How do you record music on Laptops?

Spruce Goose

Spruce Goose

Then Goose me up woman!
Apr 17, 2001
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How do I do this?
I have been using a ZOOM 8 track mixer but thought it might be time to come to the future and start recording through computer...

I mainly play keyboards.

I dont understand what MIDI does. My keyboard has MIDI sockets etc.

I know there is such thing as a USB to MIDI connecter. Will this then allow me to simply play my keyboard and record into the laptop using some music editing software?

A cheap program I saw was Sony Music Maker:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/musicstudio

It says this - simply plug your microphone or instrument into your PC sound card and click Record to capture audio and MIDI.

What does that mean? Does that mean I can do the method mentioned above (MIDI to USB)?

I always thought that MIDI was that crappy poly sort of sound like computers of the 80's?

Please, any help would be great
 
pretty much what you said. I'm an uber amateur when it comes to recording and don't actually do it seriously, so here's a n00b solution hah.

Get a USB - MIDI interface for recording your keys.

Get a USB or Firewire audio interface for running from mixing desk/amp for anything else you want to play, either running from a guitar amp, or singing into a mic etc.

And you're set.

I bought a Guitar Port UX1 for guitar modelling because I don't play seriously or gig, so I just like to sit at my laptop and play with headphones. It runs in via USB and has an instrument input, an XLR mic input (no phantom power...UX2 has that I think), it also has a stereo L-R in, which you can also use as 2 separate mono inputs as well.

Recording software picks up the device as an audio interface, so you can record direct into a program. You can record 2 channels at the same time to separate tracks. When I was on tour doing production I recorded almost every show (accoustic guitar and vocals) with my UX1 and my laptop, and the results were awesome.

For software, there's a cool free program called Reaper which is an open source (i think) recording suite like protools/nuendo etc that I've been screwing around with a fair bit lately. I've used Nuendo and other higher end programs before, and find that I can do everything I did with those, with Reaper. So check that out.

So yeah. There's some options I guess hah.

MIDI = Musical Instrument Digital Interface...basically, you can have libraries of sounds on your comp (softsynth packages) that when you keyboard triggers a midi event, it plays from those sounds...they can be anything from a monotone beep to a fully sampled Steinway grand piano sound. There are some AMAZING piano softsynths out there.

Not long ago I got a cheap arse USB MIDI controller keyboard just for screwing around with, and it's the most fun ever. Got a bunch of awesome Moog soft synths and got my Rick Wakeman on.
 
REAPER is uncrippled, unexpiring shareware and is VERY powerful - there's a lot of stuff it does that even surpasses the big boys. I'm a SONAR user myself so I wholeheartedly recommend that but it's expensive and there's a bit of a learning curve.

Check out www.reaper.fm - the program is under 4 meg and the manual is on PDF so you can get an idea of how to use the program and see if it's for you before you start if you like.

Other than that, Salty pretty much said it all. :)
 
The 2nd one is what you'd want, which does the same thing the first one does, only better. I have one similar to the first one, I got it with my USB midi keyboard. It's good, but it's generally just for taking audio in, you can't record any midi data from it.

The second one would let you run midi out of your keyboard, to midi in of the device. Then, and I'll probably be corrected here, I think you run a loop back from the device from midi out, to the midi in of your keyboard, which then lets the computer access the sound banks of the keyboard.

So it goes...

You hit a key
MIDI event sent OUT to the device/PC
device/PC sends MIDI signal back to keyboard MIDI IN
keyboard sends appropriate sound back to the device.

You could just record a direct audio line out of your keyboard and use the first one, but then you're not going to have any editing control once you've recorded it all. If you ran it all via MIDI, once it's recorded you can tweak notes, note velocity, even change the entire sound or tweak it.

You'll probably find a wealth of knowlegde on the subject at the Jordan Rudess forums too.
 
Yeah, that first one is really only for recording audio and it's pretty crappy. I got one of those with my MIDI keyboard as a bonus and didn't bother even plugging it in (anyone want a USB audio interface? Cheap!! :D).

Salty's right. MIDI is really just information - it's not sounds or anything, it's just data that says what note is being played, for how long, how hard, did you use the pitch bender wheel, etc. So the idea is you set up your recorder to record the MIDI data from your keyboard, then when it plays back, you send that data back to the keyboard to hear its sounds. But because it's just data, you have the flexibility to change the sounds or even edit which notes you're hearing, fix the timing up, etc. (Basically what Salty said).

If you have an onboard soundcard (which you no doubt have), get a cable that connects from the output of your keyboard (or even the headphone out if it's a cheap consumer one that doesn't have proper outputs) that will go into the line-in of your soundcard. While the MIDI is playing your keyboards sounds on one track, set a different track to record the audio from your keyboard that's going into your soundcard's line-in.

If you do that a few times, you can build up quite a decent sounding recording out of it.

Also like Salty mentioned, you're not just limited to your own keyboard sounds. Rather than sending that MIDI data back to your keyboard, you can route it to a VSTi synth plugin and have literally thousands of sounds available to you running inside your recorder. It's a whole world out there waiting for you when you discover this stuff! :)
 
I have laid plans out to convince the wife I need to start drumming again, and she should buy me an electric kit because it is quite and I can go play in the shed or whatever...I wish she would stop complaining and buy me it or something
 
I'm such a musical tourist when it comes to instruments. I have like, a slight amount of aptitude for everything. I can play guitar, I can play bass, I know the basics of keys, and behind a kit I can keep a beat. I just wish I could get really GOOD at something and not want to play around with everything haha.

I'd LOVE an electronic kit...that'd be fucking awesome.
 
I'd really love to get back into playing drums a bit now myself... there was a time where I was tossing up between being a guitarist or drummer but guitar won out, and now that I think about how expensive good drums are and how much of a pain in the ass they are to lug around, I'm kinda grateful of my choice! :p But that said, having a kit set up here in the studio to muck around on between projects would be a bit of fun I think. :)
 
Yeah it does.

If you create a track, then go "Insert - New MIDI Event" it'll put one in the track. Double click on that and it'll bring up the keyboard editor. You have to drag a VST instrument onto the track to use for the sounds.
 
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