Aug
How To Write A Song! 3
by Jayme Gutierrez Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »..Before I blog the next step, I want to explain a bit more about the piano and drums (or “Drunsh” as I like to call them)..
I use midi instruments a LOT. Usually VST plugins. Midi (or “Musical Instrument Digital Interface”) is basically a controller that triggers samples. A midi instrument is a bank of sampled sounds.
Basically, when you’re recording midi, you’re just recording data, telling the computer when, how loud, what key, e.t.c, to trigger the samples.
For piano I use “Ivory grand pianos” from Synthogy. It sounds very nice and there are 3 to choose from; a Bosendorfer, a Steinway and a Yamaha concert grand.
The Yamaha is brighter and will cut through the mix a lot easier than the other two pianos. But that doesn’t mean to say that I don’t use the other two. I used them in some of the songs I have on itunes.
For this song in particular I used the Yamaha because I want it to sound a little more “poppy”.
For my DAW (Digital audio workstation) I use cubase 5 and since I have changed computers (watch video blog 13 to find out why I changed computers) I have started having problems with midi! It seems to be recording it before I’ve even played it!!?? I know, IMPOSSIBLE! It’s something to do with the internal system clock on the motherboard, or something like that. So it records but then puts each note in the key edit a bit before the beat. I also suspect some midi jitter going on, but I won’t go in to that.
So anyway, long story short; I can’t find a way to fix it so all I do is click and drag the whole track a couple of milliseconds back, after I’ve played it in, so that the notes are closer to the beat.
So, that’s the piano.
Then there’s the “Drunsh”
Again, I use another midi instrument, this one’s called ezdrummer. Good sounding, easy to use drums.
After I’ve finished recording the midi for the piano and drums, I then do a bounce of each track, which basically renders all of the samples into one audio file (or in this case two stereo audio files, one for piano and one for drums).
I tend to bounce down the midi instruments as soon as I can because they tend to eat up a lot of RAM and CPU. I then save the project, then save it again under a new name, delete the midi files, discard the midi instruments and import the new bounced down audio files, that I have just created, into the new project.
That’s it for now, more later…