Recording - December 2009 - 40

Our newest column touches on a critical but often ignored aspect of recording—acoustic and electric/ electronic keyboards. Join Devon Brent as he starts our journey toward black-and-white recording Nirvana RECORDING KEYBOARDS IN A By Devon Brent DAW AGE—PART 1 adjustments—before you know it, you’re programming major alterations, and even your own sounds from scratch. Great fun, if the instrument is built to allow that. If it has unchangeable preset sounds only, they’d better be killer or you’ll risk being disappointed in the long run. I’m not a professional appraiser, and I generally track rackmount synths and not keyboards on EBay and such places, but with that in mind, let me name a few examples of good solid starter units. For “bread-n-butter” sounds, there are the original Yamaha Motif Rack ($300–$400), the Korg Triton Rack ($350–$450), the Roland XV-5050 rack ($300ish) and XP-30 keyboard ($300–$500), and the Alesis QS series (QS6 and 6.1, QS7 and 7.1, QS8 and 8.1, QSR Rack) and its variants that go from $150ish for the rack up to $500ish for the 88 key QS8.1. (My Editors suggest a look at the various E-mu Proteus modules and keyboards as well.) These will offer a good variety of presets, generally with expansion slots for memory and new sounds. If you already have a good all-rounder, then a more ‘focused’ synth might be in order. Hint: When you audition sounds from synths, turn off the built-in effects (reverb, chorus, etc.). While these heavily effected sounds may be seductive, they may not fit into a mix—you want to make sure the sound itself is solid, then you can add effects from either within the synth or from your DAW’s effects as the mix needs it. Space considerations Okay, so now you’ve figured out what you want. Do you have the space? Keyboards can take up a lot of room, especially when you want more than one. Measure the floor space that an A-frame multi-tier stand at the music store takes up, allow for more space in front and all around it, and check your own space back home. If it’s a rack you’re planning, add up the rack units in height, allow for empty spaces in between (to let air circulate), and think of anything else that might have to go into the rack, like a MIDI interface, power amp, power conditioner, or patch bay. Think long and hard about which units you’ll need to access from the front, from the back, how often, and place them accordingly. Place the set-it-and-forget-it units at the bottom, but if that includes a power amp for passive monitors, make sure it can breathe so it doesn’t overheat. Recording software synthesizers and effects from within a DAW is so much easier than recording from outside the box: no microphones, no cable hassles, no poorquality preamps, no outside noise to mess up a take— the list goes on. But out there in the wild there exist hardware synthesizers, both rackmountable units and keyboards with sound brains, that provide workflows and sounds that have not been emulated in software. Some are highly regarded for their individual sound character, others are simply great gigging tools that can also do a good job in the studio. Whatever your reasons for wanting to incorporate synth sounds that didn’t come as softsynths—keep reading, the effort will be well worth it. Let’s begin to examine in detail how you can make the best use inside your DAW of those devices that live outside of your DAW. This will involve managing two types of signals flowing between those devices and your DAW: audio and MIDI. As you’ll see, this should not be too difficult—after all, most any DAW that has been around for a long while started out as a MIDI sequencer before ever recording audio, and newer DAWs also handle MIDI, while they all record audio as a matter of course. So let’s break down the chores and choices—not all at once, since there is too much to talk about for one column. If you’re new at this, simply save this issue and the forthcoming instalments until you have the complete picture. What synths? If you don’t already have synths, as either rackmount versions (often called “modules”) or as keyboards, there are hundreds of synthesizers that have been made over the past several decades, and many are well within the range of software prices. If you intend to augment your instrumentation with a synth or two, you probably have something in mind already, something you either heard or got to use yourself. You may wish to quickly educate yourself elsewhere about the different types of synthesis and sampling/sample-playback technologies found on the various makes and models (analog/subtractive filter synthesis, additive, FM, Phase Distortion, and others). Some combine two or more of these technologies. What is also of importance is the degree to which the rackmount modules and keyboards are user-programmable. At first you may like the factory presets just as they are, but you’ll soon get the bug to makeRECORDING DECEMBER 2009

Recording - December 2009

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