 Tech Talk Music. Today we're going to talk about music, mainly in the digital world. We're going to talk about different parts of it and what does it mean when we talk about these certain things. So we're going to compare music in the digital world to music in the real world because basically anything that's done on a computer usually is just a mirror image of something that's done in the real world. So there's three main parts of music when you're creating it both in the real world and the digital world. And the first part of course is the music itself, the notes. So you have a composer who writes down the notes, the notes tell you what note to play, what octave, how long to hold those notes for. And in the digital world, although there's different options, one of the most common options is MIDI files and MIDI controllers. So a lot of people when they hear the word MIDI they think electronic-sounding digital music. And although it is digital, it doesn't necessarily have to sound electronic. In fact, it doesn't sound like anything. As I just said, MIDI is just the music notes. Just like you can have music sheets sitting on a desk, they don't make any noise by themselves. You need instruments and people to play them. MIDI files are the same way. MIDI files just contain what notes are to be played, how fast they are to be played, how long they're to be held, how loud and how hard they should be played. It's all that information. It's basically, if you can rate it on music sheets, it's pretty much going to be done in a MIDI file. So again, MIDI files are just the music notes. Don't make any sound themselves. So to make sounds, just like with music sheets, you need instruments and people to play them. In this case, when it comes to the digital world, usually the player is either software or someone using a MIDI controller, such as my keyboard back here, which is just sending out the MIDI information. But you need instruments to make the sound. And when it comes to the digital world, you mainly have two options. You have synthesized sounds and you have samples. First we'll look at synthesized sounds. As we all probably know, sound is just waves that move back and forth. The farther spread apart they are, the lower pitch it is. The closer they are, the higher pitch they are, and the wider or the length of them has to do with the volume. And when you're working with a synthesizer, basically it's a program, or it's going to be software or hardware, but basically you adjust a bunch of knobs and settings to make a wave that sounds a certain way. And they can be round, smooth waves, or they can be solid waves that are very triangular in shape. But depending on how you put those together, you can make pretty much any sound. And nowadays, there's a lot of great synthesizers out there that there's some synthesizers that sound just like the real instruments, and then there's some that don't, and not that one is better than the other. All depends on what you're going for when it comes to the sound of your music. If you're trying to make techno or electronic music, you probably want that electronic sound. But if you're doing rock and roll, you may not want too much of an electronic sound. So the synthesizers, depending on how they're designed, can sound like different things. And although I use synthesizers, I am not one who designs instruments for them. So I can't go into detail on that, but I believe it takes pretty good talent artistically to make a good sounding synthesizer. And again, the second option is sampling. Sampling is definitely done a lot with drums. It's probably the easiest thing to sample. Basically, you have someone hit drum, you record it, and then anytime someone hits a key on the keyboard, it makes that sound and just plays that recording back. Samples can also be changed in pitch. So I can play a single note on a keyboard or on a piano, like a C note, and then link it to a virtual keyboard where I can bend the pitch of it and to make different notes out of it, which you get more and more distortion further and further away you get from the original note. But sampling can also be done very precision where you actually record each note on a piano. So when you're playing on a MIDI keyboard or putting the notes into a program, it's not adjusting the sound to make that note. It's actually playing a recording of each note for a different note for each key, different sample, different recording for each key. It's very time-consuming, very hard to do, get good recordings. And when it comes to putting samples into a program, you have some programs like LMMS, which is also similar to Fruity Loops on the Windows system, but there's lots of programs like that where you can just bring in a wave file. As far as drums, you can do that in LMMS or there's Hydrogen, where each track, each note is a different recording, where LMMS will adjust the recording to put it into a different note by bending the sound. But another option that's common that is widely used amongst a lot of programs are called sound font files, which swammy, I believe is the name of the program I've used to create those. And like I said, you can record a note or a group of notes from any instrument and link them to certain notes when they're played on a MIDI device. And again, when it comes to sound font files or sampling when you're using programs like that, they can be real recordings of real instruments or they can be recordings of synthesized sounds, in which case you're probably better off using the actual synthesizer because you're going to get less distortion when you're moving out in a range of notes. So that's where it comes in. The instruments again can be synthesized or samples. And I'm going to get in here in coming weeks a little bit more about sound fonts because I get asked a lot, especially when it comes to LMMS, how can you make a drum kit, which is a very vague term, which is a package of recordings of drums to where each note is playing a different recording such as you do in in hydrogen. And the answer, depending on what you're doing in LMMS, probably one of the simplest options would be to use sound font files, which is lots of great sound font files out there. And finally, the last of the main three parts of music is effects. These are, you know, echoes and reverbs and other types of distortions. And there's lots of great programs that a lot of music programs have built in effects. One of my favorite programs that's kind of external that you plug other programs into is I rack a rack. I believe is how you say it has lots of great presets makes it very easy to mix different effects. And especially in the digital world, it is even if you're using very good samples, the music will sound very mechanical unless you add some effects and definitely things like reverbs and echoes. And another portion of that that I think would fall under effects is humanization or humanizing where you can add swing and other stuff to the music. Basically what this is is they say in the digital world when it comes to audio or if you're making imagery in like blender and you're trying to make a scene is that imperfection is perfection because in the real world there is no such thing as perfection when it comes to replicating something. So if I lay out a bunch of pennies on a table, they're all going to look a little different where if I'm in blender and I make one model of a penny and I make a hundred copies of it, it's going to look at a place that they all look exactly the same even if the one penny looks perfect. Same with music. And again it depends on the type of music you're making if you're looking for a very regimented digital type of music you may want it to be sound very mechanical but a lot of music people feel that it doesn't have any heart or soul if it's very mechanical like that. So especially if you look at programs like hydrogen drum kits or hydrogen drum machine there are humanization knobs where you can turn and you can put a swing and it basically makes everything slightly not perfect as far as the timing or other aspects of the music. And you can do the same sort of thing with LMMS using controllers where really it's still using timing and stuff but you can make it sound a little more random by using those effects. But again three main portions of music both in the real world and the digital world is the music itself, the notes, the instruments that are being played and then the effects which in the real world could be how somebody plays the notes because you have notes written out and you have the instrument but you can add your own little touch to it but it could also be like using a mute on a trumpet or trombone, something like that. So I thought that I'd just talk about that a little bit because I'll be getting a little bit into a little more stuff on music applications. I used to do a lot more music software. I don't do that as much anymore just because it takes a lot of setup to get the sound sounding right where my voice and the music aren't overpowering each other plus just so many topics I want to go over but I'm going to touch on a few things in the coming weeks. I hope you enjoyed this tech talk and as always please visit filmsbychrist.com. That's Chris of the K. There should be a link in the description and as always I hope that you have a great day.