How to Compose Music with a Computer, What’s a DAW?

I started with an electric piano, a gift for our family. One with that came with hope for my little girl to start lessons and feel the beauty of music.

The keys on our Yamaha are weighted. It’s a standard piano size with 88 keys, and it feels a lot like my parents old baby grand piano.

Here is a link to Yamaha’s web site for more info on Portable Grande Piano DGX-660. If you are interested, we bought ours at Best Buy in Canada, but this model or something that suites you should available at your local music store.

My music making software was first loaded onto a Microsoft Laptop. Shortly thereafter I went to my local computer store and bought a refurbished i5 with a good amount of RAM and storage. That cost me about $450 CAD. The store I used for this buy was Canada Computers.

I strongly suggest you begin with a computer you will use for many years if you can afford that option. Changing musical software and plugins to a new computer can be a lengthy and rather frustrating process.

Simple as that.

DAW – Digital Audio Workstation:

Simply put, it’s a computer program for recording, mixing and editing instruments, sounds and samples.

Picture yourself recording Drums on Track 1, Guitar on Track 2 and finally Piano on Track 3. All these tracks are visualized in a computer program. As you play back the song, if you hear a mistake, each track can be individually edited right inside the computer programs interface.

Effects like reverb, distortion and equalization (and many many more) can be applied through this software as well.

A few popular DAWs include:
Cubase
Logic Pro
Ableton Live
FL Studios

Digital Music Files:

Imagine recording a sample of a single violin playing the note C. What if you could attach that recorded sound to a keyboard’s key. For example, when you play Middle C on the keyboard, the sound that actually comes out is C played beautifully by a professional violinist (pre-recorded at a professional studio).

Now imagine when you press Middle C lightly, it plays one recording of the musician playing their violin lightly. When you press Middle C hard, the violin plays a separate recorded sample of the violinist playing C loudly.

What you end up with is a beautiful professional recorded sound rather than a synthesized fake sound.

Here is how it works in theory:

First, there’s a Midi Controller

Something needs to tell the computer what note to play and how. Simply put, when hooked up to the computer, your electric piano keyboard is called a MIDI controller. As an analogy, the same way a computer keypad is used to type letters for MS WORD, your electric piano keys control playing the pre-recorded sounds in your DAW.

Then there are VST’s or ‘Audio Files’

When you press a key on your MIDI Controller (Electric piano), it sends a message to your computer that tells your DAW (Cubase for example) to play a sound. Normally that sound could be a basic MIDI file that sounds like garbage.

So how do you make it sound like the crisp beautiful violin? You download a “Violin VST library” ( Pre-recorded violin sounds) into your DAW. Each violin recording gets mapped appropriately to your keyboard and when you play any of the 88 keys, you are in-effect controlling the musician on their violin.

For a very technical but excellent description of Audio Files and VST’s, check out the comment on this discussion at Spitfire Audio’s Forum.

Sound Card (Not the one that comes inside your computer):

One last thing, Those vast amounts of pre-recorded sounds (I.e. the violin) that are now attached to your computer have a play back delay. For example, you press the key Middle C, wait a bit, Grab a sandwich, and then the sound comes out of your speaker.

To remedy this, an external sound card (audio interface) helps process sample sounds faster. Its like steroids for your computer.

It is a box that simply plugs into a USB port.

Sound cards usually come with slots that you can jack a microphone into and record live guitar, drums vocals etc. without any computer processing delay.

See Steinberg UR-22c Audio Interface for pricing info. (Long and McQuade is a Canadian Music store, so prices are in CAD).

Here is a video that I named “Info overload” for the UR-22c. But it gives you an idea of the industry terms and functions of an audio interface. I usually drone out after 9 minutes watching it, but to be fair, he is super thorough and I appreciate his review.

Here is a link to the Steinberg Website for Cubase AI

Cubase AI is a compact version of their PRO version. But it’s really all you need to get going.

Advancing to the next version of Cubase is a decision you have to make as you grow with your music.

I currently have upgraded to Cubase Artist. It suits my needs.