[Closed] Recomend me some music creating software for my daughter.

What phone and what computer do you have?

She has a laptop with Windows 7 on it and 4meg of ram but it's sub £300 job so i doubt it'll have any fancy sound cards in it.

i use audacity which is a free multitracking programme. It's petty simple to set and use which helps as some stuff is really confusing if you're not used to recording software. Garageband is great but i think you can only get it on macs.

Cheers, I was just having a look at garageband on my mac, it would do the job but I don't think there's a PC version.

I'll have a look at audacity.

Ta

Reason, Cubase, Pro-tools are all the standards but expensive although they all have Demo versions that are downloadable.She could start mucking around with those before she settles on a full version.

[url= http://lmms.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php ]Failing that this is free, don't let the name fool you, its available on Windows[/url]

Garageband is Mac only, I'd say either Audacity or Sony Acid which has midi support and get a USB audio interface with phantom power (esentially a built in mic pre-amp)

For cheap you want [url= http://lmms.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php ]LMMS[/url]

This is probably better for creating actual music than Audacity

Ableton Live Lite for less than £100

http://www.energy-xt.com/index.php

Cheap, great for beginners but still plenty powerful.

reaper. lots of pros moving from logic, pro tools etc to this, its free tho you can and should buy the £40 version. its as good if not better in some ways than the above. you may need a soundcard or audio interface, get a usb one and stay away from soundblaster http://www.thomann.de/gb/behringer_ucontrol_uca_202.htm
is a cheap one but you can go much higher

I recently bought a Yamaha Audiogram 3 USB interface box which came with Cubase AI 5. all in £80 ready to record including a legitimate copy of Cubase.

The Yamaha has a combined XLR/jack plug input socket, a stereo pair of jack input sockets, stereo phono inputs and stereo jack and phono outputs, plus a headphone socket.

I'm not exactly sure how I've managed it but I've managed to record my drumkit on the stereo pair and "the room" on the jack/XLR input, onto separate tracks in Cubase. Kit was mic'd up in our rehearsal room through our keyboard player's rack mixer, 5 in, stereo out.
This gave us a stereo drum track and another track picking up all the instruments in the room - a "guide" track which I plan to lose later, but that the rest of the band can follow as they record their pieces.

sadly it turned out that the drum mics picked everything else up as well as the kit, so I went back later, on my own, and recorded the drums again onto a new track in Cubase, while playing along to what we'd already recorded. We've also done guitar, bass, lead and backing vocals in separate sessions, and the rough mixes are sounding pretty good so far. Just waiting for the keyboard tracks - keyboard player has Cubase at home so he says he'll do the keyboard tracks while he's off over Xmas.

So if anyone tells you that this device can't record two Cubase tracks simultaneously, it can, I've managed it.

Another vote for reaper. Spend a bit of time with YouTube videos showing the basics, download some free VSTi instruments (see http://freemusicsoftware.org/ for a great resource - I recommend Independence by MAGIX as a great all rounder, but there are loads).

Also check out http://www.karaoke-version.co.uk which allows you to download customised backing tracks - you pay around .99c for a track but you can then download as many custom versions of it as you want. Simply download each instrument as a separate mp3 track, import them into reaper, and then you can remix, add your own vocals etc.

one other resource that is great fun to play with is http://www.looperman.com/ which will allow you to get some pretty good free loops of all sorts of stuff (drums, vocals, piano, synth etc). These can again be dumped into Reaper and remixed, added to etc.

I have bought my daughter an Alesis Io2 soundcard/usb box to get the mic input into my laptop.

Have fun!

having spent a long time on cubase, i've just moved to ableton live and find that a much better way of working. much more conducive to jammimg a tune out. as mentioned the lite version is under a ton or free if bundled with a scarlett 2i4 soundcard which is £149.

So if anyone tells you that this device can't record two Cubase tracks simultaneously, it can, I've managed it.

That will be me then. I'll have to go and try to do this as I would love to have both the stereo and an additional mono track. Could be a lazy Sunday afternoon test

Reaper is amazing but not that beginner friendly. There still isn't really a decent PC alternative to GarageBand AFAIK (and I did research this a little while ago for a digital music learning resource I helped write).

LMMS looks good but I'm not sure what its like for recording audio. Reason is cool - I've not used it for a while but you never used to be able to record audio properly on that.

Give her your Mac 😛 - GarageBand is perfect really , amazing piece of software.

I'd say keep it super simple to start with. I'd ask the same question or do a search here http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=74&sid=43e3aded6c15e840a6c7851b62212cee

I wouldn't go with Audacity or anything like that, to be honest I'd go with something like FL Studio although if you want to record audio you can't get away with the cheapest versions, though you could just record into Audacity and then bring the wav into FL. I'm not sure Audacity would be much fun to create a tune in, though Burial just uses Soundforge so it is possible. I've not used Live but it might be a better option.

I started with FL back when it was fruity loops and the simple interface and workflow was just really easy to pick up. Sitting down infront of Cubase or Sonar would probably just be off putting, still makes me want to cry anyway!

main thing for a beginner is it needs to be fun with quick results!

LMMS looks good but I'm not sure what its like for recording audio

My daughter's school uses LMMS for creating music but I tend to use Audacity or Cubase (AI) for recording. Cubase will reduce you to tears unless you go through the tutorial first but it doesn't take long and makes a huge difference

If your daughter is recording her own voice then one of the advantages of the paid packages (e.g. Cubase AI) is that they tend to come with at least one decent reverb and that makes a huge difference. I haven't found a decent free reverb out there yet (and gave up trying a while back so there may be now).

I'm not exactly sure how I've managed it but I've managed to record my drumkit on the stereo pair and "the room" on the jack/XLR input, onto separate tracks in Cubase

sadly it turned out that the drum mics picked everything else up as well as the kit

What happens is that the Audiogram mixes the mic and stereo pair together before sending it to the USB so your drum mic wasn't picking up the room - your room mic was. You had Cubase recording the same thing twice, once in mono and once in stereo. The USB is only stereo (from the schematic for the Audiogram)

So if anyone tells you that this device can't record two Cubase tracks simultaneously, it can, I've managed it.

See above. I really hoped that it was possible but it isn't :(. It's even worse if you buy the '6' thinking you get six tracks but you only get stereo.

ah that makes sense. apologies for sounding like a know-it-all, I stand corrected - although it did [i]seem[/i] to work, after a fashion, at the time.
Not really fit for the purpose for which I bought it, although I guess it's fit for the purpose it is sold for 🙁

I would really expect to be able to record two instruments simultaneously on two different tracks, but the only way to prove it would be to DI a bass or guitar input direct from the FX pedals into channel 1 and a vocal mic or perhaps another instrument DI'd into the other channel. something to experiment with over Xmas I guess.

Do you have one of the Yamaha Audiogram things to hand?

<thread hijack - sorry>
I reckon something like [url= http://www.pmtonline.co.uk/zoom-r16-digital-recorder.html ]this[/url] is what I [i]really[/i] need to record my band without spending hundreds of quid a day in a pro studio, would you agree leffeboy?

I understand Zoom don't have the best quality reputation in the world, but my 505-II guitar FX pedal seems to be holding up to the requirements of a hobby rock band.

</hijack>

If I was spending 'decent' money on a DAW, I'd go with Ableton Live, I love the workflow, everything is very intuitive.

Here's a remix I finished this evening.

http://soundcloud.com/800-xl/thieves-like-us-killing

I reckon something like this is what I really need to record my band without spending hundreds of quid a day in a pro studio, would you agree leffeboy?

I've never used it before but a first pass look at it suggests that it might work very well. The thing to check is that you can actually do the editing on proper software on a PC rather than using the interface on the device itself which is nearly always impossible. It looks as though if you connect it to a PC then you have access to all of the recording per channel which is what you want - but I didn't check in detail. I might though as it looks rather nice although I'd prefer more inputs with phantom power.

Do you have one of the Yamaha Audiogram things to hand?

If you are stuck then you can always use one of your computer inputs as one channel and the audiogram for the others. You need to change the ASIO driver from the Yamaha one to the DirectX one to get access to your computer soundcard inputs as well and then drop the buffer size way down to get rid of the stupid latency

rough mix of one of our songs, wot I recorded with said Yammy, coming soon...
ah, here we are now: https://soundcloud.com/chasing-glass/our-war

Snare drum sounds crap, not like a £300+ snare, turns out I hadn't tuned it since I got it out of the box about 2.6 years ago. oh well

more here: https://soundcloud.com/chasing-glass

"Northern Lights" recorded in my dining kitchen with a Behringer UCG102 USB interface & Cakewalks Sonar.

The rest recorded as described above.

I'm not too familiar with Cubase but I've been dabbling with Sonar for a couple of years so I exported each instrument track from Cubase on the laptop & imported it into Sonar on the desktop, then mixed from there. I've also tidied up some of my sloppy drumming 😉

Slightly OT, but any hobbyist music makers on Android should check out Caustic2. Is like a cut down Reason for your phone or tablet. Only had it for a couple of days but it seems well featured, stable and pretty cool for scratching out ideas on the move. Could do with a decent sampler module (only currently has a soundfont based sampling synth), but seems pretty well supported so that might be on the cards at some point.

EDIT. Ignore comment about lack of sampler - I thought the PCMsynth in Caustic was only soundfonts, but it does import .wav too so can be used as a sampler. Which is nice.

our keyboard player went half-half with me on the Zoom R16 portastudio 🙂

haven't tried recording with it yet but I have managed to set it up on our Cubase mixes as a Mackie controller.
So weird/cool watching the sliders on the Cubase screen go up & down as I move the sliders on the R16, and the tracks fade in/out as I do it.