Music

Music is a really big part of my life - I love producing it, and I love playing it. The music I listen to is often my own because I like to know how everything works, and by producing it myself I basically guarantee that.

In keeping with my standard of "do the simplest thing that could possibly work," I tend to use minimum hardware and minimum software that produces the sound I'm looking for. This means a MacBook Air, because you need a DAW to get almost anything done with audio, and Apple hardware is very well respected amongst content producers.

Cubase

For software (a DAW) I use Cubase. That may seem a bit weird since Cubase is old and tricky to use, but I don't mind a bit of complexity if it means I can get the job done. Cubase is a very capable piece of software, and it's very stable. It has everything I would look for in a quality piece of production software.

Your DAW is the centre of your workflow - it's the piece of software that defines time and sound, but it's not always up to every job out of the box. I can't sing, so I need a solution for that. I've tried Omnivocal (which ships with Cubase now) but the results were never satisfying. Instead I went on a magical journey to try and find something that could sing better than me, and the journey was short...because a strangled cat sings better than me.

So does this...

Synthesizer V Studio 2 Pro

I rely on Dreamtonics Synthesizer V to produce vocals, usually using the Natalie voice pack. Natalie is a nice middle ground of vocal that works well for English singing, and has a very dynamic voice that can scale from a delicate whisper all the way up to belting vocals that will blow your socks off. For a male voice I mostly use Liam, and for many of the same reasons. Liam can't hit the highs as well but he's still very dynamic. Infrequently I use ASTERION for super-deep vocals.

Another neat thing about Synth V is that it has a rap mode that takes some of the musicality away in favour of a more "spoken" sound. For me this means I can use Synth V in a pinch to build parts of audiobooks and small pieces of dialog. It's not perfect though - timing syllables can be a real problem because music is about timing, and when you're speaking that happens to be the least of your concerns. It's also hard to get effects that you need to deliver emotion in a piece because you can't readily make it sound upset, nor will it cough. You can use ElevenLabs to get these kinds of things but all I managed to end up with was an empty wallet*.

*ElevenLabs is very expensive, and doesn't deliver most of what I need in an audiobook. It can't do music either.

But you can still do some cool stuff!

Music

Here's a nice simple track I put together using just basic Cubase and some Synthesizer V. This track is particularly lazy and doesn't have much in the way of lyrics, but what it does have it makes good use of.

Soundscapes

This simple setup can produce some nice soundscapes. That basically means presenting audio with some kind of atmosphere that might be intended for a book, but it's more to do with the imagination of a scenario than a story.

Cool.

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