today I'm doing a tracktion 7 tutorial now tracktion t7 is one of my favorite
free digital audio workstations but is it the best free daw for you
maybe I'm going to show you how to start making music in this tracktion 7 tutorial
and I'll let you decide if it's the best free daw for your music production
welcome to simple green tech I'm Radio zane and on this channel i do audio tech
tips tutorials and reviews to help you unleash your creativity now today I'm
looking at tracktion t7 and I know I've done several videos on this specific
digital audio workstation but I wanted to update a few things and combine them
into this one video so what am I going to be looking at in this tracktion 7
tutorial well first I'm going to look at setting up your audio interface in t7
and then I'll look at doing some recording into tracktion 7 after that
we'll get into installing VST plugins how to set up your MIDI keyboard and how
to use VST instruments in tracktion t7 this is going to give you a great
starting point for making music on your computer and just so you know I've
linked to all of the software and any hardware that I mentioned in this video
it's linked in the description below in case you want any further information on
any of it but right now let's jump in first we're going to quickly set up our
audio interface in tracktion t7 so what we're going to want to do is go into the
settings tab then make sure you're on audio devices and then in audio device
type you want to change this to asio and then in device you would select whatever
your device is in here so I'm going to be using the Focusrite 2i2 and because
we're creating music I'm going to leave the sample rate at 44100 Hertz your
audio interface may be capable of higher settings but if you aren't familiar with
changing sample rates you may want to stick with the 44100 for now it's the
standard for CD audio and you'll likely want to dither down to that eventually
anyway and you should just leave the buffer size the way it is for now this
is what's going to control your latency the
lower the number here the lower the latency but it will also use more CPU
power and it could cause the daw to become a little bit unstable and maybe
even crash so I suggest just leaving it at this see how it goes now let's record
some audio into tracktion t7 I have my guitar plugged directly into my audio
interface and I'm going to record the guitar dry which means no effects or
anything just the guitar going straight into the interface go to the track that
you want to record on and then click into this area right here and you're
going to want to select the input that you're going to be recording to I'm
recording to input two so that's what I'm going to click you can see when I
strum my guitar there's a signal coming in here and then the next step is to arm
the track for recording this tells the system that this is the track that
you're going to record on to you can record onto multiple tracks at the same
time if you really wanted to but we're not going to get into that for this
video I'll save that for another time but before we actually start recording I
recommend going into the click track setting down here
and you want to go to the pre-record count in length let's use one bar
count in then turn on your click track here this gives you some time between
pressing record and actually starting to record if you don't do this it will
start to record as soon as you press the record button so we have our input set
the track is armed for recording and our click track is all set up let's
record some audio now all you want to do is just press the record button and away
we go
so there's our dry recording of guitar and dry guitar is kind of boring we need
to add some character to it but tracktion t7 doesn't come with an amp sim plugin
so we'll need to download a third-party plugin and install it we should also
look at getting some VST instruments too like a drum plug-in and maybe a synth
plugin I'm going to use the free guitar amp sim from Ik multimedia it's
called AmpliTube Custom Shop there are other free guitar amp Sims out there and
if you're interested I did another video comparing three of them a link to it
below in case you want to check that one out I'm also going to download MT
power drum kit from their website and this is going to be my drum plug-in and
for my synth plug-in I'm going to download synth master player free and
you can get this over at plugin boutique I've linked to it below along
with MT power drum kit and IK Multimedia's AmpliTube Custom Shop
when you have your plugins downloaded start to install them sometimes you
might get a plug-in that's just a dll file in a zip folder and there's no
installer and what you want to do with that is bring it into your VST plug-in
folder on 32-bit systems it's going to be in Program Files x86 and then you'll
see VST plugins if it's not there you can always create it and for 64-bit
systems it's going to be in Program Files VST plugins you can just drop your
DLL files into this folder here if you do have an installer you might
want to make sure that it installs into each of these folders so the 32-bit one
you want to install into the 32-bit folder and the 64-bit one you want to
install into the 64-bit folder most of the time it's going to select these
folders by default but sometimes it does choose another folder and typically that
one is Program Files Steinberg and you'll find your VST plugins' in here
usually and we're going to set up tracktion t7 to find this folder along
with the other ones so even if your plugins install to one of these folders
tracktion t7 is going to find it so now that we have some plugins downloaded and
installed let's go back into tracktion what we're going to want to do now is go
to settings and then you want to go to plugins and you want to go down to
scanning and sorting and then you want to click on scan for new or updated VST
plugins you're going to see this select folders
to scan here and I've already included my C Program Files VST plugins and my C
program files x86 VST plugins but now I'm going to choose the Steinberg folder
just to show you how you do choose the folders so for me I'm going to go to
local disk c
and I want to go down to Program Files yours isn't click there just click
Program Files and then you want to go down and find the folder that you want
so if you don't have the VST plugins folder already selected make sure you
select that one first and then you can come back and choose another one
now I'm going to choose Steinberg VST plugins' click OK you can see that it's
added that to the folders that we're going to scan for plugins and once you
have all your folders set up in here click scan you're going to see it's
going through the whole scan process here now you're going to see I had some
errors here and what this is is because I'm using the 64-bit tracktion t7 and I
actually had it set to scan for the 32-bit folder so this is just telling me
these ones didn't load and these were actually 32-bit plugins anyway so that
doesn't bug me too much so I'll just click OK and we'll close out of that now
we can go back into our project and I want to spruce this recording up a
little bit so what I'll do is right-click over in this area here and
I'm going to go to add new plugin and I'm gonna find my amp sim which is
AmpliTube and once it's loaded you can start listening to various presets on
your recording to find your desired sound you may want to loop a section so
you can hear it go over and over again while you scan for sounds and to do that
you just want to click and drag these markers here
so say you want to keep it at the start you can do that or you can move it
around if you want but I'm gonna leave it at the start and then I'm going to go
to about four bars out and say that's what I want to loop so I'll leave it
there and then I'll just click on this loop button here and now when I play it
back this is going to loop this over and over again that way we can just continue
to look for presets
now let's add our drum plugin so we're going to go to track two
and then you right-click over here you want to go down to add new plug-in
and you locate mt power drum kit or whatever drum plugin you might have you
can see our drum plugin here and the cool thing about mt power drum kit is
that it has grooves already pre-done so you don't have to program your drums
individually you can actually go in here and you can start off with something
like a groove here and you can actually listen to these grooves before you add
them in let's preview what some of them sound like there's also fills over here
so you can change it up every now and then alright say this is the one we like
let's drag that in here now we have a MIDI clip that has all our drum
information on it and obviously it's not as long as our clip so what we're going
to want to do is duplicate it and you can just hold down ctrl on your computer
keyboard and then click and drag on this clip and then you can do it again and
you can do this as many times as you need you can also right-click on it and
you can copy
and then you can press ctrl-v on your computer keyboard and you can paste it
wherever you want and that can be handy if you're working on parts later on in
the song and you want to copy this stuff from the beginning over to that part and
you can do the same thing with your audio files that you recorded just click
and drag while holding the control button down on your computer keyboard
you can also trim your audio files you can see I have nothing at the end here
and to trim it up you just click on this hollow triangle in the corner of your
clip and then you can drag and now we have eight bars here that are all lined
up my playing wasn't that great so the loop isn't going to be that great but
yours will be much better when you do it say you liked this beat but you wanted
to add something or take something out you can actually zoom in onto your MIDI
clip here and you can see all of your notes if you don't see them you might be
scrolled up too much so you can just actually use the wheel on your mouse to
scroll down here until you find the section that has the notes in it and can
actually delete notes by using the eraser tool here by clicking and erasing
or you can draw in some other notes if you wanted
by using the pencil tool and clicking wherever you want to draw in some new
notes
now we have a guitar track and some drums let's add in a synthesizer
but first you may need to set up your MIDI keyboard so I'm gonna quickly show
you how to do that you go back to settings then you go to MIDI devices and
in here you should see the name of your MIDI keyboard and it might show disabled
beside it if it does you actually just click on it and that enables it and
that's all you have to do make sure it says enabled we're now ready to go
record something with our MIDI controller so now to select the MIDI
input we just click into this area here again
and I'm gonna go down to key station mini 32 you select whatever MIDI
keyboard you have now we'll add our synthmaster plug in here so you right
click over here add new plugin
and you can see we have our synth master plug-in loaded up to record this will
just arm the track for recording just like we did before and they can easily
just go down and click on the record button here
if you want to go back to edit some things it's easy to go in you can just
zoom in
down to the scrollbar and using the wheel on your mouse to zoom in or out
then you can see it here and we can click and drag notes around if we need
to and of course just like before you can click on the pencil tool and draw
more notes and if you want to one of the other neat things is you can click on
the velocity control can click and control how hard or how soft you press a
Note and that's a pretty cool feature to have
in there
and just like before you can press ctrll on your computer keyboard click
and drag and create as many of these as you like
tracktion t7 makes it very easy to start creating music and if you're new you
just need to practice a little bit and you're going to be making great songs or
albums in no time you've got this click right here to see my tracktion 7 tutorial
playlist or click down here to see what YouTube recommends you watch next thank
you so much for watching if you like this video please give it a thumbs up
also subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more videos from me for
simple green tech I'm Radio zane and we'll talk soon