I have been working on a music project with my brother and a friend. The music we are creating is generally electronic with the appearance of guitar and other instruments scattered throughout. We are working on this project from my home in Pennsylvania. The project has taken off somewhat and has expanded to include other bands. Wolverine Storage Company, another local Pennsylvania band will be visiting our home studio to record their first album this Spring. This article will give an overview of the software
and hardware my band, Cryptoglitch is using to record, mix, and edit our songs. You will have to forgive me my indulgence of providing the history of this project as a backdrop to the story of the tools we use.
The Cryptoglitch project is the brainchild of mine and my brother Kevin. We both have been interested in electronic/industrial music for a very long while. As I progressed with my ability to play guitar as well as lyrical abilities my brother kept asking me to work on a music project with him. Kevin had previously performed with a band in Indiana by the name of Sutur. Sutur was an industrial band complete with bass, guitar, synthesizer and drum machine, so Kevin had some experience with both live and recorded performances.
Kevin brought to my house a Korg Triton synthesizer that sat and collected dust for some months. Another friend had sent me a track of his recordings made with Propellerhead's Reason software. I obtained a copy of Reason after this and started playing around. Within a couple of months I had familiarized myself with Reason using the book "Reason 4 Power!" and
YouTube videos.
Cryptoglitch's first song, "Kill Switch", was born almost by accident. While my brother and I have musical abilities, we both sound dreadful when we sing. We were at a point in our musical project where we were ready for vocals to recorded. We stumbled about for a while trying to mask our voices using guitar effects machines. We tried several effects machines, but never found anything that we were happy with.
At this time, a friend of friend, also in to music, had just returned from California and wanted to come out to the studio to play a song she wrote while in California. Kevin and I listened to her song and fell in love with her voice. Jascha had a voice that reminded us of Joss Stone, Joan Baez, and others. As I mentioned before, our project was to be an electronic/industrial type. We were not sure at all how a smokey, folky, jazzy female vocal style was going to fit in with the music.
Jascha came out and heard the track, which at the time was titled Jekyll and Hyde, recorded using Reason 4. The song was heavy on drums and synthesizer and light in every other aspect. Jascha heard the music, asked for the lyrics, and sat alone, replaying the music for about an hour. She called me back into the studio to record her voice.
At this point in the music project we were making use of a Tascam DP-01 digital 8 recording device. The Tascam device allowed for the import of tracks in a very specific WAV format. Reason 4 would export to WAV, but not a WAV format the Tascam would accept. Reason did support 16bit mono WAV export, however, the Tascam would not recognize the format. Because of this limitation we had to make use of the Xilisoft Audio Converter to convert the WAV from Reason to a WAV format that the Tascam would recognize.
Once the music was imported into the Tascam we hooked up the mics to the Tascam and let Jascha have at it. She nailed the track on the first take. We now hooked the Tascam back to the laptop and imported the vocal track in WAV format. This is where things became complicated for us. Reason has a sampler device built in, however, you had to make use of another product, ReCycle, to import WAV files, into Reason's support REX format. This was cumbersome and clumsy, and never seemed to turn out just the way we wanted.
I had read many articles on digital audio workstations (DAW) and home studio setups using Linux and free software. This is how I heard about Audacity. Audacity will allow you to create, edit and mix many tracks. Audacity even supports the importing and editing of MP3's and even better, will export to MP3 on both Windows and Linux.
I downloaded Audacity, imported the vocal track, and imported the music track. Very exciting times! Audacity supports the VST plug-in format and comes with a handful of plug-ins built in. I played around with the echo, delay, and phaser plug-ins for the vocal track. I finally came up with something we all liked, and exported to MP3. The one part of this process that we were still unhappy with was the inability to place effects on the individual Reason tracks. There were 4 devices in our music from Reason, but of course we could only process effects on the mixed down track when working with the track in Audacity. Reason does have it's own effects processors, but they were not fitting exactly what we were looking for.
We began researching other DAW hardware and software combinations. We tried using Cakewalk's Sonar. We even played around with the idea of buying a Mac and using Apple's Logic. We finally settled on Pro Tools. Pro Tools seemed to have every capability we wanted. We could record directly in to Pro Tools, we could import the individual tracks from Reason and process them uniquely. There are so many plug-ins available for Pro Tools that we could, if we so desired, and had the talent, accomplish our entire composition within Pro Tools. Pro Tools, however, works only with specific recording software, or more to the point, it uses specific hardware as a kind of licensing mechanism.
Kevin and I, on our way back from the TSG data center, stopped at the Guitar Center in Rockville. We were looking for a USB or fire wire recording device that would come bundled with Pro Tools. Having little experience with these devices we asked the gents at Guitar Center what they recommended. The pointed us to the M-AUDIO FastTrack device.
This device is a USB powered recording device with two inputs. It came with small studio monitors, and a condenser microphone. We asked the sales rep if the bundle came with Pro Tools and were assured it did. The FastTrack also fell within our price range at $250 so we made the purchase and off we went to play.
The installation of the FastTrack was painless, however, we soon discovered, that while a Pro Tools disc was included, it was a trial version. On top of the trial version we could not for the life of us get the software installed. As mentioned before Pro Tools uses specific hardware for licensing. Pro Tools would not recognize the FastTrack at all. We updated to the latest drivers. We removed and reinstalled. All to no avail. We decided to return the product and look at hardware devices produced by the makes of Pro Tools, namely Digidesign.
The folks at Guitar Center were very helpful and happy to correct their mistake of providing us with bad information. We actually met with the same sales representative that helped us on our previous visit. Kevin and I drooled around the store quite a while before settling on the DigiDesign MBox 2 Mini. This device is very similar to the FastTrack, except it is a Digidesign product. The bundle we were looking at came only with the recording device and software. That wasn't a problem for us as we already had microphones, a PA, several amps and other monitoring devices. The MBox usually prices in around $300, however, the Guitar Center folks gave it to us as an even exchange for the FastTrack.
I cannot express to you all via text just how happy I am with the MBox purchase. The bundle comes with Pro Tools 7.3. After registration with Digidesign, users are presented with a free upgrade to 7.4. In addition to Pro Tools, a one year free subscription to BroadJam, an independent musician website, was provided. We also received numerous plug-ins and even a copy of Reason 3 Adapted. This version of Reason is somewhat scaled down, and is meant to tie in directly with Pro Tools. Digidesign also produces DVDs that help familiarize users with the complex Pro Tools interface. The first installation of these learning DVDs were also included in the bundle.
This time installing Pro Tools happened without a problem. The MBox was found immediately and software updates were a snap. We have recorded three rough tracks directly into the Pro Tools interface. For each track or song we record in Pro Tools we are now saving ourselves about half an hour to an hour each time we record.
With the exception of the MBox most of our equipment has been purchased from EBay or pawn shops. We are eagerly awaiting our latest equipment purchase, a Behringer MX1804 mixer. We will be using this to mix down multiple drum tracks into a single track and pipe directly into Pro Tools.
Cryptoglitch's first song, Kill Switch, is available at
iTunes and
Broadjam.com . We are hoping to get enough from the sales of our first tracks to purchase the M-Audio ProjectMix or the Digidesign 003. Both of these devices are multi-track recorders that will plug directly in to Pro Tools, providing our studio with even greater flexibility in recording our sets and other bands.
The
Broadjam.com subscription that came with our MBox purchase has been a god send.
Broadjam.com allows musicians to publish their music on the site for purchase. Similar to
iTunes,
Broadjam.com charges $0.99 per track with the artist receiving $0.80. That is a much larger percentage than many signed artists will receive. While Cryptoglitch has no desire, at the moment, for signing, the exposure we can receive via
Broadjam.com is phenomenal.
Broadjam.com offers many services, such as radio delivery, professional reviews, and so much more. If a band were so inclined, for $19.95,
Broadjam.com will register and host the band's domain, offering templates to make it easier for the band to focus on the music they are creating. With the included subscription the artist is given the ability to upload 100 songs, 4 music videos, and 16 images. We are still working on our profile page at Broadjam, but hope to have 3 songs uploaded within the next week, along with some images from our home studio.
To get our music on
iTunes we are using the
TuneCore website. Being impatient fool I am, I published our first song on
TuneCore and unknowingly closed the album before it was done. Having learned this lesson I caution other artists to be patient and wait until their album is complete before publishing using
TuneCore .
TuneCore offers many of the same features as
Broadjam.com , with the addition of physically printing CDs for the artist.
Of the two sites,
TuneCore and
Broadjam.com , I believe
Broadjam.com offers much more to the artist. Cryptoglitch will likely be making use of
Broadjam.com exclusively in the future.
For those interested in hearing our first track "Kill Switch" please visit
Broadjam.com
And now for soe shameless self promotion:
Visit Cryptoglitch's Store!
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