We’re all fairly familiar with the interior of a Recording Studio, if only from seeing music videos over the years where the recording process is often featured.
Image By Rebecca Wilson – originally posted to Flickr as Vicariously, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11992757
Whilst we recognise the image , the majority of us of course haven’t any idea of what any of these multiple dials, sliders and buttons do, nor why so many pieces of equipment need to be connected together in a spaghetti of wires.
For amateur studio engineers now, luckily, most of that equipment is encapsulated into what is called a Digital Audio Workstation (or DAW for short) – so basically a software recording studio on your computer. This software studio generally includes:
- Multi-Track Recording capabilities (you can record instruments individually rather than all together)
- Mixing Desk (so that you can then combine the individual instruments changing later)
- Audio Editing Tools (to correct mistakes, add ambience … the list is almost limitless)
- Plug Ins (to do clever things like ‘compression’ – more on these in a future post)
- Sophisticated audio routing (so doing within the computer what the spaghetti of wires would accomplish)
- Virtual Instruments (in short pre-recorded instruments on your computer that you can ‘play’ – but more on these in a future post)
There are a quite a number of DAWs on the market – all of which have been used to record hit records already. Well known names include Logic Pro X, Avid Pro Tools, FL Studio, Steinberg Cubase. There are also a number of free offerings, not least of which is Apple’s Garageband (it comes free with a Mac and there are also iPad and iPhone versions).
Given that I won’t be recruiting an entire Orchestra to do a live recording for this project, I need to be able to:
- Create individual Orchestral Parts (Violins, Violas, Flutes, Oboes, Horns and more) – probably using a keyboard
- Mix them together to make them sound as much as possible like a ‘real’ Orchestra
- Export the whole thing into something I can play through a stereo system (so create something like an MP3)
On the face of it (after hours of YouTube videos and blog posts), the consensus is that any DAW is more than capable of doing this limited set of tasks with (or without) third party plugins. As a Mac user, Garageband is something I already have. In fact, when I initially looked at recording music into my computer some years ago, I decided to buy Main Stage (concert software from Apple) as you get several ‘Jam Packs’ included in the price – one of which is a substantial set of Orchestral ‘virtual’ instruments for a mere 30 USD (a substantial saving on buying them direct). So do I need to look any further?
On balance, I decided that it would be worth taking a stab at this project using Garageband as my DAW. I already have it, I have used it before and there are thousands of tutorials on YouTube on how to get the best out of it. I expected to come across some limitations (which I did), but there are normally ways to overcome them. Also, it saves spending probably a couple of hundred dollars on software that might, in effect, not give me anything over and above what I can achieve with Garageband.
In my next post, I’ll start talking about the actual Recording Process and the ‘Virtual Instruments’ to which I have referred here.
