How to Make Music on My Computer

Video Transcript

"How to make music on your computer. Part of me says hopefully, you're not making music on your computer. Hopefully, you're recording it to your computer. Hopefully you're capturing a a good representation, a good performance, and putting that into your computer to mix, to edit, sometimes to tune vocals, switch some timings up; maybe even to sequence a song. Capture the music in you want to have a really direct signal. You want it to sound good coming in. You want to have as straight and direct a signal as humanly possible, or digitally possible. You want to capture the best performance in there. If you have to recreate the performance in there, in within the computer you're doin' too much with it. It's a great platform for editing, a great platform for tuning vocals. It's a great platform for well, instead of lugging a thousand pound tape machine around it's really portable. In certain ways it's better than tape. Not to say that I don't like tape is tape is any audio engineer's god, but the digital forum, digital realm is becoming much more proficient, a lot cleaner, a lot, you know, the frequency range is changing so that we have higher resolutions just like you have HD cameras, you have HD music. Unfortunately, MP3's dumbed that down a little bit. Even CD's dumb it down, but we have the capability of sampling and taking ninety six thousand pictures per second, and even more than that so that you really have a pristine and honest representation of what was really there. Tape, on the other hand usually colors it, but in a very pleasing way; adds a noise floor, just a little hiss, that kind of sets the ear as to what volume to expect. There's a certain depth that you can get with tape that is just inherent in it. Let me just go one step further. In using tape and a computer together, because I think you get the best of both worlds this way, time code will sync up your tape with your pro tools, and this might be a little bit more expert and you might have to book a hundred and fifty dollar an hour room to do it, but if you record your drums and bass to tape, sync that up, and then play your guitars, do your vocals digitally you really do have the marriage of getting the the certain low end representation that tape gives and the warmth and the depth that it gives to that range, and still having the ease of editing, and and tuning and all the other things, ease of operation, and the quickness that recording in the digital realm gives you. Marry those two together and I think you really do have something special, but at the same time if you're just workin' on a computer, mixing in the box is what they call it, just make sure you get your good sounds first. Don't put any trash into your computer because you're just going to get trash out, and while you can change sounds within the computer you're not going to go too much further or too much better than what you've recorded in there the first time. Really, you don't want to do too much work in there. You want to just get your sounds leveled, get a good mix of on things, make sure your imaging is good, panning things left and right. Then, give everything a separate little space in there. Make sure your vocals are right in the middle, and things aren't movin' around unless you make them move around or want them to. There's a lot of power to be had when making music in the computer; a lot of automation things. Having sweeps and sound effects move across your stereo image, having things move up and down even, and it's all inclusive, it's all in one box."