Classical Pianist Seeking The 21st Century Experience, so many options, so little time Options

[Ananda77]

Dear Friends
Please excuse my absolute ignorance of your world. I have suddenly woken up from the 19th century bubble of Chopin, conservatoires and Steinway pianos. I have now decided to invest 6-9 months of sabbatical on '21st century learning'. Electronic music; Final Cut to learn video editing; Dreamweaver and Photoshop to learn web design.

My budget for the music component is around 1000 pounds ( about 1500 us). I have a new iMac.
Here are some wishes of what to do and what to buy, slightly over budget:
Akai controller keyboard MPK 88 (600 pounds new , 900 us, obviously can buy cheaper used one.)
Motu Interface microlite. (88 pounds 130 us)
Software: Tracktion 3 (165 pounds, 225 us). Possibly Absynth 5. (375 pounds 560us)
I could try a music course in London such as Audio and sound engineering course, to dip my toe in the water. They do a day course for around £100 (about 150 us)

I want to achieve three things: 1) simply to get myself started in electronic music, so not scared away by the technology, but relaxing into / engaging in the process.
2) see if I can create big bands of interesting ambient sound. Im guessing with this wish its better I buy a midi controller that has lots of keys like a piano? Or can I get away with a smaller controller and spend more on software? I have a clavinova Yamaha which is nicely touch sensitive, but I guess I need a midi controller.
3) I want to explore audio/visual interface, to make sophisticated, creative music videos for youtube. I see this as being a new creative outlet for me when/if I can get to that stage of feeling comfortable with the technology. These might be of classical piano or of electronic music, I'm interested in the dovetailing of sound and image.
Any pointers in the general direction much appreciated! Thanks a lotl

This post has been edited by Ananda77: Fri 3 Dec 2010, 22:46

[houstonmusic]

opinions vary. here's my two cents, as an accomplished pianist and electronic film and theater composer.

use two controllers. hook up your clavinova AND a small controller with knobs, sliders, and pads. keys from the clav, tweak from the knobs, etc.

decent monitors matter.

think about Propellerhead's "Reason" as an all in one solution for sounds and sequencing. it's a powerful, well established platform that is super robust and easy to learn. well supported on the web by users and third party developers. sounds great.

you'll experience some aesthetic knots.
to massage them i advise:
1. focus on the SOUND, not the harmony.
2. make a crappy piece EVERY DAY. some of them will be good. you'll notice what's important to you faster.

let us hear some of your work...!
good luck.

[Ananda77]

opinions vary. here's my two cents, as an accomplished pianist and electronic film and theater composer.

use two controllers. hook up your clavinova AND a small controller with knobs, sliders, and pads. keys from the clav, tweak from the knobs, etc.

decent monitors matter.

think about Propellerhead's "Reason" as an all in one solution for sounds and sequencing. it's a powerful, well established platform that is super robust and easy to learn. well supported on the web by users and third party developers. sounds great.

you'll experience some aesthetic knots.
to massage them i advise:
1. focus on the SOUND, not the harmony.
2. make a crappy piece EVERY DAY. some of them will be good. you'll notice what's important to you faster.

let us hear some of your work...!
good luck.

Dear Friend,
Thank you very much for your very helpful reply. I really appreciate it! I will go and check out Reason right away. Yep Id rather buy a dinky little controller. Im guessing it might take a goood few months before I did something I felt comfortable sharing, tho maybe that's the 19th century stuck in a garret mentality!
Bye

[ronineko]

Excellant advise from houstonmusic. If you're checking out Reason why not throw Record in too?
The bundle is a great price and for the cost of a modest starter interface you have the best of both worlds.
You'll need the interface for any DAW anyway.This can also serve as your Midi interface though I recommend a USB controller for that.There are budget USB mics that can work as well, if all you input is audio.
The Reason/Record community on the internet is vast and fun and appeals to pretty much all genres.
If you feel you need to take a kick start course, it helped me when I got started. Networking has proven to be the best tool yet.
Another option I might consider is Logic Studio. You mentioned Final Cut and the integration is seamless.
You would be completely under the Apple "hood" and Logic is an all in one music studio that runs imbedded on a Mac. The Apple Logic courseware is easy and fun and quite coherent.

Once you get your chosen application I do recommend macprovideo.com as an excellent resource for tutorial videos.

Welcome to the world of digital audio production. Your friends/family will never have to worry about shopping for you again.

[jnoel4]

opinions vary. here's my two cents, as an accomplished pianist and electronic film and theater composer.

use two controllers. hook up your clavinova AND a small controller with knobs, sliders, and pads. keys from the clav, tweak from the knobs, etc.

decent monitors matter.

think about Propellerhead's "Reason" as an all in one solution for sounds and sequencing. it's a powerful, well established platform that is super robust and easy to learn. well supported on the web by users and third party developers. sounds great.

you'll experience some aesthetic knots.
to massage them i advise:
1. focus on the SOUND, not the harmony.
2. make a crappy piece EVERY DAY. some of them will be good. you'll notice what's important to you faster.

Very enlightening reply, applies to aspiring recording guitarist such as myself as well. Not meaning to add any confusion but since iMac is the platform, suggest you look into Apple's Logic Studio program which has incredible value for the cost involved.

let us hear some of your work...!
good luck.

[whispersandstare...]

A previous poster suggested that you might want to explore using Logic (an powerful industry standard, but highly complex DAW not for the beginner, generally speaking). Although Logic is worth exploring at some point, without sounding too petulant, I believe this would be more like suggesting that you jump into a Bugati after getting your drivers license rather than a reasonably priced Ford.* At any rate, my two pence are as follows:

-- Buy yourself a decent keyboard/midi controller (at least 61 keys with weighted or semi-weighted keys). This is the tool you're most familiar with--you should have a good one.

-- You have an iMac; use the tools that came with it. The easiest way to learn to record and work with music digitally, including MIDI (without exception, I believe) is to use Garageband. Garageband s already installed on your mac. Not only does this save you money, its incredibly intuitive interface makes it easy to learn and use. It also comes with a decent basic library of sounds, and is actually quite a powerful application for what it does. I've written many tracks with it with good results. Some people use Garageband as a "scratch pad" to jot down their ideas, then use Logic to hone, flesh them out, and perfect them.

Hope this helps.

* When you're ready for Logic (also an Apple product; the two are meant to work together), it works seamlessly with Garageband. After mastering the basics in Garageband, Logic will open up your Garageband projects, and keep all of your settings intact.

[mikeyb59]

The last advice about Garage Band is spot on. I've spend many thousands of dollars on gear/software and I've tended to overspend my need and not fully understand what I had. Garage Band is the result of many years of development in software and has a ridiculous number of features that are easy to use and useful. Garage Band would've been a miracle on earth 10 years ago.

If you get where you totally want to expand your sound world, Reason is one option. Another great one for about $500 is Native Instruments Komplete which has an insane amount of sounds. A third would be to get Logic Studio for $500 which has the most enormous and complete set of virtual instruments and plugins for audio processing that you can imagine for the $. Logic throws in what would've cost easily $5000 when it was an Emagic product before being bought by Apple.

This post has been edited by mikeyb59: Mon 24 Jan 2011, 21:41

[whispersandstare...]

If you get where you totally want to expand your sound world, Reason is one option. Another great one for about $500 is Native Instruments Komplete which has an insane amount of sounds. A third would be to get Logic Studio for $500 which has the most enormous and complete set of virtual instruments and plugins for audio processing that you can imagine for the $. Logic throws in what would've cost easily $5000 when it was an Emagic product before being bought by Apple.
[/quote]

Agreed on all fronts and well stated. Might want to consider Logic Express, if money's an object? It's, what, $200, I think, with a lot of the same functionality as the full application?

[musicproducer]

As a music professional, I've spent a lot of money on hardware and software. I can confidently recommend Garage Band, and not just because it's a Mac forum; it's solid, got great loops, and one of the most important aspects is that there are a lot of resources for help and instruction. One of the producers I play sessions for (he's from Hal Leonard Publishing) always brings Garage Band and his loops to integrate into our tracking sessions, and it works great.

[jnoel4]

As a music professional, I've spent a lot of money on hardware and software. I can confidently recommend Garage Band, and not just because it's a Mac forum; it's solid, got great loops, and one of the most important aspects is that there are a lot of resources for help and instruction. One of the producers I play sessions for (he's from Hal Leonard Publishing) always brings Garage Band and his loops to integrate into our tracking sessions, and it works great.

-----------------------------------------------

Totally agree with GarageBand. An upgrade to the most recent version 11 is very inexpensive and one more reason to subscribe to this great program. Given the starting parameters provided by Ananda77, I think that's the right way to go in getting a lot of bang for small bucks. And as one member pointed out, should be considered an investment for the future with its full upward compatibility with Logic Express or Studio.