Home Studio Helpline: Setting Up Your Home Studio

Reason, Logic, Sonar, Cakewalk, Acid, Nuendo, Vegas, Cool Edit... Sounds like another (trippy) language sometimes, doesn't it? Well it is in a way, especially for the non–nerds who don't know what we're on about. In this issue we'll try and get a bit more familiar with music/audio production software, the toys and tricks that are part of music production nowadays.

I remember (not so long ago) threading tape into massive big machines, cleaning heads and rollers etc, prior to recording a session. (Aaah those were the days). Now it's just a couple of mouse clicks and you're underway.

First up let me say I'm not dissin' any format or technology, I just think of them as various tools of the trade for us to create our masterpieces. There are many ways to catch a fish and these days even more ways to record a song.

I want to give you a quick insight into some of the likely software you may be contemplating for your home studio. There are all sorts of incarnations of multi–track, 2-track, loop based, MIDI sequencers, burning, notation, tuition, acoustic, multimedia, soft synths, samplers, DJ and other such cool stuff around. Sometimes you figure you need them all (well I do!... not). As we are mainly dealing with recording and music production I'll focus more in that area.
There is a damn lot of useful software that you can get free off the Net and I'm not talking cracked or pirated stuff either (naughty). There are some good shareware and free versions easily available (See Sam Airy's great article on page 56). Sometimes international magazines offer free software or trial versions as well.

Anyway, if you're contemplating buying a good sound card for your computer check out what software, and possibly what interface, comes with it, as this may or may not be all you require. I'll name drop a few and comment to get you drooling.

Cool–Edit Pro (Syntrillium) – for comprehensive audio editing and multi–track recording. CEP is a very cost effective and popular package.

Cubase SX (Steinberg) –the ground–up replacement for the venerable Cubase VST version and a pretty potent recording, editing, sequencing package that includes some great VST plug–ins. If you want even more seriousness the Nuendo (Steinberg) is the industry high–end production version.

Sonar XL (Cakewalk) – fully featured, easy to use multi–track recording and sequencing package which is stable and versatile.

Reason (Propellerheads) – electronic music studio software that is very adept towards dance and electronica music, great soft synth, sampler, looping and drum computer features. A knob twiddlers' dream.

On the horizon though Cakewalk are about to launch Project 5 which they say is their answer to Reason. Propellerheads also make the brilliant ReCycle 2.0 Loop/Tempo matching software.

Sonic Foundry produces some hot software that is definitely worth checking out. Sound Forge 6.0 is their workhorse 2–track editing/mastering package, and with lots of great features and accurate tools this is seriously cool.

Sonic Foundry's CD Architect 5.0 is a must for producing professional 'Red Book' audio standard CD pre–masters suitable for professional replication. This is a very powerful and precise package for CD burning and mastering (look out for it!).

Also from the clever people at Sonic Foundry comes Acid Pro 4.0 a superb loop–based program (so easy to get groovy with this), and on their hit list are also Vegas 4.0 and Vegas + DVD two hot new products for video, audio and DVD production. Wowee!!

Pro Tools (Digidesign) is pretty much the industry standard for professional audio recording/production, with their various array of products and options ranging from the Digi 001 and 002 (I can't wait for the 007 version), M Box (laptop ready!), Mix 24 and Mix Plus up to the dazzling HD3 system, plus a plethora of plug–ins and other must haves including the brilliant Pitch 'n Time (from NZ's own Serato) and with those ultra damn groovy Native Instruments products you can't go wrong (but you can go broke!).