![]() ![]() GM-2 - another sampler with more keyboard sounds.Though fake can be its own aesthetic virtue in the right context. Sampled piano and organ tend to sound quite convincing sampled guitar and strings tend to sound totally fake. The sampler works by playing back recordings of single notes played on each instrument. SAM-1 - a sampler that gives you some “acoustic” sounds, like piano, organ, guitar and strings.The musical application is not totally obvious, but I guess if you put the right effects on it you could make cool textures or percussion. DrumMachine - a drum machine, surprise! Defaults to 808-like sounds.Supersaw - a contemporary-sounding synth.Mono - a somewhat more versatile groovy retro synth.Simple - a very basic and not very exciting synth.Soundation includes a diverse set of MIDI-controllable software synths, some of which are quite nice: And you can play them back using any synth sound available on your computer. You can select a bunch of notes and change their length, or loudness, or transpose them. (I’m a lousy keyboard player, so for me the mouse method is a lot faster.) Once the notes are in the editor, they’re like text in a word processor. You can enter MIDI notes with a keyboard, or just draw them onto the screen with the mouse. MIDI is also easier to create and edit than audio. MIDI files are trivially small, a few kilobytes at most. Audio files are enormous - CD-quality stereo sound is ten megabytes a minute. MIDI is way easier to deal with than audio in a lot of ways. Soundation adds to the confusion by listing its assortment of prefab MIDI loops under “audio.” But it’s your computer providing the dinky piano, not the MIDI file. Computers have synths built in, so if you have a MIDI file, you’ll be able to listen to it played back on a dinky piano sound. It’s easy to get confused between audio and MIDI. Just like a piece of sheet music can be played on piano or violin or oboe or whatever, a MIDI file can be played back on synthesized piano or violin or oboe or whatever. Instead, it’s a set of instructions for a thing that makes sound. Instead, each track is a list of notes that are to be played by the software instruments (SPC, drum machine, etc.) MIDI is like sheet music - it doesn’t make sound by itself. ![]() The MIDI tracks above do not contain any sound. It was designed in the 1980s as a way for computers to talk to synthesizers, and for synthesizers to talk to each other. Audio that I record myself won’t be so neatly lined up, unless I put in a lot of effort to make it so.Īnd so what about the MIDI tracks? MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. They’re conveniently tempo-synced, meaning that they line up neatly with each other, and with any other loops I might add. Both are loops that came with Soundation. The other audio track looks like it contains drums too, but it’s actually piano played in a percussive style. The top track contains drums, which have a characteristic look: big sudden spikes that taper quickly to silence. The spiky waveforms in the audio track represent the amplitude (loudness) of the sound. The easiest solution is just to experiment with the placement of the microphone and sound source(s) until you get a reasonable level. You’re not the only one who finds this to be tricky. You’ll probably notice that it’s difficult to find a balance between your recording being too quiet and too loud. Make sure you’re somewhere quiet while you record. ![]() You can get a decent microphone and a specialized audio interface, which is more complicated and costs money, but sounds way better.You can use the mic built into your laptop, which is expedient, but sounds terrible.If you’re just getting started, there are two approaches: Recording audio is a vast topic unto itself. The first two contain loops of audio the other four contain MIDI, which I’ll explain later in the post. You can either record your own sounds, or use the loops included in Soundation, or both. The tracks all play back at the same time, so you can use them to blend together sounds as you see fit. Your song consists of a list of tracks, each of which can contain a particular sound. Soundation uses the same basic interface paradigm as other audio recording and editing programs like Pro Tools and Logic. See also the first, second, third and fourth posts. This is the fifth in a series of posts documenting the development of Play With Your Music, a music production MOOC jointly presented by P2PU, NYU and MIT. ![]()
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