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Fine Tuning Your Work
At some point you'll want to set up the different instruments in your song. On the program I use the easiest way to do this is in Track View - where you can see all the tracks at once. Controls for soloing or muting tracks are also available, usefull for compairing different sounds with others. Here is the program's Track View window. | |
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In this picture, I have a 'dialog' window open in the middle for selecting which synthesizer I want to
use. This is one way of telling this program what set of sound fonts to use. I'll get into this feature
in the Midi Channel section below.
Track view also lets me copy tracks or sections of tracks in one go. This lets me record one track with all the little "fluff" bits in and later seperate the bits onto seperate tracks for different instruments or spatial position. What's that? You ask. In a nutshell, it's where the instrument sounds like it's coming from. Origional stereo recordings were done by placing one microphone 1/3 the way into a room and another 2/3s of the way in. When played back on speakers placed in the same positions as the microphones, a listener would hear the performance exactly as it was recorded. Even if you moved around the room, you'd hear the sound from an equal position as if you were at the live performance. Listeners can even identify a near or distant instrument from the others. You can get a similar affect if you adjust the pan of different instruments along with their volume and reverberation amounts. In MIDI, reverb may not always work properly from machine to machine- again that depends on the sound cards installed on them. Right now I tinkering with a "marching band" idea for the song '76 Trombones'. I want to get the feel of a marching band passing by the listener. Panning tracks with the pan controller setting would work, but that would only be part of the trick. By panning multiple tracks that crescendo in and out at different points during the song, I can more faithfully reproduce the effect of the different instruments passing by. And I can see a visual representation of the parts as well, very helpfull for this work. Of course, the final result would either be visualized as either a very long marching band, or one that encircled the listener- we'll have to see. Below is a view of Digital Orchestrator Pro's Mixer window.  With a layout that is practically identical to a studio mixing board, I can adjust each MIDI Channel's MAIN volume, pan, reverb, and chorus. If no controllers are added in the tracks, these will govern the song's overall performance. Neat tip here: I can click Record here and the "performance" of my controller changes on the mixing board will be added into the tracks in Real Time playback. Too bad there's only one mouse pointer. Midi Channels vs. Midi Tracks Different parts of a song can be recorded on individual tracks, or all on one track. Think about a pianist. One person playing. Two hands. If you recorded in real time, you'd end up with one track. You could also record each hand onto it's own track individually. Pan the tracks left and right and you'd get a nice stereo separation, right? Not exactly. Volume, Pan, Chorus, and other effects work on Midi Channels. There are only 16 channels available in the current Midi format. The Instrument selection also depends on the Midi Channel. If I have 3 tracks all on Channel 1, and I change the instrument on Track 2, then the instrument is changed on the other 2 tracks to the same instrument. So if I want to have my left hand/right hand setup as mentioned before, I'd need 2 Channels as well as Tracks. Keep in mind that if you place an effects controller, like pan, into one individual track then that pan control will affect all of your other tracks on the same midi channel. As you can see, a bit of planning before you start recording can greatly improve the outcome of your work, and can make it easier to change things down the road without ripping your song to pieces first. | |