Anyone into making music with a computer?

[1neeto]

Real guitar and bass with virtual drums from garage band. Mixed with garage band’s DAW. This is a $5 mobile app!

https://soundcloud.com/1neeto/jumble-updated

[MikeBmusic]

I use a Casio workstation keyboard to input the MIDI for virtual instruments. There's a huge number of free ones available, and I use them for strings often - found that inputting one instrument part at a time (violin, viola, cello, double bass) - and doing it multiple times with different programs - gives the most-realistic sound, as I can tweak each one individually. Even with my fairly low power computer, I have no problems with half a dozen virtual tracks running at once, but then I'll freeze them to audio and mute the virtual tracks to free up computing power. I also use EZDrummer 2, but will often tweak the midi notes themselves and add my own fills and change sounds/hit strengths, etc.

[Muddslide]

Yeah, I've been using computers along with cassette 4 tracks, old tape recorders, effects, digital multitrack recorders, synths, field recordings, electric bass and whatever I want in the thresher to make ambient, experimental, noise and other "music" for over 20 years under the name Wilkes Land.

I only semi-released one album and that was back in 1998 or 99 but it was well reviewed and got on a lot of radio playlists for ambient/electronic music radio shows, even as far away as Russia, China and Australia.

I've continued making this stuff but haven't done anything with it but share it with friends.

I've been encouraged to copyright some of it and submit it to music library sites where producers shop for music for films. Just haven't looked into it...

[FrankHudson]

Originally Posted by MikeBmusic

I use a Casio workstation keyboard to input the MIDI for virtual instruments. There's a huge number of free ones available, and I use them for strings often - found that inputting one instrument part at a time (violin, viola, cello, double bass) - and doing it multiple times with different programs - gives the most-realistic sound, as I can tweak each one individually. Even with my fairly low power computer, I have no problems with half a dozen virtual tracks running at once, but then I'll freeze them to audio and mute the virtual tracks to free up computing power. I also use EZDrummer 2, but will often tweak the midi notes themselves and add my own fills and change sounds/hit strengths, etc.

Mike, you know what I'm going to start out with already as background:

Virtual Instruments are an incredible tool. To those who don't know what they are, they are computer software that typically contain a goodly amount sampled notes played on the real instruments, often with various articulations, that can then be played using either notation input on the computer (either regular musical notation, or the MIDI "player piano roll" style), or by picking the notes and some of the articulations with an inexpensive keyboard or other controlling instrument, such as a MIDI pickup on a guitar. Can't afford a grand piano or the room to record it in? Don't know the first thing about playing a bowed string instrument? Where can one even buy a tanpura or saz? And for GAS sufferers who buy to increase the sounds you have available, dozens of VIs are included with some DAWs, and separate ones with extended options cost less than most instruments.

Their "realism" compared to the real thing varies, but "realism" is not an absolute value in music as it is in other arts. In some ways, a VI is just a computer software version, usually with much greater fidelity and controllability of that mid 20th Century thing, the Mellotron. The steampunk Mellotron was a gizmo that played tape loops (actually strips, but...) when one pressed a key. Tape of a violin or tape of a flute. One note per tape element. One articulation. Each hard-assigned to a piano keyboard key. Does that make "Strawberry Fields Forever", the Moody Blues "Tuesday Afternoon," or King Crimson's "Epitaph" bogus? That modern VIs are much better doesn't mean that one of my favorite VIs is a faithful emulation of the Mellotron (the VI is so accurate that, just like the real thing, you can't sustain a note for longer than the original tape strips length, which when reached, just ends).

OK, end of the exposition part...

Besides keyboards, which have extraordinary realism usually, and various world instruments, I'm addicted to string parts. Like you I tend to record either individual lines one at a time or pair instruments if they are going to play the same line or even two articulations supplied as different instruments in some collections. Like you, I suspect, this allows the lines to retain independence and to be mixed to taste as a separate task. Particularly for me, I may need to work with the DAWs volume automation curves if I didn't play (or the VI misinterprets) my triggering.

For keyboard parts, I'll almost always use a keyboard to play the parts. For bowed string parts I'll use the keyboard or guitar MIDI interface about 50/50. For ethnic/world string instruments, I'll favor using the guitar MIDI interface. VIs and MIDI in general has reputation as being a keyboard player thing, but as guitarists we already think like a string instrument player and the guitar interface and a responsive VI can translate between the various string instruments more naturally. The biggest problem with guitar MIDI for a sloppy player like me is glitched notes, but they can be edited out.

Like you I'm on what would be considered an impossibly antique computer, and occasionally have to freeze or render VI tracks to add more. Compared to the rigmarole and recording quality costs of doing this on say an 4 track tape recording this is (so far) not that much trouble.

Examples? Here's a piece that shows a grand piano "recorded" in a tiny home office on a sub $100 plastic keyboard along with VI strings. As I'm not a real keyboard player, I played the left and right hand parts as separate tracks. Only the spoken word vocal is recorded conventionally.

Seventeen Almost to Ohio

And here's a Thomas Hardy poem turned into a song. Two guitar parts and a vocal, but the VIs are a pair of cello lines, one playing marcato and the other legato.

An August Midnight

Anyway, what a wonderful world when someone without much money or resources invested can realize arrangements like yours or mine!

[muscmp]

i do, what i call, standard music, and then i do my computer music. i love both types and both are quite fun. the standard, because everything is timing and rule driven, the computer because there are no rules but you must still create something that is appealing at least to you. i've been doing the computer aspect since i started with the program, sony acid, probably in 1997 or so.

i use the programs logic and reason to create either type of music.

play music!

[muscmp]

Originally Posted by robj144

Hit download and follow the steps if you want it. If you check all the add-ons, it's about 4 GB:

https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk

gibson gave up on it and bandlab took it over. it is missing a lot of stuff that was originally in sonar but, it is still considered a very viable DAW.

play music!

[LouieAtienza]

This is a demo I did for our old band a few years ago. Usually I just record basic "scratch" parts for the guitars to sing over, then when hopefully inspiration strikes, I re-record them. I then did the string sections using a SoundGarage (now defunct) hex pickup into a Roland GR-55, into my DAW using NI Kontakt instruments. I then "quantized" the MIDI tracks to, ahem, fix them. The piano parts were done not-by-note using a mouse.

Once we got to a recording studio, our singer decided to sing the song 2 steps higher, but the engineer decided to keep the orchestration and just transpose it. This was the original recording - done in my kitchen...

[Muddslide]

Originally Posted by muscmp

i do, what i call, standard music, and then i do my computer music. i love both types and both are quite fun.

Same here. Some friends say I'm a musical schizophrenic. I grew up playing mostly bass in straight up punk and rock bands, then gravitated towards acoustic old time, blues, jug band, ragtime, Celtic, folk...

But I've always loved electronic and experimental, avant garde, ambient and noise music, so I do that too. But it's very separate from my other music and playing.

Sometimes I feel like I've reached the age where I should hunker down and settle on one thing or the other. Like putting aside everything else music- and hobby-wise to just try to improve as an acoustic guitarist.

[robj144]

Originally Posted by muscmp

gibson gave up on it and bandlab took it over. it is missing a lot of stuff that was originally in sonar but, it is still considered a very viable DAW.

play music!

What is it missing? I installed it and looks the last version of Sonar with every feature available.

[KevWind]

Couple more examples . The two songs I posted earlier were both done entirely with VI's and were instrumentals

This are more of a hybrid with an analog recording and midi virtual instruments

This one is analog rhythm acoustic guitar and vocal then some sampled and highly processed acoustic guitar and midi drums and bass



This one is mostly analog vocal ,acoustic and electric guitars, and then a midi VI piano