How to Make Music With Computers

So you hear much about producing music with computers but haven’t really taken a plunge yourself? You are an avid musician but scared you will NOT be able to produce the same quality if you move to computers. Maybe you don’t know much about computers and can’t decide which “DAW” to choose. You hear all the great songs in the clubs and you know it’s just not possible to make them with any gear except computers. Well I’ll try to explain some of these for you in the simplest way possible.

DAW or Digital Audio Workstations :

First thing first: D.A.W. refers to “Digital Audio Workstation” and its self explanatory. Basically, anything that can be stored as “Digits” computer format either on a computer or on a CD, DVD or any kind of other medium is digital. Digital is the newer format. Before digital existed, everything was stored in “Analog” format. Examples of analog mediums would be cassettes, records and 8-Tracks.

Well analog is still in use in many forms, digital is just better. Quality wise and usability wise too. Digital information can be manipulated unlike analog where whatever you recorded on a cassette could NOT be changed. Digital recording is the technology of the future. By encoding analog sound into digital format, we can now process sound digitally, adding effects, mixing, and so on, plus edit to literally dozens of "generations" without any loss of quality.

MEMORY AND CPU:

As a rule of thumb, buy as FAST CPU and with AS MUCH memory possible for all your audio/video work because the more complicated your work will get, the more CPU power and memory your operations will require.

SOUND CARDS:

Buy a professional 24 bit sound card. Preferably get a stand alone audio device with many inputs and outputs. A decent device will run you about $300 to $1,000 depending what your needs are and what your budget is. DO NOT COMPROMISE on this as your sound quality will be based upon this.

You can then record audio and store it on your hard disk, in the same 44.1 KHz resolution used by DATs and CDs. Then you do multitrack recording and mix down using your computer as the "console", just as if you had a separate digital multitrack recorder. And of course, on a computer, it's very easy and relatively inexpensive to add a CD-R for making your own audio CDs.

PORTS:

USB or Fire wire? I would recommend using fire wire to connect your audio equipment just because it is faster and more reliable. Try to get as many fire wire ports as possible because you might have to expand your system but even 1 fire wire port is better than just 1 USB port. Fire wire has bigger bandwidth than USB and hence can transfer more data at faster speeds. The newer USB is fast also so if you have USB 2 ports (like the most newer computers do), you should be fine.

I hope this was a helpful article for your. I will be back with more music articles soon.