Making Music with Vista - Part 1
Robin Vincent decodes the mysteries of Vista as a platform for digital audio production
Welcome to the first in a series of articles to give you a helping hand in making music on your computer. This is for the dazed and confused, the ones that struggle to get any sense out of the music industry or the computer industry about Windows Vista and making a bit of music. In Apple-land people seem to be able to load up Garage Band and get on with messing about with loops and stuff. In Vista-land, can you do the same or is it all as awful and complicated as most audio forums would have you believe?
This first article will declare a resounding YES you can do it!
We'll look at two pieces of free music making software to whet your appetite and worry about the ins and outs another time. So, let's get on with it.
Sony ACID XPress
Go to "Downloads" and then "Free Software" and choose ACID XPress 5.0
ACID is a loop based program so you need some loops to go with it. Sony doesn't give many of these away but you'll find free downloadable samples of all their Sony Sound Series loop CD's. Right-click the ".wav" version and select "save as" or "save link as" and you'll find them downloaded to your downloads folder. Another good place for free loop and tutorials on using ACID is www.acidplanet.com
Once you've got a bunch of loops open up ACID and we'll throw some music together. By all means run the demo song to give you an idea of what's possible, otherwise start a new project.
In the botton half of the screen you get an explorer window - go to your downloads folder:
C: drive > Users > Your Name > Downloads
Select one of the loops you downloaded. It should start playing back immediately. Click and drag it on the empty top half of the screen and it will create a new track for that loop. Put your mouse cursor along side the track and it turns into a pencil tool - click drag and you'll paint your loop along the track.
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Use the Loop Explorer screen to find loops on your hard drive and import, play and edit them in ACID.
Just above the track are the loop markers. Click on the yellow tags on either end to fit the loop around your track. Click the "loop" button on the transport and click play and ACID will play back your looped track indefinitely. Choose another loop, drag it into the project window and draw where you want the loop to play.
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You can use the tempo slider to speed up and slow down your loops.
Before you know it you've created a piece of music. Notice how all the loops seem to be in time with each other - that's because these loops come with additional pitch and tempo information that ACID uses to time stretch and pitchshift in order to match the loops up. This is easily demonstrated if you click and drag the tempo slider (on the left under the track list) - it will speed up and slow down the project without changing the pitch. As you do it each track will show it's percentage change. This is exactly the sort of thing Garage Band does on the Mac and here you are making music just as easily.
Want to record your vocals? Just plug your mic into the computers mic socket and hit the record button (more on this in Part 2).
Sony ACID Xpress is simple to use and comes with a full manual to explore. It's worth spending a bit of time with it to see what's possible.
Rebirth RB-338
Messing around with loops is one way of making music, messing around with synths is another. The best freeware synth program for making tunes is Propellerheads Rebirth RB-338. It recreates two Roland TB-303 bassline synths plus the legendary 808 and 909 drum machines. It used to cost 150 quid but now offer it for prosterity as freeware.
Go to www.rebirthmuseum.com and download the CD-ROM image.
It's a bit of a hassle (but worth it), in that it's in a BitTorrent format so you have to download something called a BitTorrent client first. Follow the instructions to download and install Azureus Vuze and then click the Rebirth download link - it will automatically open Azureus and it will show you Rebirth downloading in the dashboard. Vista may ask you to unblock Azureus - you'll need to do this to allow it to download (I'd recommend uninstalling Azureus afterwards from the Control Panel - Programs and Features button).
Sony ACID Xpress is simple to use and comes with a full manual to explore. It's worth spending a bit of time with it to see what's possible.
Once downloaded you'll have a zip folder from which you can extract the "rebirth_iso_installation.iso" file. Are we there yet? Not quite. An ISO file is CD Image file, like a snapshot or complete copy of an original CD and needs to be burnt to CD in a way that recreates the original CD. The reason for all this is that Rebirth uses CD copy protection (a bit silly in a freeware program but it wasn't always free). To do this in Vista you need a Powertoy called ISO Recorder. You can download it from here.
Once downloaded, extract the files and double click the "ISORecorderV3" file to install. Once done find your extracted Rebirth file again, place a blank CD in the drive, right-click the Rebirth file and select the "Copy Image to CD" option. This will launch ISO Recorder and burn the CD for you. Now you will have your own CD copy of Rebrith RB-338 - hooray!
To install it, open the CD and double click the "Install Rebirth
RB-338" file. Now of course this is an old program and Vista is very new
and doesn't really want to run this old program so if you try to run it
directly from the icon it gets to a test and then disappears. What you
have to do is navigate to the programs folder:
C: > Program Files > Propellerheads > Rebirth
Then double click either the default song or a demo song. Choose a demo and click play to give yourself a fabulous idea of what this little gem can do.
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Once you finally get Rebirth installed, start out by playing a demo to see what's possible with this classic program.
When you're ready, go to File > New to start making your own noises. Click on play and you'll hear the default Rebirth patterns spring into life.
Music in Rebirth is made up of 16 note patterns stored in banks over the the left. You can create different patterns and then link them together to form songs - it's all really easy. To start messing about though, take your mouse and as the demo plays click on the "Cutoff" knob on the first synth and slowly move it about - now try moving the "Reso" knob - I think you're getting it already! Turn down or off (using the Mix panels) the two synths and the bottom drum machine so we can concentrate on just one drum machine. The 808 should still be going with just a hi-hat.
Click on "BD" for bass drum and look at the 16 pads. A light flashes along showing the tempo - click on the first pad so it lights up red. On the next cycle you'll hear the bass drum kick in on that first note of the bar. Stick another on pad 9. Now select the "SD" (snare drum) and click on pads 5, 13, 15 and 16 - there's a good simple drum pattern. Bring one of the synths back in to play along. If you click on the "Step" button on the synth it will step through all 16 notes and show you what they currently are - you can change them to whatever you want.
Give yourself half an hour of playing and you'll be right into it. You'll find a full pdf manual in the program folder. If you can't open PDF files then get hold of Acrobat Reader from www.adobe.com - it's free.
That's enough for now and we've learnt plenty just from the act of downloading Rebirth!
Quick Vista tip - To get to the Rebirth manual, quickly click on the Vista Start button and start typing "Rebirth" and it will appear at the top of the menu. Works for almost anything you need to find - one of Vista's best features.
In Making Music with Vista Part 2 (coming soon) we'll look at recording sound going into or through your computer...
Author
Robin Vincent runs Rain Recording (UK) out of London and is the CTO of Rain world-wide. In his tenure in the business of PC based audio production he as authored numerous articles, reviews and books on the subject.