Beat Composer

So you want to produce music on your home computer, hopefully my guide will help you to create the best possible music you can.

When composing music on your computer we must first consider which Digital Audio Work Station to use for composing. There are a large number of DAWs to choose from, but currently the industry standard is Pro Tools. I personally use Pro Tools myself along with some others such as Fruity Loops and Reason, but the other programs you may want to choose are Cubase, Logic(Mac only), Cakewalk, Ableton Live, Garageband, and Audacity which you can get free http://audacity.sourceforge.net/.

Next you will need a MIDI controller, virtual instruments, and a sound library. First I will define all of these terms which may or may not be new to you first MIDI. MIDI is a digital signal that is sent from you MIDI controller which is usually a drum machine or a small keyboard to a program in your computer called a virtual instrument. It is important to know that the MIDI controller does not transmit sound it self but merely controls the sound in the virtual instrument. A virtual instrument is a program such as Sample Tank, Rapture, or Xpand! etc. that works within a DAW, the MIDI signal triggers the sounds that are present in the virtual instrument's sound library which is just a bank of sampled sounds such as drums, strings, horns, etc. sound libraries can be bought from a retailer, traded with fellow producers or acquired from a peer-2-peer file sharing site. Programs such as Fruity Loops and Reason along with others can be used in conjuction with other DAWs such as Pro Tools as virtual instruments themselves through a build in program called ReWire allowing you to use their virtual instruments, EFXs and sound libraries.

If you are more of a live instrument person you are going to need a digital interface to get what you're playing on your guitar, drums, or what ever you play into the computer. Pro Tools requires a digital interface to even run the program an mbox2, 002, or a 003, there are other Pro Tools specific interfaces but if you're just getting started you are probably on a budget and the others are not as economically practical. There are other generic interfaces for other DAW's but I am mostly familiar with the ones listed above.

You'll also need microphones and microphone cables, the only quality cables that I personally know of that aren't too expensive are Monster cables, not to say that there aren't other quality inexpensive cables, I'm just not familiar with them. Choosing microphones is a little more complicated, almost all great quality microphones are extremely expensive. Depending on what you are recording will determine what type of microphone you should purchase. For vocals your probably going to want a cardioid pattern condenser microphone, cardioid pattern means that the microphone picks up sound in a heart shaped pattern and reduces background noise. A condenser microphone is very responsive to it's input making it very delicate making is not practical for high-volume recoding, you'll tend to get a lot of distortion. If you are micing an amp your going to want to use a dynamic microphone, they are more versetile, can be handled roughly without too much concern about damage unlike condenser mics, and are better for high-volume recording. Recording drums is the most complicated of instruments to figure out the micing for, there are a lot of micing kits out there with a set of microphones for each instrument for every piece of the drum kit. These are not actually ideal for micing drums, you don't want a bunch of similar sounding mics for every piece of the drum kit, I will list the microphones and the parts of the drum kit that I've personally had experience micing.

Kick-AKG D112, Sennheiser MD421, EVRE20, AKG D12, U47
Snare-SM57
Toms-Sennheiser 421
Hat-Neuman KM84
OHs(over head mics-AKG414
Rooms-Neuman184

Next I'll give you a few Tips and Tricks to help you get what you want out of your music.

Trick/Tip number one KICK DOUBLING

Now this isn't a very complicated trick and most people who already produce their own beats using DAW's will probably already know this but for those who don't here you go. Sometimes if you want a fuller kick with more of a thud it's a good idea to use two or more kicks to play at the same time instead of just the one, it's also a good trick to use if you've already used all of the good kicks in your sound library and you want something new without buying or acquiring more.

Trick/Tip number 2 Sub-Kick Trick (for Pro Tools)

First you'll open up you Pro Tools session, sample rate and bit rate are irrelevant as far as this trick goes. Create a mono audio track and a mono instrument track and the quick easy way to do this is to hit Shift+Ctrl+N (or Shift+Command+N for Mac) and when the track window comes up hold Ctrl (or Command) and press the up or down arrows to choose between the types of tracks. Now on the instrument track insert a virtual instrument that had drum sounds in it and the record a four bar loop or as large of a loop as you wish. When finished select one of the instrument tracks sends to be buss 1 or what ever buss you have free at the moment. After that click on the Audio Suite tab at the top of the Pro Tools window, scroll down until you hit other and from there click on Signal Generator. When it opens you will have the choice of altering the frequency, level, and type of sound wave that is generated. In frequency chose somewhere between 30-50Hz (50Hz may even be to high of a frequency for a good sub-kick, adjust the level to your liking, but you'll most likely not wont to change the type of sound wave it defaults to Sine wave. Preview your changes to make sure it's what you want, then select in the audio track the same numbers of bars you chose for you drum loop then hit process. You'll end up with audio from the signal generator on your audio track, next on the audio track you'll open up an Expander/Gate in one of it's inserts, you'll do this by clicking on an insert tab on the audio track move your cursor over Dynamics and then Expander/Gate. Now when the Expander/Gate plug-in window opens up toward the top right of the of the window you'll see a button that says 'no key input' click on that button and choose buss 1 or which ever buss you chose earlier for the instrument tracks send. Finally on the right of the Expander/Gate window there is a box called side-chain and in that box is a button with a key on it, click that button, now press play and you should hear your kick from you instrument track triggering the audio from the audio track giving you a beefier sub-bass style kick.

Trick/Tip number 3 Warbling Vocal (as used by T-Pain)

I'm not a fan of T-Pain but here is how you do the trick, bring up AutoTune in it's default settings and change the following parameters: Scale to major, Retune to 0, Tracking to 75, Rate to 0.1, Variation to 0, Onset Delay to 0, Onset Rate to 0, Pitch to 0, Amplitude to 30, and Format to 100.