Metal topic? (partly for Booch)

Well, what would you like to start with first? Drum machine or Keyboard? (would suggest keyboard first).

 

Great! Let's get started. (lol)

First you are (obviously) going to want to get started with a new project. Select "New Project" followed by "Keyboard Sampler". Next it is going to ask you to select a preset sound, for the sake of teaching, I am going to have you select the orange magnifying glass "Find Preset". Then select "By Category" and look for "Keyboard" then find "Gothic Piano".

Now you have selected the sound of the keyboard will emulate. You will see the screen now with a "01" and a picture of a keyboard, and 3 "+" to the right. Ignore those for now, and just select the keyboard for now.

Here is the Keyboard mode now. At the top right corner, you will notice an orange mini keyboard. Tap that. At the top a menu comes up with a full keyboard layout. Pressing the spaces that are not darkened, you can quickly switch to the different octaves of a piano. The "-" and "+" button will add or subtract keys from the paino you play on. The double keyboard button will allow 2 on screen keyboard with different octaves. The "Eye" button will show you the notes of the keyboard, disable or enable them to your choice.

For the sake of basics, select the area where it says "Gothic Piano" and you will notice that you can change the sound of the keyboard from here. The arrows next to the area just fast travel to the next or previous sound effect. Keep it on Gothic Piano for the time being.

Next you will notice on the bottom Left side is a little tab with numbers. Open up this menu, you should see a square for stop, arrow for play, circle for record, fast forward and rewing arrows, and rectangle with an arrow for looping, a metronome (make sure it is highlighted white, while recordingyou should ALWAYS use this. Most valuable tool for any person to keep time). Next you see a menu for recording, we will leave this alone for now, and then lastly, a menu for the song. At the bottom of this menu, you will see "BPM". It should be at 90 to start with. You can lower this or raise it to control the speed of the metronome that plays when you record. This basically judges the speed of the song you will be recording. Make note of this.

Last part of the keyboard I will show you, is the setting of the paino preset itself. It is located at the top right, in between the "Gothic Paino" Selection area and the orange mini piano setting menu. It just says "Settings". This brings up a wide menu to mess with settings such as volume and delay, and so on and so forth. For basic's sake, I will just leave you with the "Volume Envelope" section. There is a knob on the far right that says "Release". This increases and decreases the time in which the key lasts. You are going to want to change it to all the way full, it should say above it "20.0s". When you have done this, press the back arrow on the far left to close the settings menu.

You will now notice that when you strike a key, it lasts a little longer. Now we are ready to record some silly stuff. Bring up the recording and playback menu (bottom left square) and press the record button (the circle). It will give you a 4 count to prepare, and then it will play the metronome beat for the song. Go nuts! Try and record something and when you are done press the "Square" for stop. When you are done with this, and have made a little noise, we will continue.

 

Haha real gay men wear pink then use that line as a cover-up. Real men wear anything BUT pink. Or purple. Or other gay colors.

And you have any good stuff like the faceless? That was some insane stuff... definitely.one of my favorite metal bands of all time.

 

hahahah I am 100% and completely not gay. Totally comfortable with my sexuality. I love teh vaginie trust me. But I still wear pink from time to time. Purple ain't my thing though.

I will try and find you some stuff for sure, the Faceless is awesome.

 

Great!

Next, I am going to show you how to layer more into the track. Press the little "Home" button at the top left hand corner. This will bring you back to the track selection page. At the bottom of the screen (make sure you disable the recording menu, tap the bottom left hand square) and press the "+" button. You will have 3 options: Drum Machine, Keyboard Sampler and FX Bus. Before we get into the other 2, lets try adding one more keyboard track to your song. Select the Keyboard Sampler. Select your effect and repeat the process above. This time you will hear your originally recorded track along with the metronome. You can add as many tracks as you want (keep this in mind)

When you have added something else (I'll let you pick the effect, but may I suggest some bass?) let me know and we will try some drum machine work.

 

It should be stored in the track bank where you recorded from. Do me a favour, go to the home screen. Select the track you first recorded with the piano. But before you press the piano, tap the tab with the little dots and lines right next to the home button. There should be some lines there in blue that say "1" or maybe even a "2". I would snap a screenie but I can't atm the wireless net is down.

This is a couple steps ahead of where I wanted to show you, but this is your track bank. This is where you see everything you have played and you can edit, slice, and record through drawing here. Long story short, it's the schematics of the music you play.

Edit: Make sure you press the stop button before recording each time! This will drive the playback to the beginning of the song. I've done this several times thinking it didn't record.

 

No don't need the pic now. I thought of that a little late, but I figured thats what it was. Make sure whenever you start a new recording take, or playback, you always hit that stop button to bring the song back to the beginning. I of all people am the worst at this >.> LOL

Anyways, did you make a second track now that you have figured out your first recording?

 

What do you mean it doesn't sound right? If you do not like the take, you can hit the home key, hit the button with the dots and lines to see the schematics of the song. Hit the "Select" tab, and select the track you didn't like the take from (select the coloured squares) and hit the yellow dotted square with an "X" through it. This will delete the track. If you found that you deleted something you shouldnt have hit the undo (or redo if necessary) buttons on the top right to undo what you did.

Sorry I am lacking the clarification and help dept. right now. My boss is walking around checking on things around the office for all of us so I am back and forth between work and stuff.

 

Ahhhh I see hahahaha. Well that's the beauty of experimentation that's for sure, you will figure out what songs good and what sounds like garbage. I have to fiddle around with a lot before I find something that works good. Good music takes time to make that's for sure.

Well now that you have the keyboard down for the most part, time to play with the drum machine. Go to the home button, add a track and select drum machine. From here it will be the same as if you were selecting a keyboard track, you select from the several presets of drums you want to jam on. I mix and match, as each kit has some things I do and don't like. For now we will just go with general kits. Select the kit that you think would be fun to mess with. When you have done this let me know.

 

Yeah "Ambience" has some cool sounds. Fun to play with. Basically you do the same exact thing as you would with the keyboards. You hit the record button, follow the metronome and music, and add what you want.

Basically all you are doing is layering over and over tracks to make your song sound good. Don't like a track? Just undo the take and start over. Once you get the feel down for the basics I can show you more tricks and tips to add stuff. Also there are effects to learn, and plenty of them. I can see you having lots of fun with the bit crusher effect (It turns sounds down to 8-128 bits, so you can have cool and fun sounding nintendo of C64 shit LOL). it's all really a blast. Is there any questions you might have? I mean these are just the bare minimum basics. Tinkering around with the app to figure out what stuff does and what stuff sounds like it key part of experimentation, and the very essence of what makes your music sound like you. Hard to explain really but I think you may get the drift.

Aside from a couple takes you have and are barely learning, how comfortable do you feel with the app? For someone that doesn't know music and music programming much, I am wondering how BM2 feels. I can understand if it's a little overwhelming... but it will change with time.

So what else can I help with?

Oh and soon I can show you how to import your own kits. PM me your email address, so I can email you my favourite metal kit of all. It's perfect (for me at least).