So, I have been writing music for best part of my life although I don't have many hours racked up. Same goes with my guitar, I tell people that I have been playing guitar since I was 8 years old which usually puts a thought in your head that I must be somewhat of an amazing guitar player. Well you're wrong, if we were to actually count the hours which I have had a guitar strapped to me then its rather pathetic, much like my ability. Now I'm not going on course for being a downer so I'll get back to my point. In the past I have used a multitude of software to make up for the fact that I didn't own enough musical instruments to make a full song so it was time to move to technology.
A bit of histoy here folks. When I was about fifteen going on sixteen I purchased a computer from the place I worked at and got myself a decent sound card. Of course you're all going to laugh at it or reminiss of times when you had the same sound card or had the lesser Creative Labs AWE32. Yes, I was a proud member of the Creative Labs AWE 64 sound card. It was the only one at the time that I knew of which was capable of playing multiple tracks in audio as well as playing MIDI with sound fonts, and to top it off, capable of mixing this all down to a WAV file.. YES WAV! This was the eve of MP3s. The software I used then was Cubase, remember that? I think it's still around now but I haven't used it in a long while. My problem with it was that for some reason it would strip the bass from my songs. I would record/program them just fine and they would play back okay but when I mixed them down they sounded bad. I'm sure if I looked into it I may have figured out the problem or maybe it was my hardware, either way I had no money or patience to fix it. Flash forward about six years now and after leaving England to live in the US I got nostalgic for writing music again. By this time Cool Edit Pro 2.0 was out. Cool edit pro was a straight audio recorder with a lot of effects which helped clean up my sound. It had great re-verb and echo and noise reduction presets which made recording guitar and vocals easy. The problem is that there was no MIDI sequencer or equivalent to add piano or strings or drum sounds and recording guitar and vocals only gets boring real quick. So I searched around and found Fruity Loops. This was perfect for the sequencer stuff but the program was a little hard to use especially when you are used to recording music as if you have a digital multi-track recording studio. The big difference is that Fruity Loops uses a bank which holds all your instruments and then has a project window to arrange the different banks of segments. On top of that there is a mixer where you can add effects but only after you set an instrument to route through the FX channel. So all I did with Fruity Loops was program some piano and string sections and saved them as MP3s and loaded them into Cool Edit Pro. This gets very tedious when you want to make frequent small changes or decide on changing the tempo. Now seeing as I am not the best singer either, I'm a better guitar player than a singer mind you, I went on the look out for a good auto-tuner program. Actually auto-tune isn't what I was looking for, in fact what I wanted was a program to edit my vocals and correct pitch and add harmonies. I eventually found Melodyne. This was awesome although a bit buggy, this program crashed a lot and the interface was a little counter-intuitive. Well now I have another program where I record something and export it to Cool Edit Pro. I needed to plan my stuff better from the start so that I wasn't constantly re recording guitars and sequence stuff and vocals, then I read about ReWire. This is a plugin which connects software together so that they all play at the same time when you hit play on the master program which I wanted to be Cool Edit Pro. Well it didn't work.
I put up with this for a while until one day I researched the one software which does it all. I wanted to record audio and MIDI and have software to correct my less than aweful singing voice, it turns out that I have been using it all along.
Fruity Loops 10 has it all and it does it very well. After sitting down and trying to give Fruity Loops a chance I have finally figured out simple methods to get what I want and with the multitude of plugins/addons there are enough instruments, which do not suck, to make something which sounds like it was produced in a small studio down some seedy backalley. This is not meant as an insult but more to the fact that I produce music like a hobo's partially deaf dog. Fruity Loops has an addon caled PitCHER, obviously a tribute to one of the first songs to use vocal correction poorly with positive results. This plugin will take a sound file or direct from your mic and attempt to correct your partial tones to semitones which still sounds like someone is treading on your neck with thick treads while you sing "GET OFF OF ME!" at them. To make this useful there are ways to restrict notes you don't want to be tuned to. It also accepts MIDI data as an input to control the notes over time and if that is not all, it can accept multiple notes. Up to four notes can be sent into PitCHER at one time which makes it sound like you are singing through a vocoder. So that is the vocal correction taken care of.
Fruity Loops is primarily a sequencer with optional piano roll, which gets used frequently may I add. It also has some of the best MIDI drums I have seen in a long time with optional downladable drummer plugins like EZDrummer. I found some stock drumming addon which came with FL which is pretty dynamic and realistic sounding. You can get drums to sound a lot more authentic if you spend time with the velocity sliders and by adding some quiet flam style hits, anything to avoid sounding like a precise machine drummer.
There are also guitar synth plugins which sound ok-ish. The Slayer guitar synth has a multitude of variables to change the sound. The technique I have recently learned is to be able to add the damp slider to the piano roll and imitate a palm mute for specific notes. Still not as good as a real guitar but it fills the space well as a temporary instrument.
So now I don't need that multitrack recorder software or that vocal correction software nor do I need ReWire to tie it all together only to have it not work in the slightest.
No comments:
Post a Comment