|
|
ACID TipsSony ACID Pro 4.0/5.0 Tips and TechniquesI use Sony ACID Pro 5.0 as my primary music composition tool. I like to write music in sections and the looping ability of ACID allows me to literally paint the sections of a song and arrange them any way I want and then sit back and listen to see if I like it. Because I'm a keyboard player, I use a MIDI keyboard to record all of my piano and organ parts. Here are just a few of the tips and techniques I've developed while doing this. Hopefully you'll find some of them useful. I'm a forum host on DMN ACID forum so you can ask me questions by posting there. Before you do anything, make sure you have the latest copy of ACID installed. For ACID 5.0 there are no updates yet but for ACID 4.0 the latest update is 4.0f. Some of the features explained below were added in subsequent fixes of ACID 4.0. Some major functions like ReWire support were added in 4.0c so make sure you download the latest updates from the Sony site. If you use ACID Pro 5.0 you already have all of this and more. Also make sure your PC is optimized for audio. If you aren't sure how to do this visit MusicXP.net for some great tips on how to set up Windows XP for audio. You might also want to download the GenieSys OPT plugins for ACID which include a MIDI Editor, and some utilities like StolenTrack to break multi-track MIDI files into separate ACID tracks. Very useful. For more great Tips, please consider buying my book Instant ACID.
How do I get started?To really get a jump start on learning ACID, I highly recommend the VASST ACID® for Nonlinear Editors training DVD by Rudy Sarzo. It's not just for non-linear editors and it will get you up and running very quickly. You can read my review of this training DVD on the Digital Media Networks site. Jeffery Fisher also has a great beginner ACID Tutorial on his site. Can I create my own loops?Yep, you sure can. You can create loops from other loops using the Chopper (although you can do it without the chopper too), you can record your own audio loops, or you can record your own MIDI loops. I find loop creation to be quite easy which is one of the reasons I use ACID. What I do is record a new MIDI track and play my part several times. Once I think I’ve captured enough good ones. I go back and listen to the track and highlight the measure I like best and choose Select in Chopper. I listen to it looped in the chopper to make sure it loops smoothly. If it doesn't I'll open the MIDI editor and tweak the note positions until it does. Then I select Chop to New Track... and I save the final loop. If I want that as a WAV file I just solo it and do a Render As... using Render Looped Region Only. If you started with an audio loop there is no need to render. I can’t imagine it being any easier. How do you record without a metronome? (in ACID 4)ACID Pro 4 doesn't have a metronome. I find this to very strange for a music composition program with record capabilities but its true. What I find helpful is to add a drum track to the project first to help you keep time. You can always replace it later. It's kind of like the old days of analog recording when the first thing you would do is lay down a click track. I actually recorded the metronome from Vegas and a WAV file and I use that sometimes to lay down a click track in ACID. (ACID Pro 5 does have a metronome but I still like using drum tracks better) How do I record with MIDI and VSTi's in ACID?If you want to record MIDI you'll need a MIDI keyboard connected to a MIDI interface on your computer. This can be provided by a sound card or dedicated MIDI interface such as a USB device. Once the hardware is hooked up, you need to go into menu Options->Preferences and click on the MIDI tab. This is where to designate your MIDI input and output devices. Once you've done this, click on the VST Instruments tab and make sure your VSTi's are listed there with a checkmark next to them. If not, add the directory that they are in to the search list so ACID 4 can find them. Now you're ready to use a softsynth. Select menu Insert->Soft Synth and then select one of your VSTi's. This will bring up the softsynth properties dialog. The first button at the top right looks like a MIDI connection and if you hover your mouse over it, it will say "Enable Realtime MIDI Alt-F7". Press it (or press Alt-F7) so that its selected and you should be able to play your MIDI keyboard and hear the softsynth. To record, just press the record button and select MIDI as the option at the top. Modify the filename and location if you wish, and at the bottom select the correct Record device (this should be your MIDI input device) and the correct MIDI Thru device which should be your softsynth. Finally press Start and begin to play. I installed a new VSTi but ACID doesn't see it. What do I do?The first thing you should do is to make sure ACID is pointed to the VST Instrument directory that you installed you instrument to. These can be found on the Options > Preferences... > VST Instruments page. The default path is "C:\Program Files\VSTplugins\" but if you have any Steinberg applications installed your path may be "C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VSTplugins\". Unfortunately some Steinberg programs keep plug-ins in their own directory so you need to know which directory the plug-in was installed into. If you have the right directories but your VSTi still doesn't show up in the VST Instrument list, go back into Options > Preferences... > VST Instruments and press the Refresh button. This will forge a refresh of all the plug-ins in all the search directories. If both of these methods fail, you may need to manual delete the ACID presets from the Windows registry so that it is forced to build the list again. Here are the instructions on how to do that: First, if you have XP, create a restore point on your computer. If you don’t know how to do this, go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > System Restore. Click Create a Restore Point and press Next. Give the restore point a name like "Before I deleted Plugs from the registry" and press Create. Now if you mess things up, you can go back here and select Restore my computer to an earlier time, and it will undo any changes you’re about to make. OK, that was only a precautionary measure. Now on to what you really have to do: Close ACID. Select Start > Run... Then in the Open: entry field type regedit. This will bring up the Registry Editor. In the left window you'll notice a tree view starting with My Computer and one of the registry hives under it will be HKEY_CURRENT_USER. Open that and you'll see an entry at the next level called Software. Open that and find Sonic Foundry then ACID etc. until you've navigated all the way down through this path: ACID Pro 4.0 Path: ACID Pro 5.0 Path: ACID Pro 6.0 Path: Right-click on the Plugs entry and select Export... from the pop-up context menu. This will let you save a backup of the registry entry you are about to delete. Give it a name (e.g., "old-plugs.reg"), remember where you saved it, and press OK. Now with the Plugs key highlighted, just press the delete key or right-click and select delete from the context menu. Close the Registry Editor and open ACID and it should rescan for all the plugins and find the missing ones. Once again, if you’re not comfortable with editing the registry, find someone who is or call the Sony help desk. You can seriously disable your computer by deleting the wrong thing. You can always get the old plugs back by double-clicking on the "old-plugs.reg" file that you saved to have the registry entry put back in. As a last resort you can use system restore to put everything back the way it was. How do I get rid of the delay when I play my MIDI keyboard?If you have a sound card that supports Audio Streaming Input Output (ASIO) then you want to use the ASIO drivers. Go into Options->Preferences and click on the Audio tab. Look under Audio device type: (it probably says Microsoft Sound Mapper) see if there is an option that says ASIO in it. It if does select that. You may also have to press the Advanced button at the bottom of that dialog and configure the drivers to lower the ASIO buffer latency. If you don’t have an ASIO capable sound card then adjust the Playback buffering (seconds): on that same dialog to see how low you can get it before the sound breaks up. It will not be as good as ASIO but it will make the delay shorter. If you're going to use a MIDI keyboard, you really need to get an ASIO capable sound card. How do you assemble a song with verse, chorus, bridge, etc.?You have to think a little different in ACID because it only allows one sound file per track but it’s a very powerful concept. Here’s what I do. Record the verse once on its own track. Then just paint the verse how ever many times you want it on the track (no need to cut and paste). Record the chorus on the next track. Paint that wherever you need it in the song. Same goes for the bridge or any other part. You wind up with several tracks but there is no cutting and pasting. Just paint the loops where you need them. This makes rearranging a song very quick because its easy to see where the various parts lie on the timeline. It also helps in the mix if you route all these tracks to a single bus. Then you can apply effects and make volume changes in one place for that instrument. If you don’t like having all those tracks for one part here is an alternate way. Record the verse, chorus, bridge, etc. just once in succession. Then use the Chopper to highlight just a verse or just a chorus, etc and insert them as many times as you want on the timeline. This is the same as cutting and pasting but I find that using the Chopper is easier. How do I make patch changes in my VSTi MIDI files?To change the properties of a loaded VSTi you just double click on icon on the bus fader at the bottom of the screen for that SoftSynth (or right click on the icon or name and select Soft Synth Properties...) and the properties window will pop up just like it did when you added the SoftSynth. You can then change any of its properties like the program name (i.e., patch) that a DLS SoftSynth will use or the channel it listens on. If you don't see the channel dropdown box, then you probably have a version of ACID that is 4.0a or earlier. Please update to the latest version of ACID on the Sony site. If the SoftSynth can play multiple voices on separate channels you can assign each new MIDI track to a different channel and voice. Here is how it should work:
You should now have one DLS SoftSynth loaded with two MIDI channels and each MIDI track assigned to one of those channels and playing the appropriate patch assigned to their channel. This is how you would set up any multi-patch softsynth like DLS, SampleTank or SFZ (Soundfont Player), etc. If you want to manually add program changes into the MIDI stream, you can do this in the List Editor. To get to the List Editor, either double click on the MIDI icon to the left of the Track Header or right click on it and select Properties... and then select the List Editor tab at the top of the dialog. Next right click the event before where you want to add the program change and select Insert. From the Insert dialog select Patch as the Event Type and type the patch number in the Patch field. (of course you can modify the bank number as well) You should only need to use the insert method for patch changes during a loop, or to set up patches for an external MIDI device (where your SoundBlaster sound card, etc. is consider external because its hardware based and not software controllable). How can I use an existing song and add loops to it?Yes, what you want to do is called Beatmapping. This will allow you to bring in a song and map it to a beat. Once you’ve done that, you can mix and match parts of songs and they will all overlap seamlessly. Some thing to watch out for: 1. If a song was recorded live or even recorded in a studio with a live drummer who wasn’t listening to a click track, the beat may vary from measure to measure. There is not a lot you can do about this. Songs which uses a steady tempo beatmap the best. 2. The songs you want to mix together should start out with a tempo that is fairly close. You are not going to be able to mix a song at 80 beats per minute with one at 140 beats per minute because that much stretching will produce unwanted audio artifacts. Try and select songs that have tempos that are pretty close to begin with for the best results. Start by reading the Quick Start Manual cover-to-cover to get a good overview of how ACID works. Then open the User's Manual and go to the Using The Beatmapper section (in Chapter 7, starting on page 103). This should get you started quickly. Then, of course, go back and read everything you skipped. ;-) (and don’t forget to experiment, explore, and have fun) Sound Forge doesn't recognize all my VST plug-insThere are time when Sound Forge will not recognize a VST plug-in that you know is working. Here is a registry hack to fix this (WARNING: only edit the registry if you know what you are doing): The plug-in information for Sound Forge 8.0 is stored under the registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Sony Media Software\Sound Forge\8.0\Metrics\VstCache\Mappings Each entry under Mappings will have a key with the GUID of
the plug-in. You can look at the String value of Name to
find the plug-in in question. There is a Flags value that
must be set to 0x0E (14). If your plug-in has a value of 0x10
(16) it means that Sound Forge tried to open the plug-in but it
failed but this could have been due to Sound Forge opening and
closing the plug-in too quickly. Just change the Flags value and
see if it works. How do I remove vocals from a recording?Removing the vocals from a recording is a bit like trying to remove the eggs from a cake after it is baked. All of the frequencies in the recording are mixed together with the vocals sharing frequencies with other instruments and it is very difficult to achieve. If the vocals are panned dead center in a mix, you can subtract the left channel from the right channel thus removing the center channel but it will remove everything from the center channel, not just the vocals. This is best done with Sound Forge Channel Converter which already has a Vocal Cut preset. For more control and to isolate vocals, you might want to try a Freeware VST plug-in called Voice Trap.
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||
| © Copyright 2005 - John Rofrano. All Rights
Reserved. -
|