Learn about the music production process—including recording, editing, and mixing—and the tools available to you to create contemporary music on your computer. With the recent introduction of high-quality-low-cost software and hardware, the tools of music production are now available to the masses. Albums are made in bedrooms as well as studios. On the surface this is liberating. Anyone can make an album for the low cost of a couple pieces of gear and a software package. But, if you dig deeper, you will find that it is not so easy. Producing music requires knowledge, dedication, and creativity. Knowledge is where this course comes in. No matter what kind of music you are making, there is a large set of tools that you will need to use. Each lesson of this course will demonstrate a different set of music production tools, loosely following along the music production process of recording, editing, and mixing. We will start with some background on the nature of sound and how we perceive it. We will then examine the components necessary to record audio into a computer, so that you understand the devices that sound must travel through in a music production process. Once recorded, sound must be organized along a timeline, a process known as editing. It allows us to give the impression of perfect performances and create many of the sounds we hear in contemporary music. The contemporary editing tool is the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), a piece of software that stores and organizes all the assets of a musical project. We will focus on the editing tools that are essential in contemporary music production and that all DAWs provide. After editing, sounds must be combined or mixed together, so we look to the mixing board—a very creative place if you know how to use it. We will explore the basic functionality of both hardware and software mixing boards, including volume, pan, mute, solo, busses, inserts, sends, and submixes. The mixing process, however, includes more tools than the mixing board provides on its own. Sound must also be processed, modified from its recorded state to fit the context of the music. We will look at compression, equalization, and delay, and examine the many audio effects that are offshoots of these devices and how they are used in a musical context. In the end, the music production process relies on your creativity. Creativity is a product of the mind and will stay there, unexpressed, until the right tools are used in the right way to share it with the world. If you have an idea in your head, it will take numerous steps, each with an important tool, to reach your audience. You bring the dedication and creativity, and this course will bring you the knowledge to make that happen.
Frequency
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From the course by Berklee College of Music
The Technology of Music Production
357 ratings
From the lesson
Sound and Signal Flow
We will start with some background on the nature of sound and how we perceive it. We will then examine the components necessary to record audio into a computer, so that you understand the devices that sound must travel through in a music production process.
Meet the Instructors
Loudon StearnsAssistant Professor
Contemporary Writing & Production
The next property of sound we like to look at, is frequency.
And this ends up being our sense of high pitch and low pitch, and actually the
idea of pitch and frequency, that's another one of those ideas that we tend
to use interchangeably, but frequency is something like amplitude, that a computer
can measure. And pitch is something that we perceive,
just like. Loudness was.
So we should start using those words carefully.
But, either way, what's it's really related to is how fast the sound is
vibrating. And if we use our spring as an example
again, [SOUND] if I have a low frequency thing, it would be a pulse, another
pulse, another pulse, does not go very fast.
A high frequency wave would have lots of these.
[SOUND] Moving very quickly or if we were to look at a transverse wave we'd have a
low frequency or a high frequency. [NOISE] Now one thing to be conscious of,
that might not be clear in this demonstration, is that all of the
principles of sounds are actually completely independent.
I can have a high frequency, low amplitude thing, I can have a low
frequency high amplitude sound, and the frequency and amplitude are in no way
correlated to the propagation rate. So they're all completely independent.
And it would be kind of awkward if they weren't, if you think about it.
Right? If, the propagation was related to
frequency, then, things that were high pitched would travel faster.
If you played a chord, you'd get one note at a time getting to you.
It just wouldn't make sense. But, it's just important to remember that
they're totally independent of each other, which ends up being utilized in a
wide variety of ways, in that we can have audio effects that really impact only
certain parts of sound. In that we talked about, we have our
delay effects, our effects related to propagation, which was our delays, and
our reverbs. We have our effects related to amplitude,
which is our compressors, expanders, gates, limiters, and we also effects
related to frequency. But, they don't really relate directly to
frequency very much. What they're more related to is timbre.
And timbre is the collection of sound in multiple frequencies.
We find that only the very simplest of sounds has energy at a sin, at a single
frequency and that's actually a sine wave.
[SOUND] So when you hear the term sine wave you're talking about energy at a
single frequency. But that rarely happens.
Every instrument has energy [SOUND] at multiple frequencies.
We call it harmonics. [SOUND] You might have heard the term
overtones or partials. [SOUND] And that's describing the timbre,
or kind of, we might also term the spectrum, which is how the sound actually
is energy at multiple frequencies. And we have a set of audio effects that
controls that. And you've heard EQ, right?
An equalizer. I might say, boost the bottom end.
Well in that instance I have a a, an amplitude.
That I'm saying, I'm saying boost, that's raise the amplitude, and I'm also giving
a frequency, the bottom end, right? I'm saying increase the low frequencies,
and that really is any queue would do that.
Or we can actually fine tune that term and call it a filter.
An equalizer is a collection of filters. So, anytime you're going to give an
amplitude at a specific frequency. That's going to be a filter.
And it's manipulating the timbre. So.
What is the range of human hearing? If we think of, of human hearing.
Has kind of limits. The lowest frequency we can hear.
We say is 20 hertz. And the highest frequency is around
20,000 hertz. Otherwise known as 20 kilohertz.
Now 1 Hertz is once per second. So a 1 Hertz sound would vibrate once
every second. That's actually below what we can hear
and we hear things that vibrate 20 Hertz a second is a very, very low pulse and
really it's almost heard as a rhythm in a way.
Now, no one can really hear 20,000 hertz, or very rarely can we hear 20,000 hertz.
young children can often but as you grow older your high end, kind of dissapates
naturally. And so we find that really the upper end
of hearing ends up being around 18,000 hertz or 18 kilohertz.
We find that females tend to hear higher frequencies than males in general, so
it's a little bit variable, but it's nice to have that just nice round number of
the human hearing range being from 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz.
And also we don't hear equally across that entire range.
As we start getting to the higher end, it's not like we just stop hearing sound.
It kind of gradually diminishes. And as we go to the low frequencies, the
same thing kind of happens. And in the middle, there are some
variations in actually how we we hear at different frequencies.
It's as if our ears were a kind of EQ themselves.
And in fact, every piece of gear you get is going to have this kind of Frequency
response curve. So that's an important characteristic of,
of your microphones you're going to choose.
In that they will impose some kind of shape across the frequency response.
It's as if they act like an EQ. And you're going to find that across any
PC gear you get. Actually does have that kind of, effect.
And our own ears also have that effect. Effect.
So, we can see that this idea of frequency and timbre is going to be an
important one across everything we do, with music production.
So, again, like amplitude and propagation, I'd like you to bring this
into the forums. And some discussions that you might want
to start would be about the Fletcher Munson curves.
Would be about the human hearing range. Consider looking into psycho acoustics,
which is the way in which we perceive sound, look up the term masking, phantom
fundamental, frequency response and timbre in general.
It's a great set of things to discuss, and I hope we can have those discussions
in the forums here.
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