 If you'd like to know how to record your synth, drum machine or electric piano using your computer, you're in the right place. We're going to be going through step by step what you'll need, how to connect it and how to set up your software. But first of all, there's a few important terms that you need to know. There are links in the description down below for all of the products mentioned in today's video. And if you follow the link to our sponsor DistroKid, you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. So our first term is synth or synthesizer. What do I mean by that? Well, I mean something like this Arturia Mini Freak, which actually produces its own sound, even when it's not connected to a computer. This could also include things like drum machines or electric pianos. And it's different to something like this. This is the Arturia Mini Lab 3. It's a controller keyboard and it actually doesn't produce any sound by itself. It needs to be connected to a computer where it controls the sounds from the computer. If you'd like to know how to connect this up, then you should watch this video just up here. But for today's video, we'll be focusing on synths, drum machines and pianos that actually produce their own sound. You can hear me talking about audio interfaces. And whilst they're not strictly 100% required, they're close to it, in my opinion, because they make it so much more efficient for you to record audio on your computer. They also provide much better connections than the three and a half mil jack that you'll find on your desktop computer or laptop. Now talking about connections, I've got a couple of examples here. The first one is the Arturia Mini Fuse 2. And on the back of this audio interface, you'll find two MIDI connections. Now we'll talk about what MIDI connections are used for a little bit later on. But this is important because on something like this popular Scarlett 2i2 from Focusrite, you don't find MIDI connections on the back. Now whilst that's not a deal breaker, and we'll talk about how you can work around that, that may be a consideration for you if you're in the market to buy a new audio interface. You're going to hear me using the term DAW, an acronym for Digital Audio Workstation. This is the software that we'll be using to record our synth on our computer. And it includes products such as Pro Tools, QBase, Logic Pro, FL Studio, Ableton, Studio One or a free DAW which I'll be using in today's video called Cakewalk. But regardless of which DAW you'll be using, the principles remain the same. There are two types of connections we're going to be using from our synth. The first is audio or sound. So the sound which is coming from the synth. The second is MIDI, M-I-D-I. Now you don't need to know what it stands for, but it's important you understand what it does. Because importantly, MIDI does not transmit or receive any sound. Instead it transmits and receives something which I'm going to call events. So for example, when you press a key on your synth, it knows which key you pressed, how hard you pressed it and when you released it. It also knows when you've used the sustain pedal which is connected to your synth or sometimes when you adjust knobs on your synth. These are all events but we could say they're also your performance. Now importantly, because MIDI is only recording your performance and not the actual sound, it means that we can do things like change the sound later on after we've actually played the part. It also means that we can really easily make adjustments to our performance in our software including correcting mistakes or changing a note from one to another or even doing things like speeding up or slowing down the tempo after we've actually performed the part. Now you can connect your synth up to your computer for MIDI in three basic ways. Let's look at the first one. In the first scenario, both your synth and your audio interface have five pin MIDI connections and the most important thing to understand here is you're going to need one cable which connects from the MIDI out of your synthesizer to the MIDI in on your audio interface. The other cable is going to go from the MIDI out on your audio interface to the MIDI in on your synth. What is happening here is events from your synth get transmitted out and then into the audio interface and likewise during playback events are played out from the audio interface and into the synth so it knows which notes to play etc. The second scenario is useful when you have an audio interface that doesn't have five pin MIDI connections or you don't have an audio interface at all and it involves using a special cable which has MIDI connections on one end and a USB connection on the other to plug straight into your computer. Now I've got a couple of these. This one is a more modern one with a USB-C connection to connect to the computer and this much older trustier one of mine has a USB-A connection. Now with the MIDI connections they will normally be labeled in and out and you simply plug the in plug into the in MIDI connection on your synthesizer and the out to the out connection. Now a word of warning you'll see cheap versions of these cables available on places like eBay. I've ordered some of them in the past and a number of them simply didn't work so I definitely recommend going for a well-known brand with these cables and I'll put some links in the description for that. The final option is where your synth actually has a USB connection and in this case we simply use a USB cable to connect up to our computer but there's three things I want you to consider with this scenario. Firstly that USB connection may or may not be usable for MIDI. You'll have to look in your manual for that. Secondly if it is usable for MIDI you may need to set that up in the settings of your synth. You may need to switch it on in other words and finally usually it is just used for MIDI and not for audio okay in most cases. Now talking about audio let's look at how we connect up for that. So the way that I would recommend that you connect up for audio is using any quarter inch audio outputs that you have on the back of your synth going to the quarter inch inputs on your audio interface. Now with some devices they may just be mono so they'll only be one audio output in which case you just use one input on your audio interface but in many if they're stereo synths there'll be two outputs one for left and one for right and whilst you don't have to I generally connect the left output to the first input on my audio interface and the right output to the second input on my audio interface. Now in some scenarios you don't have quarter inch outputs some synths will have say a three and a half millimeter output in which case you'll need to get a conversion cable from three and a half mil to two quarter inch jacks or one quarter inch jack and the final scenario is where you don't have an audio interface where you're connecting straight to your computer using its three and a half millimeter input jacks. I don't personally recommend this method but if you really want to again try to use the quarter inch outs on your synth and you'll need a conversion cable to go to the inputs on your computer. So now that we've made all of our connections we need to let our software our door know which MIDI devices to use for recording and playing back MIDI. Now of course this is going to be different with every single door but I'll show you here in the free door Cakewalk by BandLab where the principles are the same as most other doors. So I've opened up my preferences and I've gone to the MIDI devices section and you can see there's two main things to set up here MIDI inputs and MIDI outputs. So for my MIDI inputs I have selected my mini fuse to MIDI in port okay. I've got a few devices on my system you may just have the one and that'll make it easy for you but in this case I'm choosing to use the mini fuse for MIDI input. Likewise in the output section I'm choosing the mini fuse to MIDI out which I've got selected here and that is going to make sure that anything I've recorded in terms of MIDI also gets played back to my synthesizer. Now once I've set that up in the door itself I've created two tracks one is a MIDI track. Now when you come to create this in your door it may be called a MIDI track or it may be called something like an instrument track but make sure it's something where you can select that MIDI device that we've just set up in the preferences there as your input and also as your output. Now you'll notice here I've also created another track this is an audio track so let's talk a moment about setting up audio. Now exactly how you set up your audio interface with your door depends on the door but do make sure in your door's preferences that you've selected your audio interface as the main input output device. Once you've done that go ahead and create an audio track and make sure that you've selected the correct inputs from your audio device for your audio track. Now you may have created a mono track in which case you will select just one input or you may have created a stereo track in which case you'll select two inputs as I have here. I've got one single choice here for inputs three and four on my audio interface and that's going to enable me to record my synth in stereo. So now that we've got everything set up I'm ready to do some recording. I'm actually going to start off by recording MIDI only. You can see here with my MIDI track I've got it armed for recording so I'm just going to go ahead hit the record button and play a few bars. Now after I've hit stop you can actually see all of the notes I play there you can see them in the track and then down here in the piano roll and this is where I can do things like correct some mistakes so there was a couple of notes I fumbled there this one here for example I'll just go ahead and delete that little note there and another one further on I'll delete that one and I could do things you know like move notes around and whatever I want. Now interestingly what I can do now before I play this back is actually change to a different patch on my synth so I'm going to change this to Krusty Pluck and let me play the MIDI back and you're going to hear a different patch. So that's the kind of thing we may do before we finally commit to an actual sound so let's talk about recording the audio. Now we come to the easy part actually recording the sound of your synth the audio talking about easy if you use our sponsor DistroKid to distribute your music to the world they make it super easy you simply upload your track your artwork fill in a simple form and DistroKid does all of the rest for you follow the link in the description down below. So in order to record our audio we first of all need to go to our audio track arm it for recording and then simply hit the record button in our door. Now in terms of playback there's a couple of things I want to make note of once you've recorded your audio I would advise that you go to your original MIDI track and mute it why because when you play back you may get two sounds the recording of your synth and the real-time sound of your synth as the MIDI plays it again so I definitely would mute the MIDI track. The other thing you may notice is there's a slight delay in the audio if we zoom a long long long long long long way in here we can see that as the MIDI starts to play here there's a little delay when the actual audio the first note starts to play there there's all kinds of ways to actually solve this but I take a very low-tech approach and that's to grab it and drag it off to the side and line it up visually which is going to be just fine 99.9% of the time. Now if you decide to try this out using the currently free door Katewalk by BandLab then you may also like to check out my beginners course for Katewalk by BandLab there's a link for that and a discount code in the description down below. Thank you so much for watching today and I'll see you in the next video.