The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 2: Free/Cheap Synths, Effects, Sounds!

 Education, Music  Comments Off on The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 2: Free/Cheap Synths, Effects, Sounds!
Sep 252014
 

We have our DAW and maybe some gear. One perfectly valid strategy is to simply use the included plugins in your DAW of choice. If you’re using Reaper, then it has all you need to learn with for now. Master that stuff, and come back here when you’re bored with it. Whenever that is.

If you want some external synths and effects, please go easy! It’s really tempting to get a bunch of synths, thinking, “I AM POWERFUL! SEE MY SYNTH ARMY AND WEEP!”

But the only one doing the weeping will be you. Because you won’t know which freakin’ synth to use. You may even forget which ones you have.

Get one plug-in or synth at a time, learn it, know it in and out, then it’s okay to get the next one, if you need it.

Some of the best artists limit their choices to free up their creativity. “I’m only going to paint with blue.” “I’m only going to draw dudes bowling.” “I’m only going to write angry songs about my ex.” In your case, how about, “I’m only going to use one synth?” Try to stick to that for at least a month.

Here are a few good starter synths, and they’re all free:

Get a Few Free Effects

What goes for synths goes double for effects. Go easy on the effects, because there are even more effects out there than synths. How many reverbs is enough? One, maybe two for now. Same goes for compressors, limiters, gates, and EQ. If what you’re trying to learn isn’t in the effect you’re using, then by all means, keep looking, but know when to stop and go back to making music.

So, here are some good sources for free plugin effects:

  • GVST has a ton of free effects plugins. (They have synths, too.) Their effects plugins are great for learning the basics, because they don’t fill up your screen with a lot of crap. They don’t necessarily sound the best, but they’ll do the job for now.
  • The KVR Developer Challenge is where devs go all out, make free plugins, and fight for prizes. It’s a great way to look for something new/free/cool.
  • Also, check out KVR’s list of the most popular plugins, and check out the Free category.
  • Also check out their Free News category, for the latest on free plugins.
  • Xfer Records has a page full of free effects to play with.
  • Limiter No. 6 is awesome, too. Download here.
  • George Yohng’s W1 Limiter is a nice Waves L1-style limiter for free.
  • Tokyo Dawn Records has some really good free effects, and some you can buy.
  • Voxengo has a nice selection offree effects plugins.
  • Audio Damage’s Rough Rider is a great free creative compressor. It adds a lot of squash, dirt, and crunch to sounds. It’s really good on percussion sounds you don’t like.
  • Luftikus is an awesome free equalizer that’s similar to the Maag EQ (download). It even has an “Air Band,” which will make everything sound like it was made at 11.
  • The Klanghelm IVGI Saturation and Distortion plugin adds some warmth and grit.
  • Sound on Sound has a list of their favorite free plugins, too.
  • Drummic’a from Sennheiser, available only from their German Site, is an incredible drum library. It comes with the free version of the Kontakt player. Grab a buddy who can sprechen Deutsch, and go at it. You’ll need to register with the site, activate it by email, then use the code for activating the sounds. It comes as a Kontakt library, but it’s awesome. And it’s free! We like free! (And it’s by Sennheiser, who make great mics!)

I’ll add more as I find them. There’s a staggering number of good free plugins out there.

Or, if you own Native Instruments’ Reaktor, Max For Live, or Plogue’s Bidule, you can make your own Synths and plugins, and save a ton of money. (Minus the cost of the programming environment, of course!)

Samples, Patches, and Instruments

This is a short section, because it links to some massive content. (Pun intended.)

This Reddit thread that contains an insane amount of drum samples and Massive patches should tide you over for a while. It’s useful more for the drum samples than the Massive patches, because we’re cheap here.

Here’s another Reddit thread on readers’ favorite free VST instruments.

Pay a Little, Get a Lot: Computer Music and DTM.

I recommend Computer Music magazine, specifically it’s 200th issue, because it comes with some great stuff, like the full edition of Cakewalk’s Rapture synth. Get the electronic version of the magazine through iTunes or Google Play, set up your username/password, and go download a bunch of free plugins. (If you use Google Play, when you go to download, tell them you got the magazine off Zinio. It works that way. There’s no drop-down for Google.)

One note about Rapture. Yes, it’s the full synth, but read the license carefully: it says no commercial use on the synth. So… yeah. Use it as a practice synth, then go buy the real thing, I guess.

A few of the included plugins are full versions, but most of these are “CM” versions of commercial plugins, which means that they’re functional, but kind of stripped down in a few places, because it’s hard to make a living off of free, and they really want you to go out any buy the full version.

It’s a great way to play with an unlimited demos. SynthMaster CM is essentially a “lite” version of SynthMaster you can play with as long as you want. (SynthMaster is one of my favorites, but not free. It goes on sale once or twice a year, though!)

It’s also a good place to get some free samples, because each issue comes with free samples. Buy a few issues, and you could build up a seriously crazy sample library.

Computer Music (CM) is also great for reviews. They’ll tell you if something sucks, so you’ll save money. (So will the posters at Gearslutz. In fact, they’ll tell you a lot of things suck. If they all say something is good, then it’s probably godly good.)

CM also has a ton of tutorials that come with each issue. Not to sound like a shill, but for a few bucks a month, it’s a great deal.

If you don’t care about Rapture, then just get the latest issue of CM, and you can still get some sweet gear for “free.” Well, minus what you paid for it. I think it’s like $5 an issue, or $40 a year. Your money, your call.

If you’re into the Japanese music scene, can speak the language, and can spare the money, try to hunt down DTM magazine. They also have a lot of tutorials, reviews, and free plugins. But it’s paper only, each issue is around 1500 yen, and that doesn’t even include the shipping, which can get ridiculous. (And I did say it’s in Japanese!) Cheap-ish if you live in Japan or near a Japanese bookstore, though!

Spend $130 to Never Buy Patches Again!

Now that we’re spending a little money, I’ll recommend one other thing I know, and that’s Syntorial. It will save you a stupid amount of money on patches, because you will learn how to make your own damn patches. (As you should do, anyway!)

It’s a program that teaches you how to use a synth, one knob at a time. Then it teaches you how to use your ears to figure out how sounds are constructed. It’s brilliant.

You watch a short video, then do exercises, watch more videos, do more exercises. You can quit whenever you want, but it gets addicting.

In my next (and last) post on this, I’ll give you my “How to buy plugins like a cheap badass” advice.

The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 1: Get a DAW!

 Education, Music  Comments Off on The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 1: Get a DAW!
Sep 222014
 

To make music these days, you need a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation.) There are dozens of different programs that will do the trick, and most of them have horrifyingly high price tags. So to save yourself from the ultimate beginner misake, which is, “Oh my god, I bought this DAW, it cost $700, and I hate it more than doing my taxes,” let’s look at this rationally.

Getting a DAW from my point of view is a process where you’re going to first learn how to use a DAW, and then go shopping for the DAW you’ll be using for the next few years.

How do you learn how to use a DAW without a DAW? Easy. Get a starter DAW. Use it to learn what the basics of music production, then you can shop for a DAW intelligently.

There’s no better starter DAW than Reaper. (Or any DAW that comes bundled for free with software you buy, I guess, but I’m going to assume you’re not buying anything, because this is for Cheap People.)

So why Reaper?

Because Reaper has an extremely generous demo. You get a 60-day full working demo. After that, if you keep using it, you should pay the $60 for the amateur license. (Because nobody likes leeches.)

Download the 32-bit version for now.

Why 32-bit? Because you can run all the plugins that way. Not all plugins are available in 64-bit versions yet, and some older plugins will never be available in 64-bit, due to their age, or because the developer doesn’t want to re-code them. You’ll only need to go 64-bit when you start making monstrously huge tracks. Until then, 32-bit is fine, and yes, 32-bit Reaper will run in your 64-bit OS.

Seriously, Reaper will even run on OS X versions 10.4-10.5 on PPC macs. It’s amazingly flexible.

Now go learn the basics of Reaper. Try Tutorials for Reaper’s YouTube Channel for starters. Or just do a search on YouTube. (This is the cheap guide, after all.) If you happen to have a subscription to Ask Video/MacProVideo.com, they have good tutorials on Reaper, and a ton of other stuff, but it costs money, and this is the Cheap Guide.

You can also read the fine manual.

What About Hardware?

Ah, you need a keyboard, monitors, and a USB audio interface, right? Well, maybe.

Since you’re just starting out, and maybe you’re just seeing if it’s interesting to you, I’d say hold off for a bit. This is a hobby that can get really expensive, fast.

A new crappy MIDI keyboard, runs $100. (Good ones can go over $1,000.) A USB audio interface runs $150 for a cheap one, and a cheap pair of monitor speakers starts at $100, and $100 monitors really suck. Really, really suck.

If you have to get anything, then I’d say it’s okay to a MIDI keyboard, but hold off on the other stuff, unless you need to record live instruments… in which case, why are you going cheap???? Read some other guide.

Cheap MIDI keyboards are all the same, with sloppy action, few controls, and a general cheapness that means they won’t last long. M-Audio makes a good generic crappy MIDI keyboard. If it’s like my old M-Audio keyboard, it’ll mysteriously die after a year or two. Not even my pencil could save it.

For a USB interface, I like my Focusrite Scarlett 2i2. It’s a stupid-cheap USB audio interface. It’s not the sexiest or fastest, but it gets the job done for me. I use it with some KRK-6 monitors I got on sale. They’re not great, but they’re good enough. But even those cost around $350 on sale.

At any rate, we’re not aiming to release a record right off the bat, so it’s okay if your gear is on the OEM janky side for now. Improve it as your budget allows.

My Two Iron Rules of Music Production

Before you go shopping, keep these two rules in mind. They will save you a lot of cash, and a lot of headaches down the road.

Rule One: If you can, demo the hell out of everything before you buy it. If you can’t demo it, make sure there’s a good return policy. (At least a month.) If anything feels off or uncomfortable, don’t buy it/return it. That slight discomfort in the keybed you feel? That isn’t ever going away.

Rule Two: Ignore the hype and look at the product carefully. Every single product out there has a slick marketing video with professionally made sample tracks alongside it. Don’t get suckered in. That guy making sweet music with the cool box of lights or whatever random VST? Yeah, he’s a pro. He’s got years of experience, and he probably spent at least a few weeks working with the product in question, and knows it way, way better than you do. Take the hype and dial it down a notch.

I’m not saying some of this stuff isn’t awesome– some of it is! But it’s like a great pair of size 9 yellow shoes. If you’re a size 9, and like yellow, then hot dog! This is for you! But not all of us are size 9, like yellow, or even need another pair of shoes.

So do your research and buy gear carefully, or just do it later, when you have a better idea of what you’re doing. (I recommend the latter, but I understand the former.)

Next, we’ll start looking at free synths and effects plugins! Yay, finally!

The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 0: Get Some Knowledge For Free!

 Education, Music  Comments Off on The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 0: Get Some Knowledge For Free!
Sep 202014
 

I’ve been kicking around the idea of making this kind of guide for a while. Why? Because every day on Reddit, I see 2-3 posts of the, “I want to get into EDM or EMP, but I only have 35 cents in my pocket right now. How do I do it?”

First, you need to get the right attitude towards doing this. It’s going to take a while to get good at it (I’m still not good), so you need to have your expectations set at the right level.

It’s Okay to Suck at First

Listen to Ira Glass, who is talking about producing news for radio, but this advice applies to everything. See? Even he sucked for a long time before he started to get good. So it’s okay for you to suck.

Now, I hope you’ve adjusted your expectations accordingly, so you don’t feel like you want to jump off of a building if nobody likes your first song, or even your first fifty.

It’s cool! We’ve all been there. That’s how we learn.

It helps if you focus on not sucking. (This is a great article to keep in mind.) But it’s hard to not suck at first, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing, so don’t beat yourself up too much.

The same guy who wrote the article on how to not suck wrote this excellent article that you need to engrave upon your soul. You really need to read this before you make the mistake of wasting a lot of time and money on stuff you don’t need.

Step 0: Now Get Some Knowledge (But don’t go overboard.)

Before you do anything, buy anything, whatever, go get some knowledge, but don’t bury yourself in it. Get enough so you know the basics, understand what you’re doing, then move on to making music. Don’t get caught on the hamster wheel of over-training. There’s a fine line between getting knowledge and never getting off the starting line.

This also goes for things like shopping for gear, talking on forums, etc. I’ve talked about this before with respect to Japanese– it’s the meta game. It fools you into thinking you’re doing X, but you’re not. You’re talking about X, you’re preparing for X, but you’re NOT doing X.

With that caution in mind:

Coursera has a bunch of free music classes. Look for the Berklee classes:

Or you can just take apart your favorite songs, and try to rebuild them yourself. Your call. I found the classes to be pretty useful.

Other resources:

  • Dave Conservatoire, which is kind of like Khan Academy for musicians.
  • Music Theory, the TL;DR version is a free/pay what you want PDF book.
  • Musictheory.net has a lot of resources for learning theory on your phone or PC.
  • Hooktheory is another phone/PC app/book combo with some cool stuff in it, too. Hooktheory’s “Theorytab” is really useful for figuring out chord progressions from a lot of famous songs.
  • Kunst der Fuge will give you total access to all of its MIDI files and PDFs for a one-time 20 EUR fee. Analyze away, or just add the MIDI files to your chord progression database.
  • The Dance Music Manual is great if you want to get into EDM. It’s a brilliant book. Rick Snoman has forgotten more about producing than you’ll ever know. Yes, you have to spend money on it. But it’s not much money, and you’ll get a ton out of it. This is a good way to avoid sitting through 8,000 hours of videos.

There are some great YouTube channels out there, too. In no order I like:

  • ADSR Sounds for Reaktor and Massive in particular, but they do a good job on all Native Instruments software.
  • Sadowick for Ableton and general music production advice.
  • Seamless for FL Studio, IL’s plugins (like Harmor!), or Serum.
  • ArtFX for Massive and other plugins.
  • SonicState for witty banter, music production news, and reviews.
  • DubSpot for a variety of tutorials for a lot of DAWs
  • Point Blank Music School for all kinds of tutorials.
  • Tom Cosm knows a ton about Ableton.
  • ScanProAudio has some great Push tutorials, and a lot of other useful info.
  • Pensado’s Place, because he is a god of ProTools, and even if you don’t use PT, he knows so much about producing, it’ll make your head spin. Really good stuff.
  • ReasonExperts for Reason
  • TherSiteZ also for Reason (and his awesome voice!)
  • This video is part of a series on How Music Works. A good watch.
  • Part two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five of that series.

And many more!

Pick one or two primary sources, finish them, and then see what you want to do next. Use the YouTube videos as sources of inspiration.

While you’re at it, find someone to teach you piano or keyboard. If YouTube doesn’t do it for you, then check out your local community centers. You might find something cheap there.

I love the Older Beginner’s Piano Course. Book 1, Book 2.

And remember to make music!

Mac Pro Video

 Art, Education, Music  Comments Off on Mac Pro Video
Sep 152014
 

I own a couple of Macs, but the newest one is a Mac Mini from 2006 or so. So why did I sign up for Mac Pro Video? Well, it wasn’t for Mac-anything. I found a good deal on their site– $15/month for as long as I want. And since I also finally bit the bullet and signed up for Creative Cloud, MPV looked like the best compromise for me.

I’m really into music production, but I’m also really into visual arts, web design, and programming, even. MPV has some absolutely awesome video series on music production, covering not only theory, but also DAWs, and some of the harder-to-get-used to plugins. And while there are a lot of great dudes on YouTube with great info, MPV has some great tutorials. I especially loved their series on Ableton’s Push.

And now that I’m getting in to Creative Cloud, the tutorials should come in handy,  rather than spending a couple of hours trying to find good YouTube videos. It should be a nice complement to Pencil Kings. (The Photoshop tuts there were great, as are a few of the drawing tuts I’ve been working on.)

The JOI of the N1.

 Education, Japanese Language  Comments Off on The JOI of the N1.
Sep 012014
 

I just registered for the JLPT N1 again in December. This time I’m really serious about it. As in, I’m pulling out all of the test prep stops! Or at least I’m not going to go get a cert in the middle of studying for it, and sabotage my efforts.

I signed up for classes on JOI again. I like their system. You buy some tickets (the more, the cheaper, and the longer they last), and use them on classes whenever you can take them. I generally buy them in yen, because they’re slightly cheaper. (And since the yen is plunging, it’s a good deal.) They have classes aimed right at N1 level people like me (or who aspire to pass it, anyway!), and they also have special courses in vocab, grammar, conversation, and test strategies. It’s all really helpful.

And I like it more than a MOOC. Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned, but I like real human interaction in my learning, especially when it’s something like Japanese, which requires some immediate feedback.

My other strategy for the test is something I’m already working on, and that’s working on vocabulary. I have my big book of 2000 N1 level words I should know (meh, not really, but I’m going to!), and a few other books, like one on 慣用語 (idioms, I guess?) and a Kanzen Master N1 book on 漢字.

I’ve also ditched Anki for now. Farming vocab, doing data entry and all that is too much of a pain. Instead, I got some Campus vocabulary notebooks over at JBOX, and I’ve been rapidly filling them up. This is where the 0.3mm Kuru Toga shines– at filling in the small boxes! Writing vs typing, which is faster? Neither, really, but this is working for me. It’s a nice change of pace.

The notebook has 3 columns– Foreign Word, Pronunciation, and Japanese. I put the word I want to know (kanji or hiragana, if there’s no kanji for it commonly used) in the Foreign Word column, the pronunciation in hiragana in the Pronunciation column, and either English or Japanese definitions in the Japanese column. Whatever helps me remember best.

It’s nice, because I can just grab a notebook, half-open it so that only the Foreign Word column shows, and scan down it to check my understanding and pronunciation.

I use the Page column to put a horizontal mark next to words I have trouble with. If a word has a lot of marks, it gets more attention.

It’s really the same thing as Anki, I just find it faster for me to review– no pressing buttons, or guessing whether it’s a 2 or a 3, or dealing with percentages. I keep staring at words until I remember them. Also, I keep separate notebooks, one for the N1 book, one for the 漢字 book (because a lot of it is verbs), and one for the 慣用語 book. And I have a few others, too, and a stack of blank books.

Reading-wise, I’m reading the editorials on Shasetsu Hikaku-kun whenever I can. I’m not a fan of reading right-wing Japanese editorials, but the vocab is useful. So is the reading practice! When it’s N1 time, there’s just NO time to do the reading, so I want to smash it to bits.

Listening is the only area where I don’t have a perfect countermeasure yet. I’ll probably go with my old Drill and Drill book.

Here’s hoping I can finally kill that N1 with fire!

This blog is protected by Dave\'s Spam Karma 2: 3159 Spams eaten and counting...