Making Music with Vista Part 1
Welcome to the first in a series of
articles to give you a helping hand in making music on your computer.
This is for the dazed and confused, the ones that struggle to get any
sense out of the music industry or the computer industry about
Windows Vista and making a bit of music. In Apple-land people seem to
be able to load up Garage Band and get on with messing about with
loops and stuff. In Vista-land, can you do the same or is it all as
awful and complicated as most audio forums would have you believe?
This first article will declare a
resounding YES you can do it!
We'll look at two pieces of free music
making software to whet your appetite and worry about the ins and outs another time. So, let's get on with it.
Sony ACID XPress
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com
Go to “Downloads” and then “Free
Software” and choose ACID XPress 5.0
ACID is a loop based program so you
need some loops to go with it. Sony doesn't give many of these away
but you'll find free downloadable samples of all their Sony Sound
Series loop CD's. Right-click the “.wav” version and select “save
as” or “save link as” and you'll find them downloaded to your
downloads folder. Another good place for free loop and tutorials on
using ACID is http://www.acidplanet.com
Once you've got a bunch of loops open
up ACID and we'll throw some music together. By all means run the
demo song to give you an idea of what's possible, otherwise start a
new project.
In the botton half of the screen you
get an explorer window – go to your downloads folder (C: drive –
Users – Your Name – Downloads) and select one of the loops you
downloaded. It should start playing back immediately. Click and drag
it on the empty top half of the screen and it will create a new track
for that loop. Put your mouse cursor along side the track and it
turns into a pencil tool – click drag and you'll paint your loop
along the track.
Just above the track are the loop
markers. Click on the yellow tags on either end to fit the loop
around your track. Click the “loop” button on the transport and
click play and ACID will play back your looped track indefinitely.
Choose another loop, drag it into the project window and draw where
you want the loop to play.
Before you know it you've created a
piece of music. Notice how all the loops seem to be in time with each
other – that's because these loops come with additional pitch and
tempo information that ACID uses to time stretch and pitchshift in
order to match the loops up. This is easily demonstrated if you click
and drag the tempo slider (on the left under the track list) – it
will speed up and slow down the project without changing the pitch.
As you do it each track will show it's percentage change. This is
exactly the sort of thing Garage Band does on the Mac and here you
are making music just as easily.
Want to record your vocals? Just plug
your mic into the computers mic socket and hit the record button (more on this in Part 2).
Sony ACID Xpress is simple to use and
comes with a full manual to explore. It's worth spending a bit of
time with it to see what's possible.
Rebirth RB-338
Messing around with loops is one way of
making music, messing around with synths is another. The best
freeware synth program for making tunes is Propellerheads Rebirth
RB-338. It recreates two Roland TB-303 bassline synths plus the
legendary 808 and 909 drum machines. It used to cost 150 quid but now
they offer it for prosterity as freeware.
Go to
http://www.rebirthmuseum.com/
and download the CD-ROM image.
It's a bit of a hassle (but worth it),
in that it's in a BitTorrent format so you have to download something
called a BitTorrent client first. Follow the instructions to download
and install Azureus Vuze and then click the Rebirth download link –
it will automatically open Azureus and it will show you Rebirth
downloading in the dashboard. Vista may ask you to unblock Azureus –
you'll need to do this to allow it to download (I'd recommend uninstalling
Azureus afterwards from the Control Panel – Programs and Features
button).
Once downloaded
you'll have a zip folder from which you can extract the
“rebirth_iso_installation.iso” file! Are we there yet? Not quite.
An ISO file is CD Image file, like a snapshot or complete copy of an
original CD and needs to be burnt to CD in a way that recreates the
original CD. The reason for all this is that Rebirth uses CD copy
protection (a bit silly in a freeware program but it wasn't always
free). To do this in Vista you need a Powertoy called ISO Recorder.
You can download it from here -
http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm
Once downloaded, extract the files and double click the
“ISORecorderV3” file to install. Once done find your extracted
Rebirth file again, place a blank CD in the drive, right-click the
Rebirth file and select the “Copy Image to CD” option. This will
launch ISO Recorder and burn the CD for you. Now you will have your
own CD copy of Rebrith RB-338 – hooray!
To install it, open the CD and double click the “Install
Rebirth RB-338” file. Now of course this is an old program and
Vista is very new and doesn't really want to run this old program so
if you try to run it directly from the icon it gets to a test and
then disappears. What you have to do is navigate to the programs
folder (probably C:\Program
Files\Propellerheads\Rebirth) and double click either the default
song or a demo song. Choose a demo and click play to give yourself a
fabulous idea of what this little gem can do.
When you're ready go to File and New to
start making your own noises. Click on play and you'll hear the
default Rebirth patterns spring into life. Music in Rebirth is made
up of 16 note patterns stored in banks over the the left. You can
create different patterns and then link them together to form songs –
it's all really easy. To start messing about though take your mouse
and as the demo plays click on the “Cutoff” knob on the first
synth and slowly move it about – now try moving the “Reso” knob
– I think you're getting it already! Turn down or off (using the
Mix panels) the two synths and the bottom drum machine so we can
concentrate on just one drum machine. The 808 should still be going
with just a hi-hat. Click on “BD” for bass drum and look at the
16 pads. A light flashes along showing the tempo – click on the
first pad so it lights up red. On the next cycle you'll hear the bass
drum kick in on that first note of the bar. Stick another on pad 9.
Now select the “SD” (snare drum) and click on pads 5, 13, 15 and
16 – there's a good simple drum pattern. Bring one of the synths
back in to play along. If you click on the “Step” button on the
synth it will step through all 16 notes and show you what they
currently are – you can change them to whatever you want. Give
yourself half an hour of playing and you'll be right into it. You'll
find a full pdf manual in the program folder. If you can't open PDF
files then get hold of Acrobat Reader from http://www.adobe.com
– it's free.
That's enough for now and we've learnt
plenty just from the act of downloading Rebirth!
Quick Vista tip – To get to the
Rebirth manual quickly click on the Vista Start button and start
typing “Rebirth” and it will appear at the top of the menu. Works
for almost anything you need to find – one of the Vista's best
features.
In Making Music with Vista Part 2 we'll
look at recording sound going into or through your computer...
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