waveform free is the latest free daw from tracktion software and it's a great
upgrade over tracktion 7 in this video I'm going to show you how to start
making music in the free version of waveform 11 I'm Zane and on this channel
I do weekly audio tech tips tutorials and reviews to help you conquer the tech
and unleash your creativity and I've included a link to tracktion's home page
in the description so you can easily hop over there and download this great free
digital audio workstation and here's what I'm going to go over in this
waveform free tutorial first will quickly make sure your audio interface
is set up correctly then we'll look at recording audio after that we'll get
into using effect plugins how to set up your midi controller and record MIDI
then we'll look at using the piano roll for editing MIDI and drawing MIDI notes
in plus we'll also look at the new pattern generator we'll check out how to
use VST instruments and effects plus we'll get into arranging the clips in
the timeline to form your song and then we'll look at exporting your track to an
mp3 file now let's get started alright first let's go up to settings audio
devices and then in the audio device type you want to make sure it says ASIO
as long as you have an azo sound card if not you can change it to Windows audio
or direct sound whatever type of sound card you have there
then in device you want to make sure that your sound card is selected and
then you shouldn't really need to worry about sample rate I think by default
it's at 44,100 Hertz which is cd-quality
and to start out you might just want to leave it there I have mine at 48,000
because that's what I use for my videos and this is going in my video so that's
why mines change there but for starting out maybe just leave it at 44100 then
your audio buffer size this affects the latency which is the time from when you
input sound into your audio interface and it goes into the computer and then
it comes back out into your ears the lower the audio buffer size
lower the latency but some sound cards and some computers can't handle those
lower settings and it may cause some weird stuff to happen with your audio so
you might want to play around with that or leave it sort of at a middle setting
which should be safe but feel free to play around with that because you can
always change it later on if you need to and that's it for setting up your audio
interface so now let's go into our project here and first you may want to
adjust the way this screen looks you can close this section down on the side here
by clicking this X and you can also go up to this eyeball in the corner here
and you can turn different pieces of the interface off and on however you like so
I'm going to record some audio into track one specifically my guitar and
first what you want to do is click right here and make sure you have your input
selected so I'm going to have my guitar on input two so I'm selecting input two
and you can see when I strum my guitar I have a signal going in here now we
want to arm this track for recording so you click this button here to arm it and
if you don't hear your guitar or your audio source you may have to go down to
this section here and click the live input monitoring button so now it's on
so next I just want to make sure that the click track is enabled by clicking
there and this is our metronome to give us a little bit of a beat to play along
too and if you want to adjust your click track a little bit
I like to have a pre record count in length and I usually do two bars so it's
going to count in two bars before it actually starts recording and this gives
you a little bit of time to get ready to record before you actually have to
record after you hit the record button but this is optional you don't have to
do that if you don't want to I'm going to hit record now and we'll record
something in
so there's our audio that we've recorded but recording dry guitar is kind of
boring so we want to add some character to it but waveform free doesn't come
with an amp sim plug-in so we'll need to download a third party plug-in and
install it you may also want to grab some instrument plugins and some effects
too and after you install them make sure you go into your plugins and set it up
so waveform is searching the folders that you've installed your plugins into
and the typical folders our c program files VST plug-ins and c program files
Steinberg VST plugins and to add those you would just click this plus sign here
and find your folder and then you would click scan to scan those folders for new
plugins and when you've done that go back to your project you want to
right-click in this area right here go down to add new plug-in and find that
plug-in that you want to add I'm going to use AmpliTube you can get AmpliTube
custom shop for free which includes several amps and cabinets and effects
it's a pretty decent plugin if you don't have it I'll be sure to link to it in
the description below so now we have our amp sim loaded up onto our track and we
can listen to what it sounds like
and if you don't like it you can change the preset in here and that's the cool
thing about using an amp sim you're not stuck with one sound you can change it
later on if you like you can record with one sound and then change it up now
let's work with some virtual instruments but first you might need to set up your
MIDI keyboard if you're going to be using one if you're not using one don't
worry I'm going to show you how to work with MIDI without a controller so make
sure your MIDI controller is connected if you're using one then go up to
settings MIDI devices and then in this list here you want to make sure yours is
enabled if it's not you can just click on it and enable it if you're not using
a MIDI controller or MIDI keyboard and you want to use your computer keyboard
you can actually go down to create new virtual midi input give it a name click
OK and that will actually use your computer keyboard as a MIDI keyboard you
can use the line of letters starting with a for the white keys and then you
can use the line of letters starting with W for the Black Keys now let's go
back to our project and on track 2 we're going to click here to select the input
and you're going to choose whatever your MIDI controller is
now if you play a note on your MIDI keyboard you'll see that you have some
signal there even though there's no audio going in so now let's add a synth
now right-click in this section here go down to add new plug-in and we're going
to add the for ask or a 4OSC synth that comes with waveform that's right
there so this comes with all versions of waveform if you have the free version
you have this and let's give a quick listen to it
all right we have a signal going in everything looks good and just like
before we want to arm this track for recording I'm going to mute that guitar
track and then you want to go down here click record and we have some MIDI notes
recorded in here and if you worked with tracktion t7 you'll remember that this
was kind of the piano roll you had to use right here but in waveform 11 if you
double click on the header of the clip right up here it's going to bring up an
actual piano roll that you can resize by clicking and dragging and click that
zoom button here and it makes your notes bigger you can move your notes around
however you like you have access to quantize if you want to quantize your
notes you can also adjust the velocity of each note down here by clicking and
dragging these nodes and this can be nice to add a sort of human feel to your
playing and we can drag our notes all the way up another octave if we want
and maybe we want to try out some other presets so let's listen to this
and there's just a few of the presets that are included so that's recording
MIDI in now what if you don't have a MIDI controller and you don't want to
record any MIDI in with your computer keyboard so what we'll want to do so
we'll get rid of that clip and we're going to put no input here so if you
just want to draw your MIDI in you go up to this red plus sign here click and
drag it down into the timeline and you have these options select insert new
MIDI clip now I'm going to change this synth up and this time we're going to go
down to replace this plugin and we'll go back up to the waveform plugins
instruments and this time I want to use the micro drum sampler which also comes
with waveform free and if you click here you can choose one of these kits or you
can create your own kit by dragging and dropping clips into these pads you would
go to the reset to default so you have nothing in here and then you could drag
and drop clips into here and create your own kit but for this we're just going to
go with the 909 and we'll double click on the header' again and I'm going to
click on the pencil tool here and we're going to click and draw in our MIDI
notes and like I said before you can adjust the velocity you'd go back to the
arrow tool here and you can click and drag to adjust your velocity of your
notes and this can give it a more human-like feel
now instead of drawing your notes in there's another way that we can do this
so let's get rid of this MIDI information in here and this time I'm
going to go back and add our synth plug-in in there and we're going to
create a bass line without even drawing any MIDI information in so we're gonna
go to our piano roll and then we're going to click on pattern generator
right here pattern style we want bass line and now you can see it's drawn in a
simple bass line here but we also have access to bass presets so you can change
the style of it say we you just want simple bass let's listen to what that
sounds like
alright maybe we want techno bass
and as you can see there's many options and of course you can change this around
manually however you like so let's close this down and now when we
look at the timeline we have a couple of clips we have an audio clip and we have
a MIDI clip here and if we were making a song we would probably have multiple
clips but I just want to show you that you can edit these Clips pretty easily
you can trim the length by clicking on this hollow arrow at the end and click
and drag you can do that on both sides of the clip and you can click and drag
it around the timeline you can make copies you could click on it ctrl C on
your computer keyboard click over the side control V and we now have a copy
you can also just hold ctrl on your computer keyboard then click and drag on
the clip like that and you can also make splits and your clips where ever you
want so if you want to split this into two say we want to split it right here
we'll just click there keep the cursor in that area press forward slash on the
computer keyboard and you can see we now have two clips in here you can also
right click and then go down to split selected clip at cursor and it does the
same thing so now let's say we want to create an mp3 file out of our song here
what we'll have to do is go down to export render to a file and then you
want to go to format here and change that to mp3 file or you could keep it as
WAV or one of the other options click on this button right here go to browse
select wherever you want to save it give it a name click Save and then hit render
tracktion waveform free makes it very easy to start creating music and if
you're new to this you just need to practice a bit and you'll be making
songs or albums in no time you got this click this video up here
for 30 free VST plugins' or click down here to
see what youtube thinks you'll be interested in next if you liked this
video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel for more videos
like this thank you so much for watching for simple green tech I'm Zane keep
creating and we'll talk soon