Music production basics

Most music production these days, whether it takes place in a home studio or a professional studio, involves computers and music/audio production computer programs. There are numerous programs out there, each with their cons and pros, and they aren’t 100% compatible with each other either. (figures!) But there are a few main ones such as ProTools, Logic, and Nuendo, which are fairly consistently used by most major studios. I myself use mostly Logic in my home studio, and I have worked with all the other major programs as well.

In order to create a piece of music we need to consider a great number of factors, which I will write about in more detail in my Articles section. But suffice it to say that we need to assemble separate tracks together to create the final combined sound that becomes the music we are creating. Each of these tracks can contain an entirely separate instrument sound, or piece of audio recorded through a microphone, or for that matter, a set of computer instructions to be executed as the song is played.

Each track can have its own characteristics, its own set of effects (such as reverb or delay), and its own changing volume as the song goes by. To assemble it all together and make it sound cohesive is the process called mixing, a very important step.

So we are dealing with many thousands of variables and possibilities, which determine the quality of the final result. Actually, this is only the production process, we haven’t even considered the actual musicianship/creative process yet - the actual notes that are played/programmed before or during the production processes! That is the first and perhaps most important step, after all.
 

MIDI file creation (for web use)

General MIDI files are tiny sized, and thus very handy to work with on the web. For example they can be embedded to run in the background of a website, loading almost instantly due to their small size. The downside is that the instruments on a General MIDI (GM) file often sound less real, as all the actual sound is being provided by the computer’s own sound card. While it is a very restrictive format for the music programmer, you would be surprised at how decent it can sound if done well.

A pure General MIDI file is just a small set of instructions that your computer interprets. There is no actual audio of any kind included with a MIDI file. MIDI instructions are very useful even in professional settings, but in those settings, the MIDI instructions are actually triggering professional quality sounds, synthesizers, virtual synthesizers, samplers and the like. But on the web, they are only triggering sounds within your computer, a standardized (and fairly low quality) set of sounds called General MIDI.

To see exactly what I mean, take a listen to some GM files I have created as examples. (You can either use the linked titles or the player controls below. For the player controls to work you must have JavaScript enabled and always make sure to click on the "stop" button for the music playing before starting the next one)

Here’s a jazz standard, in a jazz trio setting (piano/bass/drums). It’s called “I Thought About You”
Another one is a classical piece on piano with a little synth sound underneath for colour. The title of this piece is “To a Wild Rose”.

For something different, take a listen to this one, a track by rapper Tupac Shakur that I did as a MIDI, called “Still Ballin” (no vocals/rap of course, as they are not possible on MIDI)

Here is my bluesy rendition of the pop song “Up Where We Belong” done on piano.
 

Also - click to check out the theme song Attila wrote and programmed for www.walterpaolo.com:
In Quest of Excellence