How to get back into recording music?

LGUG2Z
2023-06-13T01:36:14Z

Many years ago I used to record a variety of music on an old Macbook and a dodgy copy of Logic Pro with various Native Instruments VSTs.

I had so much fun playing the drums badly on my midi pads, tightening them up in Logic, and then doing random stuff with the beat editor (changing velocity curves for specific notes like hi-hats, adding in random hits) to make it sound less rigid. Then maybe I'd record my acoustic guitar with my crappy mic, throw some reverb on it, add some vocals. Man, it was a blast!

It's been over a decade since I did that, and now I'd like to get back into that world again and produce some of my own backing music for my YouTube and TikTok videos, but I honestly don't know where to start.

I guess the big difference now is that I'm on Windows, and there is no Logic Pro here. The Ableton and Maschine layouts don't really make sense to me (I think these are more loop driven?). Reaper seems quite spartan compared to how I remember Logic (I know this is probably not actually the case, but the discoverability is not great imo).

If anyone has any suggestions about where I should start - I'm mostly looking for something that has the same layout as Logic did 10+ years ago (or at least, something that would feel similar and intuitive)- a big timeline where I can drag stuff around and try different arrangements, a piano editor I can break out at the bottom, a drum editor I can break out, set the note length and just drag my left-clicked mouse across to have a million hi-hat hits and then play around with deleting different hits until I get the right vibe, the draw the velocity across all of them easily.

The gear I have right now:

Maschine MK3

Some M-Audio super mini midi keyboard

An old-school Metric Halo ULN-2 (this thing STILL costs a thousand bucks?!)

A few Shure mics and a Wave 3 USB mic

Thanks in advance!

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~creative/165e/how_to_get_back_into_recording_music

Votes: 18

Comments: 14