this magix music maker tutorial looks at the basics of how to make music with magix
music maker 2021 so if you're new to home studio music production and you're interested in getting
started with magix music maker free premium or plus then this magix music maker tutorial
is for you i'm zane welcome to simple green tech and one thing to note is i'm using magix music
maker 2021 premium but everything i'm going to show in this video will be able to be done
in magix music maker free and if you still need a copy of magix music maker free i've linked to
it down in the description so you can easily click head over and grab it for yourself but right now
let's jump into this tutorial and we're going to start off with setting up your audio interface for
recording all right so i have a new project open here and what we want to do first is check to make
sure our audio interface is set up for recording so just go up here and click on these gears here
then click on the audio midi tab and if you don't have an audio interface you could probably
leave whatever the default is in there and just use that because you're probably not
really going to be recording but if you do want to record using your on-board
sound card you should probably download asio4all and use that as your audio interface in here
so if you have an audio interface set it to the asio driver and then you would just click here and
find whatever audio interface it is that you might be using you also want to make sure that up here
it has the correct output so it would be whatever the output is on your audio interface it probably
will show up there by default but if it doesn't you can just click and choose whatever you want
and when you have all of this set up correctly you could just click ok and get out of here and we're
now ready to record some audio into magix music maker and by default it always adds this piano
plugin up here so i usually delete it you can if you want you don't have to but i'm just going to
right click delete that track and you can always add another track in here by going up to edit and
then add new track so what you want to do is go to the track that you want to record your guitar
onto i'll do track one and click this button right here and you can see it says audio record and you
should be able to hear your guitar or whatever it is you're recording after you press that
so there's my guitar and now we're ready to record it
now that it's armed for recording whenever we press the record button it's going to record
whatever we start inputting into this track so let's try that out right now
all right so that's just a little guitar track there and another thing i should
know is you may want to enable the metronome before you start recording so that you can
hear a bit of a click track and keep beat and you just do that by clicking this on
right here so we have a raw guitar track there's no effects on it or anything
what you might want to do is add a guitar amp sim and you can add this before you even start
recording so you can record with this guitar amp sim on and i'll show you how to do that you go to
effects and then you want to go to audio effects rack track
and then you go down here to the plus sign click on that and you see magix plugins here find vandal SE
in there and you might not have all of these plugins like i said earlier i'm using the premium
version so i have a few extra plugins but the free version will have vandal se in there so click on
that and here's our guitar amp sim if you click here where it says default you can choose one of
these presets here so i'm going to choose british rock and we'll hear what that sounds like now
you can just close this down so you want to unarm this track for recording so we can play
it back and you just click here until it's no longer bright red and now let's play it back
so let's do that again i'll show you with and without so this is with it on that's with it off
and of course you can change the preset so if you had this plugin on while you were recording
and you thought you liked the tone but then you decided you want to change it just
click on another preset or dial in your own settings in here
and change it up let's listen to what this sounds like now
and if you wanted to record with that vandal se guitar amp sim on you would just add the effect
before you started recording and that would work for you and recording vocals is pretty much the
same process you're just recording vocals instead of a guitar then you could add different effects
and you can see there's some presets here for vocals so you could say you want double
vocal track just click on that and now you'll notice when we go into the audio effects rack
track it has some different effects in here with some settings that are ideal for vocals
before we get into the midi section of this magix music maker tutorial i just want to ask
if you're enjoying it so far can you please give it a thumbs up it really helps my channel out
and i appreciate it so much now back into the tutorial all right now let's set up our midi
controller and this is just quick so if you don't have a midi controller yet don't worry this isn't
going to take too long and i'll also show you how to work with midi without a controller so
first you want to go back up to these gears go to the audio midi tab and then in the input device if
yours isn't listed here you want to click on this and then choose whatever controller you have and
you don't have to worry about the output device unless you're outputting midi to an external
instrument or something like that but for this we're just going to worry about the input device
so once you've done that click ok and i'm just going to mute our guitar track for now as we're
just going to focus on the next track which will be a midi track and now we're going to
add an instrument onto track 2. so click this plus sign here like i said earlier i'm using
the premium version so i'm going to have a few more options in here but i'm going to
use an instrument that actually comes with the free version for this let's just click on that
this is revolta2 it comes with magix music maker free and you can see when i added that instrument
it's automatically set it for midi recording if it wasn't you would just click on this until it said
midi recording so i'm going to play something on my midi keyboard just to make sure it's working
so if the default sound isn't what you're looking for you could just click here then you can find a
preset that gets you in the area of the sound that you want and then you can adjust it afterwards or
you can just use the preset how it is so i'm going to check out this one let's hear how that sounds
not too bad that's what i'm going gonna go with so now i'm going to hit the record button and
we'll record some midi into magix music maker and this time i'm going to turn on the metronome
so let's hit record
and there's a simple midi recording that we did and if we want to edit this further we
can double click on this and it opens up our little piano roll here and in here you can
fix up your playing a bit so if you are slightly offbeat which it looks like i was you could just
click on the note that you need to adjust and you can drag it over or
we can quantize all of our notes and to do that we'll just go up here and we're going to select
quarter notes you can choose whatever you want and then i'm going to click on this q right here and
you can see it's moved all of these to the start of the quarter note now everything is perfectly
on time another thing to note is that down here you have your velocity information you can see
i have all the notes selected so i'm changing the velocity of everything but if you wanted
to just change the velocity of one you would click out so you're not selected on everything
and then you just click and drag this to change the velocity of each note you can
also add notes in if you really wanted you would just go up here and click on this pencil tool
and then you can click wherever you want to add a note in and you can change the velocity of the
notes that you add in as well if you want to get rid of them just right click on them
and they go away now what if you don't have a midi controller or say you don't want to use your midi
controller you just want to insert some midi notes using your mouse well go up to edit then go to
object create new object and you want to create new midi object and you can select how many bars
it is for this i'm just going to go with two bars and there's our two bar empty midi track
double click on it there's our empty midi and now we can just draw in our notes
and you can make these notes longer if you want you just click on the edge of it
and then drag like that and you can see when i try to move it around or when i'm trying to extend it
it's automatically locked to the quarter note and you can turn that off by clicking this
right here and now i can freely move this wherever i want i can also extend it however long i want
so now let's look at arranging audio and midi in our timeline here so we can start arranging
our song and another thing is i'll also bring in some audio over here from one of the soundpools
this is the music maker feel good soundpool it comes with magix music maker free so
you should have this one and then you can see over here the different instruments that you
want and it shows you how many different samples are in that instrument so let's bring in drumbeat
then down here you have all the different drum beats that are included if you click on one
it starts to preview it and then you can click on it again to stop that preview
if you like it just click and we'll drag it into an empty track you can also click
and drag it into a new track if you really wanted
now if we were using an instrument like a bass or a guitar or a piano or something like that
you can see up here we have different pitches so you click on base click on the one that you wanted
so let's say that's the one we wanted if we wanted a different pitch we could click here and drag
that in and now you can see it says c3 so that's a different pitch so let's hear how that sounds
so it sounds different than when we clicked on it over here
so that's dragging sounds from the sound pools over into your timeline now let's just look at
working with our midi clips and our audio clips in the timeline you can see this is a really
long clip here it's longer than our others so we might want to shorten that and you can do that
by going to the edge of it you'll see that the cursor has changed to two arrows you just click
and drag until it's wherever you want it say we want it there and then if we just wanted to
duplicate this you can hold down control on your computer keyboard then click and drag and it's
going to create a duplicate of that clip and you can also do that with midi clips as well
if you want to copy a whole section say we want to copy all of this section you would just click
and hold down control while clicking on all of the clips that you want to copy so say we
want to copy everything or duplicate everything then we just keep holding down control and drag
you can see it's copied everything now that we have all of these clips in here
we might want to do a little bit of mixing so you want to go up to view and then go to
mix and click on mixer and that brings up our mixer here so you can start adjusting levels
of each thing you can add effects to each track adjust the pan you can solo and mute plus you also
have a mastering section over here so this is your master track where you can also add more effects
let's say your song's mixed you've got it all arranged you're now ready to render it
to a mp3 so you can share it with the world so what you want to do for that is go up to file
then go to export and if it is mp3 that you want to export as you would just go to audio
as mp3 select the bit rate i suggest selecting 192 or higher and you can click here to browse
to wherever it is you want to save it i would take normalize off but that's up to you if you
want it normalized which would give it peak levels then you can leave that on and another option here
is the only export the range between start and end markers so if you have like i do here i have
this yellow start and end marker here if i only wanted to render what was under that i
would select this if you don't select that it's going to render whatever is in the timeline
and then when you're ready just click ok and you can see it's mixing down and then you'll have
your mp3 that you can upload to wherever it is you want to upload it to one thing to note is with the
soundpools if you plan on making any money with your music or even posting it on youtube and you
have a monetized channel any monetization at all you must purchase an additional commercial license
for that specific soundpool that you want to use you can post your music on youtube or wherever it
is you want to post it if you aren't using soundpools you're just recording your own audio in
and maybe using some of the virtual instruments then you're fine you can make as much money as
you want with using magix music maker but if you are using the soundpools you must purchase
that commercial license in order to make money but if you post it to youtube and you're not monetized
yet that doesn't matter you can post it to youtube and share it all you want as long as you're not
making money using it and again that just goes for the use of the sound pools and it doesn't matter
if you have the premium plus or free version you must purchase that commercial license
if you want to use the sound pools to make money if you want to check out my magix music
maker tutorial playlist click up here or click down here to see what youtube recommends if you
like 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