My first attempts at recording songs were on a cassette tape 4-track in 1995. I paid $200 for it, and never really tried to learn to use it. Maybe it doesn't matter, but it is kind of a pattern-- buying stuff and never learning it thoroughly enough to get the most use out of it. A pattern I have been able to break a couple of times, thankfully, and which having identified maybe I can break more often in the future.
Second piece of apparatus I used to record music was Real Audio Creator: Just an audio recorder on my Windows 95 PC. I used it in conjunction with one of those "stick" looking microphones that people used for early video calls. Fidelity? Not so much. And it was using a really cheap soundcard I got at a computer expo for like $20. Here's an example of something I recorded using that setup: http://johnorama.com/songs/older_acoustic/harrison.mp3
That's something like the third song I ever wrote.
Eventually I started upgrading. I used "Magix Music" something or other for a while, and made a couple songs on that that miraculously turned out pretty well, like my "New Planet": http://johnorama.com/songs/fun_pop/new_planet.mp3
It was fun experimenting with sounds using that software. "New Planet" was made by sampling a 2-liter soda bottle, a couple of wineglasses with water in them, and a clip that was for keeping hard drives in a tower case. And singing, of course. I don't even really know how I got all the rhythms to line up, but it Magixally worked. And wouldn't you know it, that software is still around: http://www.magix.com/us/music-maker/
Eventually, probably because it's what Jeff used, I got a hacked version of Cool Edit, and then Cool Edit Pro, and eventually even paid for it probably somewhere JUST before it got bought by Adobe-- after which it kind of stopped being really good and useful (probably because it started to be different than I was used to). With Cool Edit Pro I made a lot lot lot of songs, including my entry in the Album Fight from way back when: http://johnorama.com/index.php?folder=Z ... NfZGVlcGx5
Back in the PC days I would also fool around with random one-off pieces of MIDI-manipulation software. There was one that was basically a step sequencer, but it had the mystical ability to let you step sequence entire chords and then futz with the output. Turning steps and tracks on and off, and manipulating the pitch a bit, I was able to make my "Birds of Our Own": http://johnorama.com/songs/weird/birds_of_our_own.mp3
That was actually recorded live from the software, and then I recorded vocals over the single-take recording of the synths. In my PC at the time I had an All-In-Wonder Pro card, which apparently included some pretty nice general MIDI sounds. If I had known about vocoders then, I probably would have used one instead of just my vocals. And certainly there was no autotune at the time, or I'd have cranked that up Cher-style totally. I'm still very fond of that "song" (maybe it should be called a "piece"). I'm an enormous Laurie Anderson fan, and at the end of that piece is a direct quote from one of her songs. If she ever heard it, I would hope she'd take it as an homage and not plagiarism.
Around 2003 I started to play around with Fruity Loops (which subsequently became FL Studio, which if you weren't aware is still around and in face is the software that Avicii uses (the guy who make "Wake Me Up"). With Fruity, and CEP for vocals, I made this one: http://johnorama.com/songs/fun_pop/what ... cience.mp3
In that, I *did* know about autotune, and cranked it up to 11 on the vocals to get that flippy-dippy sound.
I migrated from CEP to Cubase, probably because it's what Ken and Blue were using (although I think they were using Nuendo). I liked Cubase well enough, and made a few songs on it, like this one: http://johnorama.com/songs/sensitive_po ... _wiser.mp3 and this one: http://johnorama.com/songs/sensitive_po ... alking.mp3
Eventually I got restless. For no good reason-- well, actually I think it's because my cracked copy of Cubase got old and I had a job and started to look around for what else to use.
And I switched to Mac OS.
So then, Garageband, which led to Logic, which I've been using for a while now.
(With a little diversion into Reaper because I had a deadline I couldn't miss and it was there and the rest of my stuff wasn't set up. With Reaper I made probably the most important song of my life: http://johnorama.com/songs/fun_pop/john ... oposal.mp3 )
I've been jumping around a lot these days. I made some good stuff in Logic, sometimes in conjunction with GarageBand. Like "That's Enough", which I started in GarageBand on my iPad on an airplane, then transferred to Logic where I continued the composition and recording: http://www.songfight.org/music/thats_en ... and_te.mp3
It worked well enough but I was still restless. Can't even explain why. I think it's all going back to trying to capture that creative mojo of the early days in Cool Edit Pro, and whatever mystical force helped me make "What We Need More Of Is Science".
I never did try ProTools. Just didn't get around to it, and didn't feel like using the basic version.
So now, I still have Logic, and it's still useful and I'll still use it. There's nothing wrong with it. But I've been looking around for other things. Electronicky things, inspirational things.
I recently did about 15 days worth of the 30-day trial of Ableton Live. But I ran into problems with it when I started to try to record vocals. Things that I take as standard don't seem to be present. Or are there in a way that I didn't really understand. Stuff like normalizing after you record a take. I'm not really into opening another piece of software to manipulate the audio file and then going back into my regular DAW. I'm much too used to having it all in there together. Also, Ableton doesn't let you export an entire song as MIDI, which I wanted in order to switch over to Logic (maybe that contradicts my "don't open another app" idea, but still) if I needed to.
So, I have a copy of Reason that I purchased a little while back after another round of investigating Reason vs. Ableton (and also vs. Bitwig, a new DAW on teh block). And I'm going to learn my lesson and get good at using Reason. My first, unsatisfactory but yet COMPLETED effort at making a song in Reason is this week's "Fever Dream". I don't like the arrangement, and I didn't take the time to mix it well. But I got a song made and output using just Reason.
Well, ALMOST using Reason: I had to export the song as a WAV from Reason, and then use Logic to convert to an MP3! There must be a way to get a song out of Reason as an MP3... still so much to learn.
I'm still using my iPad for a lot of things. I've purchased many music apps for iPad and iPhone. There are a LOT of really cool synthesizers available, and iOS has internal routing that lets you play a synth in one app from a keyboard in another app, and record the output in a third if you want. All of which is required in order to really get the most out of all those apps. The iPad is actually the closest thing to an old-school multiple-hardware-synth setup that I've seen. All of these separate instruments being controlled by another one, and then routed into some kind of recording app. As simple or as complex as you want.
The trouble is that it's still a bit cumbersome. The sounds that you can get out of those synths are amazing, but you're trapped in the keyboard size of an iPad unless you want to plug in an external keyboard. And piping them into a DAW on your laptop seems to be a bit of a chore. What's funny is that back in the PC days I would have welcomed that chore and had no problem with all of the convolutions required. These days I whine about it. I don't want to learn all that.
Additional irony is piled on there by the fact that my new DAW-of-choice is also modeled after the old-school "hardware wired together with cables" model. To an extreme extent, because you actually have pictures of hardware and you hit TAB to flip them around and see all the cables routed to each other. Lots and lots and lots of possibilities there. Probably too many possibilities for me. But I'm learning. Hopefully I won't get sucked into the rabbit hole so much that I don't actually write any songs on the stupid thing.
One thing that I noticed while watching a ton of Ableton Live tutorials on YouTube-- almost every person doing those tutorials is really thinking of themselves not as a composer but as a sound designer. Before doing a tutorial about like, "how to save a file" they will open up a basic OSC synth and create a kick drum sound from scratch! Ridiculously tangential to the topic of their tutorial but I saw it over and over. To the extent that I feel like it would be hilarious to make a spoof tutorial that takes it to the extreme. (But of course I don't have the chops for that.) OR-- create a "how to make a tutorial" tutorial that illustrates some basic documentation techniques and provides a framework to maybe clean some of this crap up. But that would be a waste of time, since nobody would care.
I have been reading the blog and videopodcasts of the Recording Revolution guy. Very very useful tips and tricks for mixing. And a minimal amount of tangential information. He focuses on simple things that are applicable across basically every DAW, and he is all about using the basics to get a good mix-- EQ, Compression, Panning, etc. I think I've said this before but I highly recommend signing up for his email list and reading his blog: http://therecordingrevolution.com/
I would love to hear more about your software choices, why you made them, and how you use them today. And your hardware choices for that matter, if you like. (Though I must tell you in advance that I don't care what kind of guitar you have.)
Cheers,
JB
