[MUSIC ] In this week, we're going to move

into the computer to the central hub of

the post production process, the DAW, or
Digital Audio Workstation.
And I use the term post-production and it,
it's, it's, the term, prod, production
gets used in a wide variety of ways in,
in, in music.
So, let's try to define that a little
more.
Sometimes, production means the entire
process, right, on producing music, but
when talking to actual musicians and mix
engineers, very often you can be a little
more specific and break it up into three
phases.
The pre-production process, production,
and post-production.
The pre-production process would be
composing your song, getting your ideas
together, planning for the performance.
Production is the actual recording of the
performance.
We might call it the tracking of the
performance or recording of it, and the
post-production process is everything you
do after that.
So, you go into your DAW, and you do your
editing, your mixing, and your mastering.
We'll start this week, with how you can
figure your DAW for the production and
post-production process.
There are many choices you have to make
when first setting up your project, that
set you up for success, along the, along
the way.
When recording, we're going to have to
configure our DAW to work at the correct
sample rate and word length.
So, that's configuring how we're going to
record our digital audio information, and
we're also going to have to configure our
file management.
We're going to find that when dealing
with, with the DAW and music production in
general, you're going to generate many,
many files and lots of data.
And it's important to know where
everything is.
If every time you hit Record, you're
creating a new audio file that's living
somewhere on your hard drive and if you
don't know quite where that is, you're
going to have a lot of trouble down the
road.
A music production project is not simply a
single file, like a Word document.
Instead, it's a folder that contains
subfolders, that contain a ton of
different data.
So, again, you have to be very clear with
how you're saving things.
Now, as I go through the information in
the DAW, we're going to be looking at
actually, a variety of different DAWs over
the course of the course.
But the concepts are the same in all of
them.
It really, they all have the same exact
features.
It's just a button is moved here and
there.
So, though we're focusing maybe in logic
in this example, you should be able to
apply that information easily in another
DAW.
I'm covering the things that are
consistent across them all.
After we've recorded our audio in our DAW,
we'll move onto editing it and editing is
the rearranging and manipulation of those
individual audio files.
A really creative time but it can be kind
of tedious to sit there with the mouse and
move individual audio files over and over
so we'll focus a little bit on efficiency
and just again, those common DAW features
that make editing much easier.
From there, we'll look at mixing a little
bit this week, but we'll examine that
further in future weeks.
And then, finally this week, we'll look at
MIDI.
And MIDI data is an important type of data
we haven't looked at yet in the course.
Midi stands for Musical Instrument Digital
Interface, and it's kind of a real-time
score, a kind of a way to transmit not so
much audio, right?
It's not a specific representation of
sound, but more of a representation of a
musical score.
And we have a lot of editing capabilities
that works with MIDI in all the, all the
DAWs that are out there.
So, let's look at sampling and digital
audio conversion.
I'd like to take a moment to demonstrate
some of these digital audio principles.
I have here an audio file that was
recorded at 48,000 hertz.
So, the sampling frequency was 48,000
hertz.
It's a 4-second wave file and what I have
recorded in it is a sine wave playing a
500 hertz tone.
Let's hear the wave form.
If I zoom way in, you'll see, it has a
sine wave shape or a smooth kind of shape.
In the sonogram display, we have a single
line at 500 hertz.
In the spectrum analyzer, we have a single
peak at 500 hertz.
A sine wave is a special type of wave form
because it's energy at single frequency.
We said earlier that most musical sounds
are energy at a fundamental frequency and
then they have partials or harmonics above
that and we saw that with the sonogram and
spectrum analysis of my voice earlier.
A sine wave is special because it's energy
at a single frequency, you can think of it
as only a fundamental tone.
Now, we said earlier that this is recorded
at a 48,000 hertz sampling rate.
And if I zoom way in, we'll actually see,
I have the sine wave and if I zoom further
in, we can see the individual points that
are those individual measurements of
digital audio.
So, when I play back this sound wave at
48,000 hertz, it's going to play each one
of those at a 48,000th of a second.
So, we hear one sample and then a 48,000th
of a second later, we hear the next
sample, then at 48,000th of a second
later, we hear the next sample.
What happens if I play this back at a
different sampling rater?
Well, let me try it.
The sam, the sampling rate originally is
48,000 hertz, I'll play it back at 96,000
hertz.
Now, let's hear it.
Do you notice what's different?
Now, we see a peak at 1k, 1,000 hertz, and
we have our fundamental frequency line
here at 1,000 hertz.
We also see that the waveform is now half
the length.
It was 4 seconds before.
Now, it's at 2 seconds.
So, playing something back at a different
sampling rate is like speeding up or
slowing down our, a record or a turntable.
And then, if I speed it up twice as fast
from 48,000 to 96,000, if I speed it up
twice as fast, we're going to have half
the length and it's going to be double the
frequency or an octave higher.
Now, I'm pointing this out because
sometimes you get errors like this.
So, this is the original 500 hertz tone
playing back at a 48,000 hertz sample
rate.
What if I was to change this a little bit
to put it at 44.1?
It's a little bit out of tune and it's a
little bit longer.
So sometimes, when working with digital
audio, you'll have a sample rate mismatch
where something is played back at the
wrong sample rate.
And it sounds as if a record was played a
little faster, or a little slower, or a
lot faster, or a lot slower depending on
how big the mismatch is.
So, something to be aware of and to watch
out for.
And also, something that you might want to
play with creatively at some point, if you
want to speed something up or slow
something down drastically.
Now, the next thing I would like to point
out is just how good we are at hearing
individual samples.
I'm going to Zoom In around two seconds
here quite a bit, to the point where we
see the individual samples.
Now, rarely do you need to adjust the
level of an individual sample.
But sometimes for corrective purposes, if
there's a digital glitch you do want to go
in and edit individual samples.
And this DAW has the ability to do that.
S,o I will grab and just move one of these
samples in both left and right just a
little bit.
So, you see, I'm just changing a single
sample.
Remember, there's 48,000 of these per
second, right?
So, it's a very, very tiny slice of time.
Actually, a 48 thousandth of a second.
And what I find amazing is how obvious it
is when we hear that, that little
mismatch, that tiny little moment is
clearly audible.
Let's hear.
It's kind of hard to hear and see in the
spectrum slate but there's a, a thin blue
line there.
Right here, there's a thin blue line,
that's that click and I sure heard it.
Let's hear it again.
That high-frequency click, that was that
one sample out.
So, even a single sample can have a
dramatic impact on your audio and the
quality of your audio.
It's really nice to know what these kind
of digital glitches are so you can
identify when you hear a problem, but it's
also really important to know just how
specific and how perfect that audio has to
be.
It has to come out exactly in time, 48,000
times per second, and those samples have
to be perfect every time.
If you think about it, that's actually a
lot of computational power that needs to
happen in the computer to make sure each
one of those samples goes out perfectly
48,000 times per second.
Because even if just one of them is wrong,
it's going to be an audible click for the
listener.