Thompp Nation - Music Zone

Faq

This section describes how to set up a budget music composing, recording mixing and publishing process. It covers questions on what hardware to purchase, what software is required, and various music formats.

What hardware is required?
What software is required for composing and mixing?
What is MIDI format?
What is Audio format?
How do I convert Audio files to MP3 format?
How do I 'clean up' my sound files to remove background hum and hiss?

What hardware is required?

You will, of course, require a keyboard with at least 61 (5 octaves) full-size keys, an audio out line (headphones or speakers). If you want to record MIDI format, you will also need a MIDI out connector. I use a Concertmate 980 keyboard (100 UK knickers from Tandy) that supports General MIDI, and has MIDI in and out connections.

Also, to record MIDI you will need a MIDI interface. For 70 UK smackeroonies, I use a MIDEX 3 Interface, available in the UK from Maplins. This comes with a connector lead to your USB port, and driver software CD. You will need a MIDI to MIDI cable to connect to your keyboard to record, and another one if your keyboard has the facility to playback.

To record audio, you simply need a 1.6mm to 1.6mm lead (with a 3.5mm adaptor for the keybaord end) to plug into the microphone socket on your PC to record audio.

What software is required for composing and mixing?

There are some good budget-level products around. I use Willow software's excellent Anvil Studio available from downloads.com, which seems extremely easy to use, and supports both MIDI and audio formats.

Anvil Studio is shareware. The basic product is unlimited in terms of MIDI function, but can only record a single 60-second audio track. You can buy and download plug-ins (cheaply) from anvilstudio.com, that allow you to record multiple and longer audio tracks, only limited by memory and disk space on your PC.

What is MIDI format?

MIDI format actually stores the notes of a song, such as pitch, duration, volume, etc. This allows you to edit individual notes in a song after it has been intiially recorded. MIDI format is "quantised" which means only exact notes can be recorded. Hence music is replayed very precisely (which means you have to be a very precise player or you will have a lot of errors to correct). Also means that songs migth sound a bit mechanical by being too perfect, and lack expression.

The instruments loaded on your PC will probably not exactly match those on your keyboard, but you can easily change the insturment of a MIDI track in your song, and new instruments can be downloaded from the web.

MIDI files are generally quite small as all they record are note events, you will probbaly never even get close to 100K.

What is Audio format?

Audio (in this context, .wav) format is a raw sound format. This records your track exactly as it sounds to you directly from the keyboard. Unlike MIDI, because Audio files are raw sound files, you cannot edit notes once they are recorded. Any errors means re-recording the entire section.

Audio files can be very large (a single track at 60 seconds at CD quality is almost 5 Meg).

How do I convert Audio files to MP3 format?

MP3 format is a widely-use sound format for distributing songs over the internet. MP3 files are much smaller that Audio (.wav) files - typical savings are 90% - with no significant loss in quality. Please note you cannot gain further space savings by zipping mp3 files because they are already in a compressed format.

Again, there are some useful freeware products available on the internet. I use Electronic Cosmo's MPEG Studio 1.5 from downloads.com. When encoding a .wav file into .mp3 format, I use the "Plugger +" codec by Alberto Demichelis.

More recently I have used the Musicmatch Jukebox.

How do I 'clean up' my sound files to remove background hum and hiss?

The disadvantage of recording audio into the microphone socket can sometimes be the poor sound reproduction qaulity. As well as background hums and hisses, ambient noise in the room can be picked up too.

Anvil Studio (see above) has filters on the Audio track composition screen. A low pass filter with a lower limit of 100 MHz as a first try should get rid of some of the hiss.