Software such as Cakewalk’s Home Studio can turn your Windows or Macintosh computer into a virtual sound mixer and editor.

By CHRISTOPHER AVE, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published August 12, 2002

Thanks to advances in software and speedier processors, the power to make high-quality music on a home computer is within most anyone's reach

So you like to play music on your computer?

For most people, that means downloading a few songs as MP3 files or popping the latest music CD into the CD-ROM drive.

But with today's fast processors and large hard drives, you can actually create your own music with your PC, whether recording your daughter's piano recital, learning how to play Purple Haze on guitar or crafting your own pop album.

Even an average computer these days has the power to manipulate music. With a few well-chosen accessories, you can harness that power to produce recordings that have surprising sophistication. There's nothing like slipping a disc into your friend's CD player and casually mentioning that you wrote, arranged, engineered and produced the song you're listening to, all on your home computer.

Computers have been commonly used in professional music production for about a decade. They offer two main advantages over tape recorders:

-- The lack of "tape hiss" or other background noise common to tape recorders;

-- The ability to do "nonlinear editing." In other words, you can zero in on precisely the point in the song you want to change. And with modern software, you can make almost any change imaginable to a bit of sound.

Thanks to technological advances and cost reductions, the power to make high-quality music on a home computer is within almost anyone's reach. And while there's no guarantee your results will be ready for the Top 40, there's never been a better time to learn how.

So we decided to explain and review a number of software and hardware products that offer near-professional quality for a fraction of the cost.

First, some perspective: When the Beatles recorded their masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, they used a machine that could record four simultaneous tracks of music. Today, even low-cost software offers the hobbyist musician the ability to record and synchronize 24 or more tracks of music. That means 24 instruments or voices playing simultaneously, all in proper timing, just as you recorded them.

Combined with the falling prices of quality microphones and preamplifiers, the improvements in computer hardware and software have driven an explosion in the home recording market.

"It's becoming really commonplace, and with the advancing technology, people can get pretty good results without having to go to a studio," said Rob Reid, marketing director of Applied Research and Technology, which makes products aimed at the home-recording market.

"As long as your engineer skills are good," said Alan Hyatt, owner of Studio Projects microphone company and a former recording artist, "even in your home recording studio, I contend that you can get 90 to 95 percent as good a product as a professional studio can."

Getting started

Get online to learn guitar As a teenager teaching myself to play the guitar in the 1970s, I had few instructional resources available other than to pay for formal lessons. Making music on the Web Here are some Web sites that can be useful to people who record music on their computers.

To use a computer to record music, the first thing you need is a way to translate sound waves into bits of digital information, then back into sound.

In most cases, you will use a sound card for this process. But will the one that came with your computer do the job? Sound cards vary greatly in price and performance. If you want to record music, it's best to have a card capable of full-duplex operation. That means it allows you to hear what's already recorded and record something on top of it at the same time.

Unless you have a high-end computer, chances are you don't have a very high-quality sound card, and you might want to invest in one. There are many reputable sound card manufacturers, and their products range in price from $20 to more than $1,000. Perhaps the most popular manufacturer is Creative, which makes various versions of the Soundblaster card. Most are full duplex, and they may fit the bill if you're on a tight budget.

For better sound quality, you might investigate a company called M-Audio, which makes a range of sound cards known for the high quality of their audio-digital/digital-audio converters. If all you want to do is record one or two sources at a time, an excellent choice would be the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 ($200). It offers an audible advantage over Soundblaster and other budget cards, and it can record two sources of audio simultaneously. It also offers digital input, but unless you have a sophisticated musical device with a digital output, that isn't crucial.

Some computers have sound cards with a digital input but less-than-desirable audio-digital converters. If you already have one of those cards, you might consider a stand-alone audio-digital converter such as the ART DI/O ($200), which converts two channels of audio to digital.

The advantage of the DI/O, and the feature that the company is built around, is a piece of vintage technology circa 1955: a vacuum-sealed tube. ART and several other companies tout the old technology as a way to "warm up" audio that is recorded digitally.

And this brings up a perceived flaw of recorded music on your computer. It's not that a computer adds a coldness to music. Quite the opposite. The computer adds nothing to what is recorded onto it, while the old tape recorders and other vintage gear added a bit of compression. That is, they slightly reduced the volume of the loudest parts of the music while adding what our ears perceive as warmth.

Now that thousands of people are recording music onto computers, bypassing tape completely, companies such as ART add a vacuum tube to their products to emulate the warmth that tape adds to music.

Does it work? The answer depends on whom you ask. Many say adding a tube -- or using a compressor, a machine that does to sound what tape used to do -- improves many styles of music. And companies such as ART and Joemeek offer products that use old-school technology for much less than what it would cost to purchase vintage gear.

Finally, some musicians will want sound cards or converters with more than a couple of audio inputs, so they can record a whole band playing together, for instance. For those people, M-Audio offers the Delta 44 ($230) and the Delta 66 ($300), which offer four and six audio inputs, respectively, along with the same high-quality converters. Both cards are praised in home-recording circles as a relatively inexpensive way to achieve professional-quality results.

The right software

Now we have the hardware to get sound into the computer. But we still need software.

More than a dozen manufacturers make recording software, ranging from very basic to incredibly advanced. For a quick range of options, you could start with the No. 1 recording software company, Cakewalk.

Cakewalk offers specialized products such as CD burning/MP3 recording software (Pyro) and loop-based mixing software (Plasma), both of which are excellent for those purposes.

But if you want to record and manipulate audio to create songs, it may be best to start with an all-in-one solution such as Cakewalk's Home Studio ($90-$150).

Home Studio allows you to record as many audio tracks -- that is, individual instruments or voices -- as your computer can handle. (My 1-gigahertz Pentium III processor allows at least 20 to 25 tracks). Like any other multitrack recording software, Home Studio allows you to layer instruments and voices on top of each other, as well as edit any sound in very precise ways.

It won't make Aunt Millie sound like Barbra Streisand, to be sure. But it likely will allow her to sound as good as she ever has, even if it takes weeks of editing and re-recording sessions to do it. The only real drawback of Home Studio is that you can record only two instruments or voices at a time, which won't work if you want to make a demo for your garage band.

So, if you're really serious about this music stuff, step right up to Sonar 2.0 ($300-$400), Cakewalk's flagship product. With Sonar, you can record as many simultaneous tracks as you want. The interface is remarkably intuitive, showing you the volume level (in decibels) of each track along with a visual representation of its sound wave. Editing is familiar to anyone who uses Windows products; you can cut and paste each and every bit of sound you record.

But not every feature of this powerful package is instantly accessible. In fact, Sonar requires an investment of time: The user guide is 616 pages. And its cost means that only serious hobbyists, semiprofessionals or professionals will find Sonar the best software choice. Others may well find that Home Studio meets their needs and their budget.

Sonar and Home Studio include a boatload of smaller pieces of software that work within them. Some are software synthesizers, instruments that make sounds using your computer's horsepower. Others are known as plug-ins, which when applied can change sounds in different ways.

Some may find the plug-ins included with their multitrack software of choice inadequate. But plug-ins can be quite expensive purchased separately. One group of plug-ins to consider is Sonitus:fx, made by a company called Ultrafunk. Each of the 10 different plug-ins is sold for $50; the collection sells for $299.

The collection includes reverb (sort of an echo, giving the impression of spaciousness), a compressor, a delay (which does what you would imagine: send back a delayed echo of the original sound); and seven others. I found the sound quality impressive for the price (consider that the industry standard, Waves, sells a plug-in collection for more than $1,000).

Finally, many home recordists "master" their songs after mixing, that is, adjust volume, add effects and otherwise prepare the song for distribution on a CD or on the Internet. One way to do this is with a separate piece of software designed to manipulate a stereo audio file.

If you go that route, a great bet is Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge 6.0 ($200-$300), a comprehensive editor that allows you to manipulate stereo files in ways that will make your final mix sound even better.

A good mic

You've heard the hackneyed expression "garbage in, garbage out"? It holds true for home recording. If your original signal -- whether it's your guitar, your daughter's piano or Aunt Millie's voice -- isn't recorded well, it probably won't sound good in the finished song.

The best way to ensure a better sound on the front end is to use a decent microphone. This is an area in which traditional recording studios have always had a huge advantage over folks who make music at home. A top-flight microphone can cost $5,000 or more.

But happily, more manufacturers are seeking the home-recording market (using cheaper labor in China to do it). Companies such as Groove Tubes, Marshall Electronics and Studio Projects are excellent places to start looking for a decent recording microphone.

I have had good success using Marshall Electronics' V-67 ($150) on voice and MXL 603S ($100) on guitar and percussion. But for voice, you might not ever use a better microphone than Studio Projects' C-1 ($230). It has a very accurate, warm sound, and it comes with its own shock mount and carrying case, rare accessories in that price range.

Studio Projects recently unveiled a less expensive model aimed squarely at the home recording market, the B-1, available for the bargain-basement price of $79. While it won't be confused with those $5,000 models, the B-1 is a very solid place to start.

A final note about microphones: The models mentioned all need a source of power and a sort of volume boost called preamplification. So you will need what's commonly called a preamp, which provides both. An excellent and economical choice is the M-Audio Audio Buddy ($90), which will power up and amplify two microphones at once. ART's Tube MP ($80-$120) is also a popular choice, and it has a vacuum tube for warmth.

If you are truly ambitious, you could pick up the M-Audio DMP-3 ($200), another two-channel preamp that is incredibly quiet and powerful. Finally, M-Audio's Omni Studio package ($400) includes the Delta 66 sound card, two preamps plus other inputs for instruments, such as electric guitars, that don't need preamps. It offers the best bang for the buck now available and quality that borders on professional.

Play that funky music

Ready to make music on your computer? Remember a few things:

* Learning anything takes time and patience, especially where a computer is concerned.

* Read every manual carefully, and use the Help function in software.

* The newer the computer, the better odds you have of making recording software run smoothly.

* Have fun.

-- Christopher Ave is the Times' Clearwater city editor and spends hours in his spare-bedroom "studio" recording pop and Christian music. He can be reached at cave@sptimes.com.

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