, in which case we'll just have smaller things like this. Like here's a kick. Here's the snare. And we put a snare again and again and then our kick again. And with these, we just need to manually line them up. So we'll talk more about that in a minute. Last thing about this horizontal layer is the numbering. If you look up here, I think we talked about this already. But just a reminder. If you see a whole number, so just the number 2. That means we are at bar two because that's the number to beat one. If you see a number dot and other number, that means in this case B2, B2. Okay, Here's B2, B3, B2, B4. And then we're gonna go to bar three because there are four beats in a bar. Now if I zoom in a little farther, we're going to see note in between there. So now we have bar to be 1. Third 16th note, okay, there are 4 16th notes possible, so 1234, that makes the third 16th note the halfway point. Okay? Because this is, these are, this is B1 and B3. So the way ableton does it is bar dot B, f.16 eighth note. Other programs might do something different. You might see a, a weirder number in the end. But almost all of them do bars, dot, beat, and then either dot 16th note, or they might use a different timing mechanism for the last number. You can also look at this in terms of time. If we go down here, the bottom, we see time three seconds, 3.5 seconds, four seconds, 4.5 seconds. The seconds you might think, Oh, that's what I want to see because that's more familiar to me. It's actually much less useful. Because what I really care about is where things are on the grid. The grid is the most important thing here. Not so much the timing. Okay? We'll work more with this once we start building and beat, which we'll do in just a couple of videos. But, but first let's talk about the vertical axis.
32. Vertical = Tracks: Okay, on the vertical axis, we have tracks. Each one of these is a track. Okay? So we've already talked about the two kinds of tracks we can have here. We have audio tracks, which are these two. And we have midi tracks, which are these two. When it comes to the grid, they basically, we're saying a couple things when you're working on a project that you're going to want to do. First, try to group things together. These are both drums, so I'm going to keep them side-by-side. You can always rearrange things by just dragging them. So if I wanted this to be in between those two, I can just drag this track above there. And now it's there. That doesn't change anything, just keeps things tidy. The next one is name your tracks. So if I go here and for me I'm going to press Command R to rename this. I'm going to call this. Well, let's see. We have kick and snare is what I have on this track. So I'm actually going to break this out into two different tracks. I'm going to call that kick that I'm going to duplicate it. And I'm going to delete my kicks from this one and delete my snares from that one. Now I'm going to call this snare. I like to, when we're working with individual drum sounds, or actually any individual sounds, keep them on separate tracks as much as you can. Sometimes you just can't do that. But in a case like this, I only have kicks on this track. So let's call that kick. Now I'm going to have only snares on this track. So let's call that snares. This makes it a lot easier when you get into the mixing phase. I can do things to my KEK without affecting my snares if they're on separate tracks. So for example, if I turn the volume of this kick way down, that's fine. I can do that if I have it set up like this. But if the snares are also on that track, now I've turned down the volume of my kick and my snares. So that's less convenient. Now I have separate volume adjustment for my kick and my snares. Not to mention all of the effects I might put on there. If I put some effects on this kick, I might not want those to be on the snare. So having them on separate tracks, any individual sounds, try to put on separate tracks. They'll just keep things more organized. It might make it so you have tons and tons of tracks, but that's okay. That's how big sessions work. This one has kicks and snares and hi-hats because this is a whole loop. Okay, so I'm going to call this drum loop because it's got a whole loop on it. That's going to tell me this is a lot of different stuff. Cool. So name your tracks and keep them grouped kinda close together. By similar sounds, right? If I had a synthesizer here and a synthesizer here, I'd keep those close together just so that my synths are together. Okay, So none of that will really affect the sound where these are ordered. But it just makes it easier to keep track of things as you start to build a whole song using this stuff.
33. How DAWs Handle Meter: Okay, Let's go back to the horizontal element a little bit. And I want to point out one kind of weird thing about how these programs work when it comes to meter. Okay, so first let's talk about what a meter is. So all music is in a time signature. And if you don't know what time signatures are, I guess I'm not going to go into huge amount of detail about how different time signatures work here in this video. But let's just focus on the difference between a time signature like 44 and a time signature like 34. Okay? So in 4, 4, we have four beats in a measure. And the beat is a quarter note. That's the bottom number. It's a four. So we're going to call it a quarter note. And there are four of those in a measure. Okay? So for example, this beat is in 4, 4. I'm going to solo it. So we only hear this beat. And let's count to four while we listened to it. You'll notice that it basically starts over every four beats, one, etc. Okay, so that's in 44. Now, we could have a beat that's an 3, 4. And that would be the same thing except it would line up every three beats. Okay. So be like 123123123123. Got it. Okay. We can set the time signature. Our session up here in the transport area. Okay, right now it's set to four for what I want to point out here is if I change this to 34, okay, now my session isn't 34. And now let's listen to this loop. It's still in four for changing the session. Time signature doesn't really change our content. What it changes is the grid. Okay, so let's put this and let's put this on B1. Okay, so our loop, our drum loop is now on, starts on beat 1. So now you'll see that it goes 1, 1 point 2. So bar 1, b2, bar one beat three to B2. So we're only showing on the Grid 3 beats per bar, which is correct because I've changed it to 34. However, our drum loop hasn't changed. Like the downbeat of the drum loop is still up here. This is before. Right? Before is now listed on our grid, has beat 1. So we have the wrong meter for our drum loop. Our drum loop is in 4, for our session meter is in 34. That's fine. You might choose to do that. But what it means is that our drum loop isn't going to line up on our grid very well, right? Because r greater than three and our drum loop and then four. So what I want you to get out of this video, if you're confused, is this changing the meter of our session does not change the content in it, okay? It really only changes the grid, okay? And where things line up on the grid, see this one is at bar to beat two is where this kick is. I'm gonna change it back four for now, just move to B2, right? Because it started counting at the beginning and shifted it over. Now, did it change the way it sounds? No. It changed how the grid is arranged, but it did not change how it sounds. Important thing to understand. Moving on.
34. Vocabulary: Downbeats, Upbeats, and Offbeats: Okay, We're going to start moving towards making a beat. And we're going to make a beat using individual hits like these. Before we do that though, let's talk about a little bit of vocabulary. Okay, So we have here, and let me do this. Okay? So this bar here is showing us one measure, one bar k, four beats. So a little bit of vocabulary about building a beat. There are really 43 elements to a beat. There are downbeats, upbeats, and offbeats. Downbeats. There's only one downbeat per bar. And it is here. Okay, It is the beginning of the bar. That is the downbeat. Okay? The next downbeat in time doesn't happen until the beginning of the next bar. Okay? Those are our downbeats. The upbeat, it's halfway through right there, which is going to be beat three, halfway between two downbeats. So if our downbeats are hearing here, are upbeat, is right here on beat 344. There is only one upbeat per bar, because it's halfway. Unless we're in double time, which we'll talk more about that later. And then the third thing is our offbeat. So our offbeat make a new track here. Are, offbeat is going to be in-between every beat. There are four of the four off beats per bar. So here's B1. B2, halfway is, is the third 16th note. Those are our offbeats because it's off the beat. Hey, there are four of those and every bar k. So downbeats, offbeats, upbeat or sorry, downbeats, upbeats and offbeats for offbeats, for every bar. One upbeat and one downbeat gave these terms are going to be important because we're going to build a little drum loop and we're going to need all of those terms. Okay? All right, Next, let's talk about the elements that go into making a beat.
35. Elements of the Beat: Kick, Snare, Hi Hats: Okay, What sounds go into a beat? Now we're going to start by making what we call the world's most simple drumbeat. Okay, this is going to be no thrills. So there can be anything in a drumbeat, you know, you can use spoons clanking together. You can use hitting on your desk. Any percussive sound like that. One of the most famous producers right now, dead mouse talks about using farts for to take the place of stairs. You can do that if you wanted to. We're not gonna do that here though. We're going to use the three most basic things to build our first beat, okay? And the three most basic things at any beat needs is a kick, snare, and a high hat. Okay, those three things. So I basically have kicks, snares and high hats here, but I'm going to erase them because all three of these things I pulled from this loop. So let's get rid of those. I'm going to un-solo this loop and then I'm going to mute it because I don't want to hear that. So I'm going to search through my library of stuff and find some sounds. Someone's going to search for kick. Well, in school, I'm gonna go with that one. So I'm going to put a kick on my timeline. I'm going to put that on my kick track. Okay, now, you probably don't have a big library of sounds like this. This is a great opportunity to head over to a website like freesound.org. I mentioned this before. I love this website. You can find millions of things for a totally free, royalty free download all day long. Let's Of course there. As with typically happens if I'm searching through like hundreds of stairs. Like one of the first ones I just heard was the one that I want that one. I ultimately it's got a little bit of a clap to it only because that's kinda what I'm feeling like right now. Okay, so here's our snare. Hi-hat and this root for hat. Now one thing you'll notice here that a lot of these hats are little loops. And I don't want a loop right now. I just want a single hit. We sometimes call these one shots, like just a one shot of a hi-hat hit like that. That's a one-shot. That's what I'm looking for, although I don't like that one. Here. Nouns, nice, nice and thin. We'll go with that. Okay, So here are my three sounds. Kick, snare, snare, that's not a snare. Let's rename that to high hat. Okay, Now next thing I'm gonna do is shorten the sound. You see how there's a lot of empty sound at the end of these. I want to shorten these to be roughly a quarter note long. So I can grab the ends of the clip and push it in. Or I can just highlight here and delete, and then delete all this extra stuff. That's still ringing. I can draw a little fade out on it just to make sure it's not still making sound. Okay. The hi-hat, I might want even shorter, but we'll see once we start building our beat. Okay, so those are the three most basic sounds that we need for a beat. We can add in all kinds of stuff later. But this'll get us off the ground. Okay, so let's go in and start talking about the elements.
36. Building the Worlds Most Basic Beat: Okay, So here's the formula we're going to work with in order to make the most basic beat. Okay, now, before I tell you the formula, if you're not into beats and you don't have any interest in making beads. That's okay. Just use this as a way to get to know the dog. Okay. So it's just roll with me here for a few minutes. And then once you make this, then you'll kinda understand how things work on the timeline k. So just, just go with it for a second. The formula for the most basic beat is kick on, downbeat. Snare on upbeat, high hat, on offbeats. Iq. Okay, So the first thing I'm going to want to do is make sure my samples, my one-shot start right where I think they start. Okay, So if I look here, this one's got a little bit of space right there, like that. So I'm going to tighten that up and then slide that over. This one has a little bit of space. I think that's probably fine. Because we're really zoomed in here. So I think that one's okay. My kick is just like a really crazy waveform as kicks sometimes are. And we're going to leave that how it is. That'll be fine. Okay. So now I'm going to zoom out and let's get rid of these old things. Make sure I'm looking at one bar k, This is one bar. So this is B2, B3, B4. Okay, make sure you're on the right resolution. It's really easy to be zoomed way in here and be like Cool, here's my b. And then realize that your bead is like hyper fast, right? Okay, that's not interesting. We gotta make sure we're zoomed out so that we're getting the whole beat, the whole bar. Now once we build this beat, you'll be able to adjust it to do different styles. So one of the cool things is that we're going to make this beat. And then just by like nudging something around here, there you fall into a different genre entirely. Beats are very genre specific, so we can just move the kick drum over an eighth note. And suddenly you've got like drum and bass and crank up the tempo, but it's still okay. So let's start. Let's do these, each element one at a time. So let's start with getting our kick in the right spot.
37. Placing the Kick: Okay, so remember the formula, kick goes on downbeats. So our kick is on a downbeat, it's right there. Let's solo archaic. So we're only going to hear our kick and we're going to turn this loop on. Okay, So we're gonna loop one bar over and over. My loop is turned on. This is the area that's going to be looped. And here we go. 341234. Okay? If I want to double-check that I'm right, I can always turn on my metronome. And here 1234. Cool. So KYC is on beat 1. That's our downbeat. That's where we want it. And we could jazz it up a little bit by putting our kick also on the upbeat on beat three. But hold on to that for now.
38. Placing the Snare: All right, snare goes on the upbeat here. Okay, so B3 halfway. And that's gonna give us that lets us into our kick and snare at same time. So I'm going to command click solo here so that we're soloing both things. I could also just mute everything but these two, let's do that. So now my hi-hat and my drum loop is needed. Let's go back to the beginning. Okay, So far, so good. Now, I mentioned earlier the idea of double time. What we could do is take this be, and what we will do in a minute is take this beat and double everything to make it so that everything happens within the first two beats. We'll talk more about that in just a minute. But for now, let's just move on to our hi-hats.
39. Placing the Hi Hats: All right, our hi-hat are gonna go on the upbeats. Now I can exactly see my upbeat here, right? Or sorry, our hats are gonna go on the offbeat. So I have to zoom in a little bit more so I see my offbeat. It's right there. Okay, Now I'm going to copy and click right here, paste, click right here, paste, click right here, and paste. Ok. Now we have the whole thing. Okay, So let's hear it. Oops, I got to unmute my hi-hat, turn off my metronome. Cool. Now, last thing we wanna do with this is let's double it up, like I was just talking about. So to double it up, I'm going to leave my hi-hats right where they are. I'm going to move my snare to be not halfway between the bar, in the bar, but halfway between beats 13. So that puts it on beat 2. I'm also going to put it halfway between B3 and the next downbeat. It's going to put it on before. Okay, now I'm gonna take my kick and put it on beat one and also on beat three. Now let's here. It starts with getting, okay, starting to come together. There's a bit more we can do with our high hats and still be in this kind of framework of the most basic beat. So let's go to that next.
40. Having Fun with Hi Hats: Now the high hats are generally the most forgiving, meaning you can put them really kind of all over the place and make it work. But one thing we can do is we can put, take all of our high hats if we want to and put them in addition to where they are now, also put them on the beads. So I'm going to copy and paste these on the beads and basically double them up. So now they're on every beat and every offbeat. Let's hear that. Okay, Now it's starting to sound like a beat, right? You can also just kinda have fun with your adds a little bit. If you wanted to just add a few around there just for fun. If you zoom in a little farther, you can make some faster ones like that. That gets you into that kind of almost trap style that's really popular right now, that has really frantic I hat. You just do this a whole bunch and you'll get that really frantic hi-hat sound. But let's go back to this. Cool. So now we have our basic beat. So the next thing I want to do with this is make it so that I can easily loop this beat. It's not as easy as looping this beat, right? Because this is a loop. So how do I turn this into a loop? Something I can just copy and paste over and over and over. It's not there yet because if I just copy this and paste it, it can go anywhere. There's one step I can do to make it so that this is an easily livable beat. And that is called consolidating. So let's do that in the next step. To finish off our very basic b.
41. Looping and Consolidating: Okay, in order to make this a livable beat, what I wanna do is take each track and turn it into a one bar clip. Right now, this clip is only a 16th note long. Okay? But what I wanna do is have this clip B, the whole bar. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select both of these clips. And I'm going to select the empty space after them because I need to select the whole bar, including the empty space. Okay, now I'm gonna do something called Consolidate. Now different programs might call this different things they might call emerge, they might call it render in place. But in Ableton we call it consolidate. And it's Command J is the key command to do it. Like I said, I don't memorize all key commands, but this one happens to be my name, so I remember it. So I will press Command J. It's going to take a second to think, and then it's going to make our clip, one long clip. Okay, Now, this is great because now we can do is if I zoom out and I just hit Command D to duplicate, I can just duplicate this all day long and it's going to stay right perfectly in time on our grid. Look at that. Let's go to the downbeat. Here's bar 8. It perfectly right there, right? So having that one, that full one bar is nice thing to do. Let's do that with our snare. And don't forget, we need this extra empty space to make it a full beat or a full bar long. So Command J. There it is. Duplicate that out. And it's going to be perfectly in time. Same thing with our hi-hat, not forgetting the empty space Command J. Duplicate that out. Cool. All right, let's hear it one more time. Let's start from random spot. Still perfectly in time. Here's our metronome. Lovely. Now, one thing that's really fun to do is take your beat and play it against another loop. And you just kind of augmented this loop with your beat. Let's hear what that sounds like. Next. Let's kinda go. My play around with that a little bit. But I think I'm more happy with just stick into our bead. It's simple, but it's nice. Crank up step a little bit. And we've made something great. We can start adding layers to it and playing around with their beak.
42. Audio is Finicky.: Okay, In this next section, we're gonna kinda deep dive into some of the principles of audio. And now working with audio is finicky. It's not finicky in the way that it's delicate and can fall apart once it's recorded, you've got it and that's good. The thing about audio is that there's just a ton of data in audio. If we look here at this waveform, and we'll go over how to read these wave forms at a minute. But you can see there's just so many points of data. And if we zoom way, way, way in, you can see those actual points that they are. Okay? All of these points represent some number in this file. So it's a lot of data. And each one of those points can be manipulated, right? So you record something and that's only really the kind of starting point of the sound is when you record it. There's a lot you can do after you've recorded a sound to make it sound better. There's things you can do to the volume. There's things you can do to the frequencies. There's things you can do to time. You can really manipulate audio a lot because there's just so much data in it. There's so much to work with. So more on that when we get into effects processing and things like that. For now, let's look at, let's talk about what we're actually looking at when we're looking at a wave form like this.
43. Looking at Waveforms: Okay, So there are two ways that we look at recorded sound. And the main way, the way we're looking at most of the time is as a waveform like this. Now what we're looking at here is first we're looking at a stereo waveforms. That means that there are two audio signals. Let me just separate this. There we go. So here's one signal, that'll be our left signal, and here's our right signal. And most of the time when we're dealing with music, It's a stereo track, meaning he's got two signals, one for the left side and one for the right side, because we have a left and a right ear. But when you're dealing with individual samples, you might only be looking at one file or a mono signal. So let's treat this as a mono signal. I'm going to get rid of the other one. Okay, so now we have a mono signal. Now this is going to come out. Now it's going to come out the left side. But I can change it to becoming out both sides by changing the panning to the center. You remember the term panning back from when we talked about how to use different programs. So now what are we looking at with this big squiggly line? What we're looking at is amplitude on the vertical axis. So volume, amplitude and volume are same thing. So volume on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis. So as it goes forward in time, the different volumes, Let's just zoom in. Okay, so this gets here and then this gets, goes up and down. Now, you'll notice that the center is 0. So the way we represent volume here is a little weird. The center is 0, meaning if it's sitting right on that line, that the signal is right on that line. No volume. If it goes under that line, that means volume. And if it goes over that line it means volume. So you can see here that we have 0, 0, 0, 5, and 1. And under it we have 0, negative 0.5 and negative one. We'll talk more about those in just a second. But basically the thing we need to understand here is that what this is representing is what our speaker is doing. So imagine a speaker, right? Speaker can push out. And if it pushes out, it has to come back. So if it's standing still, that means our signals right on the line, right on 0. If the signal goes above the line, then in it, so it has a positive value, then it's our speaker pushing out. If it has a negative value. So our speaker coming back in. Okay, so speakers are always doing this. Now. That would mean that most of the time, symmetrical, it goes up the same amount that it goes down. So it's always going in and out the same amount, but it's not actually always going in and out the same amount. If we zoom in, we can see there are little spots where it doesn't see like look right here. They're pushed out, came back to 0, dipped under 0 just a tiny bit and then pushed out again. So that's kinda indicative of maybe a distorted sound or something like that. It's not bad. All audio files do this. They generally go back and forth like this. But even that isn't perfectly symmetrical. You should have grabbed a more normal sound. This is kind of a Gucci weird little sound. But what we're seeing is volume above or below. And then time. So the amount that it goes above this line or the amount that goes below this line is how loud it is. Okay, and then we scroll through time on this axis. The other way that we look at sound, sometimes much more rare, but sometimes we look at sound as a spectrogram. This is a spectrogram. You may have seen something that looks like this in the past. What we're looking at here is frequency over time. Okay? So we have the frequencies that we're hearing and then scrolling across in time. So anything that's got a color means we're hearing those frequencies. So we're hearing in this one, you know, we're hearing a bunch of stuff up here, a little bit of a void in the middle and then something really hard down here that looks to me like maybe it's a snare hit or something. And we typically represent volume with color when we're looking at a spectrogram. So this is louder than this. And this yellow and white is the loudest. Sometimes you encounter these on what we call spectral effects. Effects that really do you think was with pitch. But this is actually a pretty hard for a computer to do because it has to figure out all the pitches and all the frequencies that are being used in a sound. And that sometimes takes a little bit of time. It definitely takes a little bit of computing power. So more common is to see a waveform that's doing volume over time. Because a computer can figure that out on the fly like immediately. So this is typically how we look at sound.
44. Sine Waves: Okay, Let's talk about this 0, 1 and negative 1 issue again, but from a different perspective. So I have here what looks like a big block of sound. And if I zoom way in, you'll see that it's not a big block of sound. It is a perfect sine wave. Sine wave is our most simple sound. It's our most basic sound, sounds like this. Okay? Most basic sound. Now. It's perfectly going up and down, crosses over the 0 line perfectly because this was mathematically created, I did not record this. So I want to show you how assign relates to this 01 negative one. If you remember back to your math classes, assign S I N, which is what this is based off. It's basically a circle. And this wave form is a circle. It doesn't look like a circle. But this is what happens to a circle when you have to distribute it out over time, right? Circles and time don't line up very well. So what we have to do is kind of take it and kinda twist it like that. And this is how we do it. So let me just show it to you as a circle. Okay, so here's a circle. Let's say we call this line through its middle access as 0. Because we're going to put a 0 on both sides. This line, we're going to say is one. And this line, we're going to say it's negative one or the other end of the same line. So if I was going, if I had to distribute the circle out over time, what I would do is I would start at, let's start anywhere, but let's start here. Okay, so I'm gonna say this point is 0. Then I'm gonna go to one. Then I'm going to go to 0 again. Then I'm going to go to negative one. And then I'm going to go to 0 again. That's the path that we take around the circle. If I go look at my wave form, I'm doing here is 0, negative one. I'm going backwards in this case, let's go to right here. Okay, so 0 to one, and this is a little shorter one, but we'll come back to that later. Let's say this is 1, 0, 1, 0, negative 1, 0. So it's the same thing through here. So this would be called one phase of the sine wave, or one cycle of the sine wave goes from 0 to one to 0 to negative one to 0. So that makes a circle, and we would call that a sine wave. Now circles and sine waves are good. They are pure sounds, they are clean, they are simple. Now there's another thing that this one and negative one represent here, and that is our peak volume. We cannot go above 11 is our maximum volume. Okay, so when we talk about volume in audio programs, most of the time, we're talking about one as our peak. So our volume is always going to be a decimal point. It's going to be 0. 9 would be pretty, pretty loud, right? Because that's going to be near one. If we hit one. Depending on the software, that can be okay. But if we go past one, we get, we overload the system and we generally get distortion out of it. We'll talk more about that in just a minute. In fact, let's talk more about that right now, but let's go to a new video to do it.
45. Clipping: Okay, now let's talk about what happens if we go over 1 with our volume. This results in something called clipping. Clipping is a term you're going to hear all the time when we talk about audio. If an a, any sound might be clipped, the waveform might be clipped because they're all kinda terms that we use. And this is what it means. Here. I have a little thing that this is going to generate me a sine wave, okay, so I can say the frequency and the amplitude or the volume. I'm going to try to generate a sine wave that goes over one. See it wants a value of 0 to one. And let's see if it'll let me say 1.2. No, it's not gonna let me. Okay. I'm just gonna put it at one. Okay? Now if I zoom in, you'll see my sine wave is going all the way up to one hit and right on the top. Okay. Let's see if I can boost it to go over. Okay, I'm going to boost this by a little bit and say Allow clipping. And I'm going to do it. Wonderful. Okay, now my signal is clipped. It's going to be a little buzzy. So there's a little more buzz to that sound because it's clipped. So let me show you what it's doing. The reason we call it clipped is that we can't go over one. So it's not that this signal is going up like this. And then curving around here. It's not curving around there and then coming back down and it's not the end. It's just that we can't see it. That's not true. What's happening is the signal goes up and then it's flat right there, and then it goes down. It's getting a little bit of a haircut, right? Someone just went against all the tops and the bottoms of my waveforms. So that data, which is the arch at the top, has now been lost because my volume is too high. It is clipped. So the tops of those waveforms are gone. When they, when they disappear, we can't usually get that data back. And anytime you have like a jagged edge in a waveform, which we now do because there's kind of a, almost a right angle right there, right where this goes up and then flat and then down. Not quite a right angle, but pretty close to it. Jagged edge generally means distortion in a wave form. So let me see if I can zoom back in. Let's undo it. Cat. Here's our perfect way farm. Okay, now I'm going to read you the amplify on that clip it. Now here's that same wave form by clapped writers. All that extra bussiness there, that is called clipping. And you really want to avoid it.
46. File Formats: Okay, Let's talk really quick about file formats for audio. There are probably three formats that you're maybe familiar with, One more than others. One is the MP3. You're probably familiar with an MP3 file. The other two main audio formats are WAV and AIFF, okay, and there's a bunch of other audio formats that you can see here. And there's actually even more than this. But the main three that we work with the most are AIF, wav, and mp3. Now, here are, here's the big difference. And I often wave are uncompressed files, meaning that if you save something as a WAV file, it is everything, okay. It's gonna be a much bigger file is it's going to be full quality. Everything we have, all that data that we know about that's in that file is going to go into a WAV file. An mp3 file is a compressed file format. Which means to simplify, that means that when it saves it as an MP3 file, it's going to throw out some information. There's gonna be some information that it thinks we probably don't need that and it's going to get rid of it to make the file smaller. That's why mp3s are cool for sharing on the internet because they're smaller. But mp3s are not good for making full audio tracks out of because they're missing information. You're kind of already, if you start working on a project by importing an MP3, kind of already starting at a disadvantage. So when we're working with professional quality audio, we want WAV or AIFF. Wav is much more common these days, even though it says Microsoft here and AIF says Apple. Both system using, using both. They're both uncompressed file formats, so they're both great. Mp3s are still cool. But what an MP3 is good for is after you've made a whole project, then you save it as an MP3 so that you can send it to your spouse or your buddies. That's what mp3s are good for. Or you can upload to a streaming service or something like that. But while you're working on it, everything stays as an AIFF or a WAV file. Now, what I'm talking about here is individual audio files. Let me show you, for example, Here's my sample library. Here's just a ton of audio samples. Let's just go into I don't know anything. Okay. Now you'll see that the majority of these are WAV files. Okay, so if I'm working with a sample, it's gotta be a WAV file or an AIFF file. But it's gotta be an uncompressed audio file. Okay, I'm not going to use a sample that's an MP3 file. It's just not going to sound as good. So that's what I'm talking about is your individual samples that you're going to be working with. Our WAV files. The session th