 This video is sponsored by DistroKid. Follow the VIP link in the description down below to get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. Barry Tune asks, is it okay to not like the Beatles? Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Welcome to the first episode in what I hope will be a new series on this channel, Get Facked. Well I'm going to answer your questions in less than a minute or so per question. Now if you do have some questions for future episodes, please ask in the comments down below. Patrick from the GarageBand Guide asks, what was your first ever door? You know, about 29 years ago now I started using my first ever door. It's since been consigned to the dustbin of history and it was called Digital Orchestrator Plus and I've got to tell you me and my friends were pretty impressed with it. Not only could you record MIDI, which we'd done previously with other computer programs, but now you could record and manipulate digital audio. That was a game changer for us and I went ahead and recorded my first album with it. Fast forward about three years on from there in 1998 or so, I started using Cakewalk. Vonco asks, are you a beta tester for the upcoming Cakewalk Sona? So after BandLab had made their announcements about the new versions of Cakewalk around about eight months ago or so, I did apply to be a beta tester for the new Cakewalk Next. It took maybe a few months before they replied to me and said yes, I've been accepted as a tester but I needed to sign an NDA so I signed the NDA, sent it back to them and I didn't hear anything from them since. That was a few months ago now. So no, I'm not a beta tester for either the new Cakewalk Next or Cakewalk Sona. Pat Jones asks, now that you have used both Cakewalk and Studio One for a while, which is better and why? You know, I've actually been using Studio One for a number of years and indeed five years ago when I launched this channel, my first few tutorials were using Studio One. But I later decided that I wanted to also teach people about Cakewalk because it was free at the time. It's an excellent door and I felt that there's a lot of beginners getting into it who were rather confused about how to use it. Now I wouldn't say that I ever initially chose Studio One because I was looking for a better door. It was more to do with the companies that own Cakewalk at the time all those years ago and there seemed to be a lot of uncertainty about its future. I can't tell you which door is best. They're both very, very good and I suggest you just use the one that you feel happy with. Honard Pogge asks, what's the cheapest equipment you can recommend for a home studio setup? Okay, so here's my list without any explanation. For a safe bet with an audio interface, I'd probably go the Focusrite Scarlett IIi II. For your first studio condenser microphone, I'd give the Audio Technica 80-2020 a try and I'd even give the shore SM58 a run for its money. For headphones, still after all of these years, a good all-rounder is the Sennheiser HD280 Pro and for studio monitors, it's a little bit tricky because I haven't tried any of the budget ones for quite a while, but I do hear good things about the PreSonus Eris range. Planet Person asks, when exporting tracks to send to a mix engineer, do I gain control or just send at unity if the tracks are clipping? So first of all, you should not send any tracks to your mix engineer which are clipping because he or she cannot get rid of that then in the mix. It's bait in. Now if you find that you set your fader to unity gain and your track is clipping, then I would work backwards from there. Is it one of the plugins in the chain which is making it clip? If you eliminate the plugins, is it the initial gain setting? In which case, try turning the gain down. But if you've got your fader set to unity and your gain set to unity and you've got clipping, then that suggests that you actually recorded the track too loud. In that circumstance, no one can get rid of that clipping and I would suggest if you can re-record the track. Don't forget that if you want to distribute your music on popular platforms like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Google Play, etc, check out the VIP link in the description down below for our sponsor DistroKid. If you follow that link, you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. Robemonde Music asks, what do you think about piracy? What I would say about piracy is this, don't get it into your head that you must have this or that plugin to be successful with your music production. With the vast majority of DAWs these days, they come with an array of stock plugins, which means you can do 99.9% of what you need to do with those. As well as that, there are literally hundreds or thousands of free plugins these days and some of them are very, very good quality. So before you go ahead and make that step of using pirated software, which really does affect the livelihoods of some developers, I would ask yourself, do I really need this that much? Jahangm asks, any free VST similar to Melodyne? So I think it's worth noting that Melodyne essential is just $99 and that will take care of most of the pitch and timing correction that you're likely to want to do. But if that's still outside of your budget, I am aware of a product called MxTune. I'll put a link for it in the description down below. Now it's only available for PC and I haven't had a chance to fully test it yet. So if you do download it and give it a go, let me know in the comments how you got along. Barry Tune asks, is it okay to not like the Beatles? I think the better question is, could anyone ever force or coerce you into liking something that you just don't like? I think liking music is a little bit like loving someone. Could you genuinely be forced to love someone? I'll let you answer that in the comments down below. But regardless of whether you like the Beatles or not, I do believe that there's something to be learned from them in terms of melody, harmony, lyrics, and production as well. Regardless of whether you dig their music or not. And if you don't like them, I think that's absolutely fine. Eshort Sacks asks, how are you feeling? How's your creativity been? Any music projects you're excited about? Thank you so much for this question and I think it alludes to the fact that last year I made a video disclosing that I had been suffering from some mental health issues, especially anxiety. And the answer is I'm doing okay. Like many of you, there's ups and downs and I am getting help, which I highly recommend to anyone who suffers with these kinds of issues. Now I like to talk about these things openly because around about 95% of my viewers are actually men and men seem to find these things a little bit more difficult to talk about. However, I've found that once you open the door, people talk more freely and I think that that's incredibly helpful. I want to thank you all for the kind consideration you've shown me over the last few months on this matter. And I hope to see you all in the next video.