Snapping up the magazine, I learned that Sequencers are the heart of the digital studio (of course the computer it is running on is equally important) in the sense that it also involves recording, adding effects and even EQing and final mix-down. In other words, almost like a full studio that music producers use.
Immediately my thoughts turned towards my church audio setup and how a program like this could benefit it. With talk of doing recordings, a Sequencer plugged into the hardware mixer would be able to record the whole session into the hard disk and then allow a whole range of post-recording work such as adding effects and cleaning up some of the tracks to be done before mixing down and burning from the computer’s CD burner. Now that’s at the most basic, but going a little deeper, individual instrument tracks could be recorded and burned out on it’s own for…lets say a new guitarist who is trying to learn the songs? Could burn for him/her a CD containing just the guitar parts for various songs all played by the current guitarist, which they can take home to listen and practice at home. And this could be done for every instrument (with exception of the drums since it’s not miked up).
Another area would be the Sequencer’s ability to take classical music notation and display it a MIDI overview for play back and study. It can even take notes inputted from a MIDI keyboard and change it to classical music notation, which can then be printed out for distribution. This would be very useful for music composition.
With all this very interesting ideas, it would be good to find out how much actually obtaining it would be. But even this was hampered by the fact that audio software doesn’t seem to be sold off the shelves here. Therefore I was forced to email the local distributors requesting for price lists. Looking at the prices online in US$ and Euro, the price ranges from a little over 1K for the high end products, above $500 for the mid-level and around $300 for the entry-level stuff which are limited in certain areas such as the lack of the ability to handle classical notation. All it all, it kind of reminds me of the price difference between levels in most personal electronic devices such as handphones, PDAs and digital cameras.
In the meantime, I just settle with learning from the demo versions, and about the other types of audio software such as soft synths were one can create new sounds and sample mixers where bits of different audio samples are mixed and tweaked to form complete tracks. Useful for when one feels creative and would like to actually have a finish product to actually listen to and enjoy and even distribute to others.
Phew! There is so much more I can talk about this, but I already had to spilt this into two posts and I’m learning more each time. Guess I better end here. But I shall leave some links if anyone wants further information or if anyone knows more about all this, I’m all ears for tips and new areas to discover…who knows? Maybe in a few months time, I could have some of my own stuff to post up here. Just hope I don’t end up cranking out the usual techno crap.
Links:
General guides and information
Tweakheadz
High-level Sequencer
Steinberg Cubase SX 2.0
Entry-level Sequencer
Cakewalk Home Studio 2004
Loop-based live performance software mixer
Ableton Live 3.0
Software Studio
Reason 2.5
Free software studio
Buzz machines
Leading Magazine
Computer Music
