How to Make Music with Your Computer

[DVYDRNS]

@Leviathant I'm curious why you use Vegas for music making? I thought that was primarily a video editing app? why not use Acid or some other DAW? Not finding fault with you, just legitimately curious!

[Leviathant]

@Leviathant I'm curious why you use Vegas for music making? I thought that was primarily a video editing app? why not use Acid or some other DAW? Not finding fault with you, just legitimately curious!

No, totally legitimate question, as Vegas does at first glance appear to be an odd choice for DAW. You would think that if Sony were my bag, I'd be using Acid, right?

I started using Vegas at version 2 or 3. Prior to that, I would - not kidding - use copy and paste mix in Sound Forge to 'multitrack' recordings that I made against tracks that I 'composed' (I hesitate to use that word because my wife's getting her PhD in composition). Sound Forge was awesome. Is still awesome. Vegas was the guys from Sound Forge going multitrack, how could I not try that out? The early versions of Vegas had very rudimentary video editing, but I didn't much care about that until many years later when I started messing around with video, and boy was it handy to have that available.

I remember when Acid came out, I gave it a try, and it felt like a scaled back version of Vegas. I couldn't really understand why I should bother using that when I already had an environment to work within.

The possible answer to that question might have been "Because Acid has MIDI", but given how I started out with audio editing on the computer, I actually, in a weird way, use it like a tape machine. In Sound Forge, I was essentially overdubbing. In Vegas, it was multichannel, and super-easy splitting and splicing. Any sequencing I did was external, either on a hardware drum machine, or in, say, Reason. I'd export to audio, and then mangle it in Vegas.

Where I started to feel the pain was when I wanted to do things like dynamic tempo changes. Sometime around the time Cubase SX came out (and while it still sucked, it was a huge improvement over Cubase VST) and at some point I discovered the Tempo Envelope, where you could slide down to a new tempo, change time signatures on the fly... Reason couldn't do that on its own, my drum machines couldn't do that. Mind you, I don't know if I actually recorded/released anything that did anything too fancy with the tempo, but I was starting to see how sticking with Vegas was going to restrict me.

Around that time, I joined a shitty (I say that affectionately) punk band. MIDI schmidi. All I needed were tracks and speed, and Vegas provided. Not long after that, I bought a fixer-upper of a house, and for a number of stupid reasons, the band broke up, and I didn't really make any music for a number of years. However, Melissa's composing career launched, and I took to recording both video & audio of performances of her pieces, and after one of my promos for one of her works was played on the Rachel Maddow Show, I decided I was long overdue to pay for the damn software. That was Vegas 9, I've since upgraded to 10 and again to 12.

A year ago, we finished the fixer-upper house & rented it out, and I started making music again. I've recorded a couple of songs with Melissa under the title "Up Your Cherry" (a play on "a piacere"), although I've only managed to get her to record vox for a single track, we've played a number of shows, and damnit, we will have at least an EP's worth of tracks up on Bandcamp before the year is through. Since we have to perform live, I keep the instrumentation live-oriented: Drum kit, drum machines, vocals, and mandocaster. The recorded tracks have bass too - but I've only played bass at a live UYC performance once so far, for a single track. That track actually switches from 7/4 to 6/4 near the end of it, but handily my DSI Tempest can do that without blinking, so I was able to set that to go autopilot while I brought up the bottom.

I never liked Cubase. When I finally tried Pro-Tools, I came to the conclusion that people are brainwashed. What a piece of shit DAW. I must confess I haven't used FL-anything since back when it was called FruityLoops. It's not fair to them at all, but whenever I see "FL Studio" I read it as Fruity Loops Studio. Apple bought Logic and killed the Windows version, so fuck you Apple. I came from a tracker background, so most MIDI sequencers in the late 90s came across as woefully inadequate, given the lack of control and the horrible interface. I'm sure they were fine if you could play the black and whites, but I never got into that, so Cubase and Cakewalk and the like were horrible. Reason was the first thing that came out that convinced me that there had been some evolution in usability since trackers, and I used that for a few years, often rendering it into chunks to effect later in Vegas. Inefficient, perhaps, but I also prefer individual effects pedals to a multi-fx unit.

I tried Reaper out a couple of times over the years - early on, it was passable. More recently, I feel like it's caught up with Vegas in both usability and, what, UX? UI? Information display. And instead of video editing, it has MIDI. And it's Justin Frankel, the fucking dude who made Winamp, Shoutcast & gnutella. The licensing for Reaper is pitch-perfect, and essentially reflects how I used Vegas, except the way I used Vegas involved cracks, up until I made money with the result, and then I started paying: that's against their silly rules. Reaper's philosophy to pricing is spot-on how I'd do it if I sold my company to AOL for dozens of millions of dollars in stock when I was in my early 20s and decided to keep making cool shit anyway. Heh. The guy has a fantastic combination of heart and ability, and I think that will drive Reaper to go places the other DAWs will have trouble keeping up with.