Musical Odyssey: Laying down tracks

By NESTOR GULA

Although it is great fun, there's no escaping the fact that recording music on a home computer is a time-consuming activity. You have to record each track individually.

The usual sequence is drums, bass, guitar, keyboard and then vocals. The order between the Ituitar and keyboard,

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or whatever other instruments you want to throw in, is not that important, though. Putting the rhythm section down first is crucial. Trying to sync up a drum beat to a meandering vocal or guitar track is next to impossible. Some professional software packages have beat correctors that will sync up your sloppily recorded vocals and guitar to the heat. Cheating, ehl It really does make sense to lay the rhythm down first - this represents the foundation of the song, so get this down and out of the way.

To keep you in the groove, most recording software packages have a metronome built in. Activating this produces a steady rhythm from your computer's speakers. This sound will not be recorded on your track. Setting the time also helps you keep everything together as you go along.

With many systems, latency is a huge problem. Latency is the delay between telling a computer to do something and then having it perform that task. This is best exemplified by early desktop publishing programs that ran on 20 MHz systems under Windows 3.1. There was a delay between when you hit the key and when the letter would pop up on the screen. Even now, when the system is overloaded this phenomenon occurs. When you are recording music and this happens, it is excruciating because it screws up the timing. You can always

shift what you recorded to correct this

little time lapse.

Where this latency really rears its ugly head is when you want to monitor what you are recording. If I am recording a bass track on top of the drum track. I will usually turn off the metronome a r: just listen to the drums to play my bt,. If I am sending my bass signal directl, into the computer, not playing through my amp, I will not hear what I am playing. If I turn the monitoring on. my bass sound will usually lag by about half-a-

second to a full see' the note to when I pletdy unacceptali.: not monitoring what 7 , , take some time to carefully get er sound I want from whatever instamcmt rm using and then once Ian U

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