Some Musical Experiments

So here are a few quick musical kernels or experiments from playing with my new equipment. Most of these are 10 - 30 seconds at most. They are just me jotting down some ideas. So could be expanded to full songs later on, and some are just for me to try out some various tools and techniques.

Experiment 1: This was mainly to test setting up MIDI tracks, audio tracks, and multiple tracks in Sonar. So it's a lot of noise but uses the R3 for synth and vocoder, some microphone vocals, a drum track within Sonar, and some random effects. It also uses the R3's appegiator and making sure I can synth Sonar's MIDI clock with my synthesizer. So it's a lot for just 10 seconds of audio mess.


Experiment 2: 12-29-08 take 1. This is capturing a piano riff I was playing with a few days earlier. It's also an attempt and playing with some dials while recording MIDI playback and some reverb effects on the drum.


Experiment 3: 12-29-08 take 2. This is me playing with the vocodor through the arppegiator to use my voice as a rhythm track.


Experiment 4: 01-04-09. I honestly have no idea what I was doing here. It's only been a few weeks, but I barely remember doing this.


Experiment 5: 01-11-09. I had the rhythm and bass in my head before sitting down to do this. I couldn't find anything good for the melody, so I'm pretty sure I created the lead sound on my own to fill in until I flesh it out further.


Experiment 6: 01-18-09. Another one where I had the tune in my head before adding other things to it. I wasn't sure if I wanted the melody here to be a bass line or a melody line. So right now it's a deep sound that could go either way.


And here's the first full length track that I more-or-less completely finished. Other than the drums, it comes almost completely from factory setting sounds on the R3. I created one or two sounds to fill in a few gaps. This is a medley of the first three levels of the 80s arcade game, "Marble Madness," one of the first game soundtracks that I remember that used an analog synthesizer soundtrack.


Direct links to the files:
Experiment 1
Experiment 2
Experiment 3
Experiment 4
Experiment 5
Experiment 6
Marble Madness Medley

Putting A Studio Together

So I've got a synthesizer. I'm beginning to learn how to use it. Now I need to find a way to capture what I'm doing. I need a few things:

1. A way to record MIDI. That is, to capture the notes I'm playing on the keyboard to clean and fix them before recording the audio.
   
2. A way to record audio.
   
3. A way to put multiple tracks together to make a song.

So I found the M-Audio Fast Track USB audio interface. It's got a direct line for things like keyboard or guitar, as well as a microphone port for voice and acoustic instruments. It works fairly well, other than I currently get a high-pitched hum when capturing audio that I haven't been able to filter out yet.

Then I got some software, Cakewalk Sonar, home studio for digital recording, sequencing, MIDI, and all sorts of things, including the ability to use Software Synthesizers (virtual synthesizers that only exist through software emulation) and other effects including virtual drums. When I was 17 I got one of the first versions of Cakewalk on our first PC. The product is nearly unrecognizable now from that early version, but I do have some history with it.

I'm still trying to figure out just the simplest options in Sonar, but I've figure out enough to start putting some music together.