The Icrontic home studio discussion
I've been telling Prime I want to do this for a while now. The purpose is to start a discussion about music production technology. I figured we could start off with this thread and then expand from there and see where it goes.
I think the biggest difference between this forum and other music production forums will be that there are a lot of informed PC users here, which will provide for very interesting discussion that, at the very least, isn't laced with misinformation about the "limitations" of a PC with Windows or Linux over a Mac. This will be the only place I know of where thoughtful debate on the different platforms will not be plagued by the typical "ZOMG Your music is the SuX0RS Because you don't have a Mac!!!" bullshit.
If you're into music production at any level, please join the discussion! I'm actually somewhat of a beginner myself, and this will be a great place for us all to get an education and who knows, maybe one of us will be the next Deadmau5!
Let's start off by bragging about our equipment, software, etc.
This is my rig. Thinkpad T400, 2.24ghz Core 2 Duo, 8gb DDR3, 60gb OCZ Agility II SSD, 320gb 7200 RPM Seagate HDD. My speakers are M-Audio Studiophile AV20. BEST DESKTOP COMPUTER SPEAKERS EVER. No sound conditioning, great range, simple and small. Just two RCA inputs and a speaker wire that goes between them.
My sound interface is a Hercules Deejay Trim 4&6. It is very limited. For example, you have to choose whether you want to use it in 4-in 4-out mode or 2-in 6-out mode. There is only a single balanced input for a microphone, with no phantom power, but it does have two balanced outputs.
My midi controller is an Akai MPK61. This thing rocks! It uses the same drum pads as the original MPC2000, 8 knobs, 8 launch buttons, 8 sliders, fully programmable and customizable for any interface. There are a lot of things I need, but a new midi controller won't be one for a long time.
Software: I use Ableton Live 8.2.1 and Adobe Audition 3.0 primarily. For VSTs I use Massive, Addictive Drums, Basic64 for chiptune, and Guitar Rig 4. Still working on building up my VST library.
Let's rock!
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I think the biggest difference between this forum and other music production forums will be that there are a lot of informed PC users here, which will provide for very interesting discussion that, at the very least, isn't laced with misinformation about the "limitations" of a PC with Windows or Linux over a Mac. This will be the only place I know of where thoughtful debate on the different platforms will not be plagued by the typical "ZOMG Your music is the SuX0RS Because you don't have a Mac!!!" bullshit.
If you're into music production at any level, please join the discussion! I'm actually somewhat of a beginner myself, and this will be a great place for us all to get an education and who knows, maybe one of us will be the next Deadmau5!
Let's start off by bragging about our equipment, software, etc.
This is my rig. Thinkpad T400, 2.24ghz Core 2 Duo, 8gb DDR3, 60gb OCZ Agility II SSD, 320gb 7200 RPM Seagate HDD. My speakers are M-Audio Studiophile AV20. BEST DESKTOP COMPUTER SPEAKERS EVER. No sound conditioning, great range, simple and small. Just two RCA inputs and a speaker wire that goes between them.
My sound interface is a Hercules Deejay Trim 4&6. It is very limited. For example, you have to choose whether you want to use it in 4-in 4-out mode or 2-in 6-out mode. There is only a single balanced input for a microphone, with no phantom power, but it does have two balanced outputs.
My midi controller is an Akai MPK61. This thing rocks! It uses the same drum pads as the original MPC2000, 8 knobs, 8 launch buttons, 8 sliders, fully programmable and customizable for any interface. There are a lot of things I need, but a new midi controller won't be one for a long time.
Software: I use Ableton Live 8.2.1 and Adobe Audition 3.0 primarily. For VSTs I use Massive, Addictive Drums, Basic64 for chiptune, and Guitar Rig 4. Still working on building up my VST library.
Let's rock!
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Controllerwise, I have:
Roland FP7 Digital Stage Piano
Yes, I actually know how to play the piano.
Dave Smith Instruments Prophet '08
True analog synth whaaaaaat?
And a crummy Korg nanoPad.
Software wise: Sibelius, Ableton Live, ReBirth, Reason + Rewire, Fruity Loops, and more VSTs than you can shake a tree at.
I was wondering if I'd see a thread about home/micro studios/music making rigs on here some day.
Swift setup meph, and all running off of a laptop. I love how dynamic and small-scale one can make decently powerful rigs with these days. How are you using FL, as a workplace or as a plugin?
RootWyrm, that Prophet looks like it'd be an absolute hoot to play with.
My ventures into a home studio haven't produced any great music, but I've been having fun with it for the past few years. Finally got together a fairly decent setup (even built my own desk for it) but not long after moved two times, had 3 crap jobs, wife's job blew up, finished a degree, rig drive blew up and had to be rebuilt, and just generally dealt with life being in the crapper for awhile, so time playing on the rig has been minimal. Back on our feet though and doing well, so we'll see if I can get back to playing around.
This info and picture are from before things blew up (and are skagged from my f3music.com account), but it is very similar to what I've got running now.
"The PC is now a quad core AMD I found laying around with 2gigs ram and 250g sata hard drive. It has a USB hub, multi flash card reader and CD/DVD burner all external on USB mounted right under the dual screens (how handy!)
The screens are an old ViewSonic 15" that I had to make a power supply for, and a fairly new Hanns-g 19" widescreen which has been awesome and very inexpensive.
Switched from an old M-Audio Delta 66 PCI input card to the newer all-black Line 6 UX2, which has impressed me so-far despite a few glitches with the mic amp. Monitors are the Samson Rubicon R5a's with ribbon tweets and they are sweet as hell and pretty affordable for what you get.
Input-wise we have an M-Audio Axiom 61 midi keyboard using USB to the DAW and on the side an M-Audio Trigger Fingers pad controller which is absolutely a hoot for drums if you're used to tapping out a beat with your fingers.
Mics are both MXL, a 990 on the table and a v67 on the boom, which does amazing things for vocals."
Also, been using FLStudio 7 and up for some time, but now trying out Reaper and finding it awesome and powerful. Guitars are an Epiphone T-bird Bass, Washburn generic stra-alike 6 string electric, and a couple wally-mart specials I got for $30 apiece. Also have a few harmonicas laying around, an old basic acoustic fender 6-string and a very pretty mandolin someone nice gifted the wife. None of it I can play with any skill, but again, this is all just to have fun with.
Was also trying to put together a website to host some of my tunes, but it didn't get to far. Did end up making an account on f3music.com though (http://www.f3music.com/22), which has a scant few of my various crappy music things up on it, but the free account only gives you about 30mb so whaddayawant.
I just try to use my laptop for everything, so instead of having a home studio PC I just make sure that the RAM is maxed out, added the SSD (by removing the optical drive) and I have a nice docking station that gives me more convenience when I'm home. But I love the mobility of my setup, it's nice to be able to pack up my MIDI controller and sound card and take my whole beat lab over to someone else's house.
I also have another computer with a Core 2 Quad that I use for TV, gaming, folding and other stuff. I've been known to use that computer to record audio from out of my laptop. There is a 32" screen attached to it, which makes it nice to show my waveform while I'm recording.
I'm very familiar with the Axiom keyboards, I used to have an Axiom 25, but opted for the larger Akai MPK61 instead. It's a nice keyboard, but the drum pads on Akai instruments can't be messed with.
Indeed I am. To be honest, my hearing is shockingly intact for my age (tested to 30kHz) so I can actually hear the difference between Tweakbench and real. I've played around a lot with the Tweakbench stuff, but just not really finding what I'm looking for in a sound still. Really though, part of that is that I'm not pure electronic either. I'm just weird.
http://www.samplelogic.com/cinematicguitars.html
Very cool. I recorded this demo with the Les Paul Power Chords instrument.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/30387/Cinematic%20Guitars%20Demo.mp3
The iRig lets you use the idevices as a guitar effects processor, and the results are better then I ever would have given the unit credit for:
Akai even took the docking concept to a whole new level:
http://www.akaipro.com/synthstation25
Something I've been having fun with when not at home but with some idle time is Music Studio for the idevices:
This is why I'd like to eventually get an iPad2. However, for now I'm actually really happy with the synths and beat tools that are available for WebOS.
I suck at the music and that's probably sugar coating it. But still with this simple setup I have a very large array of tools at my disposal. The things I like about this setup are that it's simple and pretty intuitive to get into. But the tools regardless of where I'm recording are the same and the files I'm generating are easily transferable back and forth. Next thing I'm planning on adding is a simple midi drum kit because using drum samples gets kind of boring.
Though speaking of samples for anyone with Garage Band if you haven't got it yet NIN has put out a bunch of fully sampled tracks for it (as well as some other music software). They are great tracks to really cut your teeth with mixing things around because they have a lot more diversity then most sample packs that you can get.
Where the debate could go is in comparing Ableton Live to Logic Studio, which is Garagebands bigger brother. Still though that's not the real purpose of this thread. I was just voicing up.
I could see someone using GarageBand to kind of get their feet wet, and I think it's a great stepping block. I see more value in using garage band on the iPad though where you could use it as a live instrument, which is what I'd like to do eventually. But, I think I also like the idea of just using an iPad as a simple instrument, like a kaosillator-style pad. I've also heard you can download an MPC emulator for them, and that would be really tight.
Where the ipad version of Garageband shines is that not only can you use it as a simple instrument for guitar, drums or keyboard. You can connect a real guitar to it and then use it's various peddle tools on a real guitar which is very cool. You can even set it up to use as a pre-amp so Guitar -> Ipad -> Amp. Lots of fun.
Software has come a long way since Cakewalk 8, both on Mac and PC. With the advances in software and controlling devices, it isn't much more difficult to produce with professional software than it is with garage band.
On a separate note, no matter how you make music, as long as you can get it into the computer, you can capture it and share. One excellent free and very capable utility is Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). Open-source and full of awesome, it can do a great many things for capturing audio. Almost no matter what platform you use, it has a version. Check it out, record something and share it with us!
Also, when comparing Garage Band to mid-level and professional software, it's really not fair to say that it's any more simple than a program like Ableton. One of the great things about Ableton is that it's pretty much a shovel-ready program. You may not even have to setup your audio hardware, depending on what you're using. (ie. built-in sound on a laptop or MBP) A MIDI controller isn't even required to make a full song, but as long as your MIDI controllers are connected before you startup the program they are automatically mapped and assigned to new MIDI channels. And you can start dragging, dropping, chopping and arranging samples without having to even figure out the tempo of the samples, in most cases. I would argue that Ableton gives you every bit of simplicity that you get with Garage Band, but has an entire suite of studio functions, instruments, effects, and samplers that are both powerful and intuitive.
FL Studio is a bit different. It is capable of doing just about anything a professional production suite is capable of, and has some unique features that can be difficult to replicate in other programs. It's really easy to use with the built in instruments, loops and effects, but not as intuitive when it comes to sampling. I know a couple of drum n bass producers here in Detroit that swear by it, but they both say the same thing. That the key to using FL Studio is to use it in a way that your end result doesn't sound like a song that was produced in FL Studio.
I think there are two key things to think about when you're trying to decide which software you're going to use, and even if you're going to use software at all.
1. You should be able to sit down with the program and create music right away. I had this experience with Ableton, moreso than any other program I attempted to use. That isn't necessarily going to be the same for everyone. For instance, someone who is used to using analog equipment might be more comfortable with Reason.
2. It shouldn't be easier for you to make the same music in another program. So even if you know how to use a program well and can hit the ground running with it, you're not wasting your time doing complicated tasks that are automated in other programs.
http://www.ableton.com/pages/max_for_live/apc_step_sequencer
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I have something similar to that on my phone. Would definitely be cool to get that going on a tablet device.