The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Hey Songfighters,

I have fond myself in an odd predicament. I have been spending a lot of time on the move. I'm often at my gf's where I can"t play guitar or I'm travelling somewhere (I spend large chunks of life on the train). I wanna make music but I need to figure out ways to become a mobile musician. I have my laptop wherever I go, I just need to figure out how to use it to channel my ideas into actual music.

Any ideas on how I can pull this off? Ideas on software I should pick up, etc.

Reason.

I just make up songs in midi using Reason on my laptop. It is a lot of fun.

Ken

if you want to make experimental xtrg style tracks, try out audiomulch. it's different!
-bill

I'll second Reason.

Reason is good and has got everything you need for multitrack synth-base recording, but it's pricey. And I take it people are talking about writing MIDI tracks in a graphical editor, not playing them in real-time.

If you were thinking of real-time performance, I'll plug SynC Modular again.
- It's free.
- You can play polyphonic music directly from your laptop QWERTY keyboard. The layout is surprisingly intuitive, although of course the range is limited.
- You can download prefab synths, or enjoy hours of fun building your own.

As to how you'd record, I think you can save its MIDI output, but I'm not sure. One option is to record the WAV to Audacity or something, but to mutitrack you might need two sound cards -- one to generate the synth sounds and send them to Line Out, and another to record the audio output on Line In. With a single card you'd have to record to Wave In, and then your second track would unavoidably pick up the output of the first track. Unless I missed something when I used to do it this way.

That reminds me --for real-time performance you'll ned an ASIO-compatible sound card, either in your laptop or attached via USB, or the latency will make live playing impossible.

Reason, yeah. Add my vote to that.

If you can read/write charts, Melody Assistant's a nice little bit of shareware, which can fake vocals passably ("Virtual Singer", for roughing things out in situations where tracking live takes might not be an option).

Though taking my advice for anything vocals related might not be what you want, heh.

Hell, even if you can't read charts, it's an on the cheap alternative, and deeper than it looks. MIDI import & export friendly.

If I was in this situation, I'd probably load up Band in a Box on the laptop, and then use it to lay out the song, the chords, etc. (newer versions than mine may even let you type in the lyrics). And then when I get home, I'd be ready to put the drum part down (that's the only thing I keep from BIAB unless I'm doing a quick demo of a song), and do a screen capture - printout of the BIAB screen - instant chord chart.

If you're thinking in terms of more experimental music, then BIAB is probably not a good choice... but for me, the trick here would be that there are certain parts of the "music making" process that I could do on a laptop, and then other parts that I have to do in a studio... figure out what those "laptop" parts are and do those while traveling so you don't have to do them when you've got some studio time. Writing lyrics, typing in lyrics, etc.

Charles