[Tom Evans]

On 2016-06-29 15:50:41 +0000, Mike Rivers said:

On 6/29/2016 10:01 AM, Tom Evans wrote:
Digital sudio recording makes learning to read music optional. And even
many successful musicians playing real instruments don't know how to
read music.

Reading music doesn't have anything to do with it. People played music
before there was a way to write it. I don't read music well enough to
play what I read, yet I'm still able to record my music.

What you're talking about is composition, really. The soft synth allows
you to, in essence, create a computer program that plays music using
pre-recorded sounds. If you play a keyboard, for instance, by ear, you
can use that to generate the program that tells the computer what notes
to play and when.

I'm interested in multi-track, MIDI recording including voice. That does
entail having the songs played back for me automatcially, in order to
review the songs for editing. There's also nothing wrong with that.

The term "edit" tends to get misused in this context. It's true that
much of the recorded music is edited, which involves cutting out parts,
replacing them with other parts or just leaving them out, adding new
parts, putting things in a different order, and such. To some, "edit"
is what they call the process of constructing a finished song from a
group of synchronized recordings. Those recordings could be tracks
generated from MIDI data and played through a soft synth, or recorded
with a microphone, which is how you would record your voice.

Most digital audio workstations (DAW) these days put the whole shebang
together. That's why they're called "workstations." Given the
appropriate interface to your computer, you can record audio, you can
record MIDI data, you can choose the sounds that the MIDI data plays
(soft synth), you can edit the whole song or individual tracks, you can
add one track at a time to build up the song, you can remove or replace
parts that didn't come out the way you wanted.

Most DAWs throw in some sort of soft synth capability to give you
something to get started with. If you don't like the sounds that you're
offered, you can add others.

If you already have a DAW program that you're happy with and you're
just looking for some different sound libraries, that's one thing, and
it might be what you're asking about.
If you're just auditioning soft synth sounds before you get started
with a full DAW package (which it sounds like what you really need),
you might start from the other end. Find a DAW you like, and then look
for sounds that fit with your music.

Your can try Reaper for free, and it's pretty cheap. Studio One (from
PreSonus)has a capable free version, as does Tracktion.

Thanks.

Instead of DAW-hopping to Reaper, Studio One or Tracktion, I think I'll
stay with Garageband, which I already know, and add more libraries to
it.

I just discovered the East West Composer Cloud monthly license option.
That would solve my problem of having to hunt down, download, install,
test and learn the hundrieds of piecmeal plug-ins, programs,
modulators, bells and whistles, etcetera, from scores of different
compaines, which would only give me hodge-podge of stuff, only a
fraction of which would be useful to me. Composer Cloud is also high
end, while much of the free and cheap instruments available on the Web
are not good quality.

I'm also considering buying the East West Spaces Convolution Reverb
plug-in, but I don't know if that's a good idea, because I can add
reverb anyway in Garageband or whatever library I add to Garageband.

Tom Evans