 Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to talk about a topic which I am very passionate about. It may not be directly related to the piano or the music theory and the ear training stuff which our channel you could say is known for, but it's something which has helped our channel without which our channel would have probably gone nowhere. And why you need to know music technology, music production as a creator, how it can inspire you and how it can also take your creations to the next level. Maybe you're a piano player who's busy practicing the piano or you're a parent watching this video and you have kids who you want to support who you feel have a fair amount of talent or you are an aspiring music producer, you're probably a youngster who's not had too much of exposure. Hopefully this lesson can get you inspired into the field and also give you reasons why you would want to get into this field of technology. Is it for you or can you just kind of get by by just being happy as a piano player or a guitar player. So in this lesson, we are primarily going to focus on why we need a home studio setup and why we need to get into the field of music technology, music recording in general and the hope also if you like this video let us know in the comments. This will be the start of many more. We would be getting into DAW recording software which are chosen to be very affordable. We can get into mixing, mastering and arrangement techniques which is actually how our school started. We started as a recording studio in a jam room and then we started doing classes in Bangalore and now it's become this YouTube channel and everything in the past has not stopped. It continues to go pretty strong we think. So the first and foremost reason why you should get into home studio recording or improve your music audio quality or capture your recordings in any form is because of something which I found personally as a musician just out of college. I was jamming with many friends especially a guitar player and a few drummer friends as well who are damn good musicians you should definitely check them out. We've been jamming for years and years throughout our college but at that time it was around maybe 2003 to 2008 I guess where I did my engineering and around that time I'm sure you'll agree the iPhone didn't have a great recording feature. I don't even think it had one to be honest. Phones pretty much had that snake game. I'm not that old by the way but I was in an era where you have this Nokia phone and you just play that snake game throughout your college. Don't do that now if you're a young person. So the first thing which got me to get into recording tools or any form of recording gear is to record any one of my thoughts or any of my ideas which you would call them as sketches something which you created during an informal jam or in some cases I would think of some ideas in my college days in the classroom and it's just lost because a lot of these ideas are sort of like air. It just comes and it goes so to speak. So one of the foremost reasons why you should learn some kind of recording is whenever you sit on the piano is to capture those thoughts no matter what. So it could be just a jam. You're jamming with a friend or you're jamming alone. It could just be for about half an hour or even five minutes or the moment you have an idea you want to capture it. But then the challenge is you're going to capture those ideas with what. What do we have these days to capture our thoughts? We have a mobile phone. We have mobile phones which capture video as well as audio through voice memo the voice memo inbuilt application. I'm sure you'll agree that the quality of that is not going to be so great because a phone first of all most likely will pick up in mono and it's going to pick up audio with everything in the room so it's also going to pick up your fan, your air conditioner if you have one on it's going to pick up the kitchen noise if you have a pet well the dog barking could also would also get into your recording so well clearly recording on phones has a lot of limitations but it's great if you're outdoors or if you're singing something to yourself for later transcription or later recording you can always sing it into a phone. So definitely you would want something to improve your existing audio quality and have the ability to just capture the moment. So if you have a loved one, a family member or if you're at a concert, if you're at a local cafe and you like the artist you watched or if you're in your church you may think to yourself, hey maybe I can do a good service for those musicians if I capture their gig or their concert but I don't have that equipment. What is the bare minimum thing I need? Well you need some kind of a recorder and you need to learn how to record. So you can use audio technology or music technology to capture the moment so to speak. So if that happens why can't we capture the audio moment? Why does it always have to be visual? And if you're a musician you have to think of these things. So I remember so many cases where I've sung ideas into my phone I've somehow found a mic to record it into a computer and if I did not do that I would never get that song or sometimes an idea could come to you from nowhere you could be walking your dog, you could be having a shower you could be brushing your teeth and the second you come up with that thought you need to respect it and you should not leave that idea. So have the ability and develop an ecosystem to capture the moment whenever it hits you. You do not have to be a professional music producer you just have to be a musician who values his or her work. So that's another reason why you would want to get into a home studio environment. So now coming to what we normally do in home studio settings you have a few of your favorite songs. Let's say you've learned a few Beatles songs or a few Bollywood songs. Now you want to put a stamp you want to put your stamp on it and you want to create some kind of a rendition and you know how it is with YouTube and Instagram these days. Almost all musicians are on those platforms but the ones which tend to thrive or the ones which survive well I feel are the ones which look good and sound good. So the people who maybe get their video shot well but then if your video shot well but the audio was captured from let's say the video DSLR camera or the mobile phone was put somewhere there then you don't serve the purpose because yes you have good video but really inferior audio. Invest some time into learning how to record and capture audio in the finest quality and it's not too difficult. All you need to do is get yourself a sound interface or an audio interface as we call it get yourself a couple of cables download a software a lot of software these days is free so you don't have to spend too much on that. You can use this software called Reaper which is open source so initially for learners you don't have to pay for it if you are not doing any commercial work at least you get the full blown version of Reaper. You need to get some tech keep it ready and get used to it. So let's look at a scenario where you are a piano player and you have learnt something. Now if I have learnt some song or some cover I have arranged it, I have prepared it my way now I need to record it in the highest quality or a decent quality so off the top you get yourself an audio interface take the output of the piano keyboard connect that into the audio interface or the sound capture device you need two cables and then that is connected to the computer and then you record that and then no amount of ambient noise dog barking or the kitchen or the AC recording because it has gone through the cable into the computer you can also record piano data through MIDI as we do for our YouTube lessons we use MIDI a lot because it ensures that we have ultimate control over our ecosystem so if you are recording your own songs let's say as a vocalist you may also want to invest in a good microphone if you are a drummer you may want a basic setup to help you record your drums well it could even be one mic by the way you know so any instrumentalist would need to figure out their tech in order to develop some content on YouTube and you don't want it to be a kind of a work in progress first year it sounds okay it's simple equipment and in some cases it won't even cost you much you might just need to pick up a mic or a couple of cables and just learn a few software and what if you want to take this the next step if you want to produce your own composition an EP, an album the good thing about today's industry is you have the ability to just sit in your home studio which could be your bedroom you can actually call your bedroom as a home studio as I've done for almost a decade now I just have another room in my house which is set up as a studio room so in a sense I'm still in a home studio so there is nothing inferior about a home studio these days a home studio can record drums in its highest quality it can record vocals it can do any kind of project even non music you can do films you can do radio production work you can do podcasts you can do all of this stuff in your home you just have to allocate one room for this particular work so if you have a goal of releasing an album or an EP hopefully sometime this year you need to get started right away and get some tech ready because you don't have to run around finding different studios to record and travelling and all of this stuff you can do the whole process from your own home it could be your garage or your bedroom or whatever you can record you can arrange you can use MIDI you can edit the song you can mix the song you can master the song you can even distribute the song you can upload it to the internet on Spotify or Amazon music or Apple music through your own work like you can invest in some kind of a subscription and get it out there you also may be an individual who likes doing film work you may like to do music for film maybe a short film a documentary maybe you would like to do background scores or a song for a movie a jingle or any kind of commercial music for that matter so you can use your production skills or your production knowledge to do any of this work and be a lot more hireable and be a lot less dependable on many people so I find a lot of people after an audio course or maybe people who are young they want to kind of work under someone and they think that there are many studios who we can write to and send emails to but the truth is you can do it on your own you can just say I'll do it in my own home studio and if I need some help maybe I need the help of a singer as I always do because I'm not a singer or maybe you need the help of a flottist a violinist or a guitarist can always hire these individuals yourself and it's your project and let's look at a very important factor cost all you need is one room you don't have to travel anywhere and remember cost we measure in terms of actual cost in terms of actual money put into the job we also measure it in terms of the amount of time you're taking to do this particular job we have a lot of stages in music production we have recording editing mixing mastering arrangement drum programming string arrangement this that we could potentially deal with about twenty people now all of those would be probably in different studios you'll have to do different zoom calls with different people then they'll give you files which you may not actually like or you may have a lot of changes so you can save your time a lot and also a lot of money because you'll be spending something for the recording person you'll be spending something for editing person the mix engineer the mastering engineer so if you can learn all this on your own you become a one woman or a one man show doing all this stuff and if ever you need other people you can plan it in your own financial planning sheet spreadsheet probably and say ok I have this much budget for my project why don't I now see ok I can probably hire someone who I know maybe it could be a friend who could do who could kind of do a collaboration you know which could be a win-win for both of you and so on and so forth so cost saving is a very important reason for you to get into this field just be good enough to record ok and it's always nice to be in control over the entire project and I find that if I don't know production or when I did not know in the earlier days it was very difficult to move forward the thoughts in my head were never coming out as a final release it was always controlled by so many other individuals sometimes in a bad way sometimes in a good way but then if it's a bad communication or if the collaboration didn't work you have no way to tell them how to get it right because you don't know production so to be in control is a very important reason you need to get into music production and I have a few more final points for you musicians out there who already do music who already perform on stage why you would want to get into music production and record rather than just being a band who jams and performs on stage first off in most of our concert environments these days we have in-ear monitoring systems and in these in-ear monitors you can send at the very bare minimum a metronome so your band can practice on metronome and that can train you for the final recording it can also train you for the concert what you could also do for the concert apart from the metronome is have what's called as a backing track so you can have some elements of the studio recording be taken on a wave file or an mp3 file which is also possible and played into your in-ear monitors as well as the audience so maybe you're a 4-piece band and you feel that you need tabla in the song you don't have a tabla player so you could probably record that and send it out to your audience at the concert and we call this as backing tracks you can also send out the metronome so if you're a solo performer you can think of this as a a minus one performer so if you're a vocalist you could make your own sort of instrumental tracks which we call as maybe carry ok tracks and you know how carry ok tracks are you never get them in the same scale it costs money and the quality is always like really really inferior so it's nice for you to have that control if you're a solo performer to make your own tracks so to speak now even if you're a professional musician wanting to produce a song but you don't want to get into the whole process recording editing mixing mastering at least we should get your idea what we call as a scratch track the bare minimum scratch track to be then given to a producer or a sound engineer or a studio or other musician so learning production is very important to get that initial canvas going that initial structure so what will be the initial structure the tempo of the song the time signature of the song feel how are the beats getting divided so a recording software can help you with all this and then what do you record as a scratch to me if it's a song with vocals it would have the vocals throughout the song it would have one polyphonic instrument at least which would probably be the instrument you play piano or guitar or banjo whatever it may be so record that keep it as a scratch track balance it a bit and then give it out to different people so even if you are not involved in the process 100% at least learn scratch recordings as we call it and at the end of the day whether we like it or not technology is always going to be the future it's going to be the only way to propel ourselves forward almost everything music can be aided and be made a lot more efficient through technology so learning gadgets learning apps learning which is the best microphone it's always going to get better just like cell phones will keep having versions of the iPhone everyone wants the latest gadgets so it's the same thing with music production as you have this awareness of technology and the way things are moving forward it will enhance the quality of your music for sure and more importantly it will also improve the efficiency you will start doing things a lot more faster so if in month number one you can make maybe one song if you use the right technology and if you learn everything well you can start doing a lot more songs you can do five or six or maybe more and to leave you with a final word why would you want to get into production or technology you have to also think of it kind of artistically in a sense if you are a mix engineer or a music producer or an arranger or any person who is controlling many instruments or many tracks as we call it you will just think that all of those are the raw ingredients for your eventual dish that you are cooking so in a way you are the cook of the song you are the guy who is responsible for the songs success so to speak yeah right Jason so I am not saying you are but you get that feeling you get that sense of responsibility you feel very passionate about the work because everyone is dependent on you so if a band or a choir or anyone gives you a project they are relying on you because you are the last stage you are the last line of work so ultimately it is your work which is going to carry that song forward so learn technology well learn music production well or music technology and in future videos I am going to give you a good summary of what gear you might need affordable gear gear could be divided as hardware and software and also how you can manage your computer well you may need some computer equipment some devices some accessories and all the tools to just get things done by just sitting in one spot and you know I want to record vocals ok let's get this done I want to do some piano let's get this done I want some virtual some synthesizer school so in future videos on our channel we are going to definitely delve into all of these things so do let us know specifically in the comments what you'd like me to cover do you want to learn a specific concept of music production like EQing or editing or compression or reverb or whatever it may be do leave us your thoughts in the comments we are trying to take this forward as a lot of you have requested for it when we did this post actually around New Year's time we actually asked what more would you like to see from our channel and almost all of you were talking about music production and how to record and you know music technology so you asked and hopefully we've answered so do leave leave a note in the comments with what you thought about this and what you'd like to learn in the future and take it from me learning recording if not anything is a lot of fun being involved with music production is a lot of fun and our youtube videos or anything we do even the riffs which we do the amount of music production and maybe even the video production work is quite a bit actually it's not just a camera shooting me and we just kind of put it out there's a lot of work which goes on behind the scenes and if you are a person who'd like to get involved with that space then let's get it done on this channel together cheers thanks for watching catch you in the next one