Free-cording Your Demos (Kind of.)

(Reaper isn't technically free, and the hardware/mics/cables cost money, but a lot of the plugins are cheap or free. If you're on a 64bit version of Windows from the last decade, this should all work. If you're on MacOS, some of this might work, some of it might be outdated with the introduction of the M1.)

I got into creating music 1998 or so, back in the days of pirated Fruity Loops, creating beats and songs on my Compaq Presario. Eventually after demoing Sonar Producer Edition, Cubase, CoolEdit, SoundForge, every other DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) I stumbled upon REAPER, from the guys who brought us WinAmp. I like WinAmp, and I ended up loving REAPER. It rarely crashes, it's versatile, and it's coded so efficiently and updated all the time. It's a free trial that doesn't expire, it nags you to buy it indefinitely. I think that's awesome, because someone who just wants to learn can tinker with it for as long as they need to. When you want to take the plunge and buy it, the license costs 60 dollars. The plugins contained in REAPER are basic looking but work great... EQ's, compressors, reverbs, delays, chorus, etc etc.

I use a TASCAM US-1800, an external soundcard with microphone and instrument/line inputs + MIDI capabilities. Mine would be overkill for most people as they wouldn't typically need to record 16 simultaneous tracks. The 2x2 version should be sufficient to anyone who wants to do vocals/guitar/MIDI/etc, the perfect way to get a foot in the door. If you want to compose by way of dragging notes around on a timeline without performing instruments or your voice, that's possible without the additional hardware as well.

So we have our REAPER and maybe we have our TASCAM, or Presonus, or whatever other audio interface you might or might not have. I'm a punk guy, I like crunchy buzzsaw guitars, rumbling bass, and speedy primal drumming, but I love rap and electronic music too so I'm going to try and cover all the bases here. I start all of my songs, regardless of genre with drums. Sometimes I use Roland electronic drums through MIDI to trigger a VSTi like SSD 5 Free Version, which is a fully articulated and sampled drum set that you can download for FREE. Quick rundown on VSTi (Virtual Studio Technology Instrument.) Sometimes installing these can be problematic, some VST instruments and effects that have an installer put them in a common place where REAPER is likely to find them, others are a DLL file that you need to put in that directory yourself. If it has an installer, PAY ATTENTION TO THE MENUS, NOTE WHERE IT'S INSTALLING THESE INCASE YOU NEED TO POINT REAPER IN THAT DIRECTION. Common folders for VSTs are C:\Program Files\VSTPlugins. VST3 plug-ins: C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3. VST plug-ins (32-bit): C:\Program Files (x86)\VSTPlugins

I use SSD5Free for rock and roll stuff, but when I want to get punk nasty, I use some of the Ugritone VSTi's: Punk & Grind Drums, Anarchy Drums (5 bucks when you sign up for their newsletter), Assault Drums, Riot Drums, they're all pretty good depending on your creative preferences. For more drum VSTi options that aren't all based on a rock and roll drumset see this list.

In REAPER you can add a MIDI item to your timeline, add the drums as an effect, and start painting in your beats on that piano roll grid looking thing on the right. If you're MIDI connected, you can trigger samples with a keyboard or an electric drumset. Google how that works, you're smarter than me, you'll figure it out.

VSTi's are cool, they can be drums, or a synthesizer, or a Hammond organ, there are shitloads of free VSTi's of all kinds of instruments but my favorite freebies are Martinic's Farfisa and Combo Organs, Kee Bass, Versilian Studios has some great orchestral / piano VSTi's (scroll down to FREEWARE) and for you electronica people, I love TAL's stuff. All of their free plugins are awesome and modelled on real life synthesizers. You can get your Rick Wakeman on. Shout out to Dexed (Yamaha DX7 model) and KIA's (yeah the car company's) VSTi synthesizer with lots of cool natural and synth sounds. Download em, fuck around, find out.

Lets talk about guitars, vocals. I'm a big fan of the Shure SM7B for vocals, it's a bit more expensive than Shure's SM57 or an SM58, and sometimes it needs a lot of gain, but it's great for only picking up what's directly in front of it. I also like the SM57 or the SM58, they're great too, on a million records. If you've got an acoustic guitar, this doesn't apply, just stick a mic in front of it and record. If you've got an electric guitar and an amp, you can slam a microphone in front of it, dial in a tone you like, and record that. If you like that, great, you can skip the next section. If you're not happy with that, unplug your guitar from your amp, plug it into your external soundcard and fire up one of these VST amp sims.

ML Audio's got free demos of Roots and Stevie T that allow you to use one of the four amps included in the paid version, and Audio Assault offers BlackSun which is completely free. If you're trying to write punk or metal or rock and roll, you'll find some kind of usable tone in one of those. Roots and BlackSun have some decent clean tone options as well... Stevie T, ehhh not so much. Fuck around, find out, maybe you'll feel differently. Sometimes I run bass through these if I'm just arranging, but I prefer a combination of Ignite Audio's SHB-1 and TSE BOD (if you don't have a real SansAmp.) Google around, you can find a bunch of these. You can also stack them on top of a VSTi and run a farfisa through a Marshall halfstack if that's your thing.

Once you've got your VSTs in the right folders, and you fire up REAPER, you can start adding them to your tracks and creating a ruckus. Arm them for recording, make sure you're monitoring, and get to it. If you need some sample MIDI drum / bass / piano loops to drag in to understand how to paint notes on the piano roll, GrooveMonkee offers some free downloads so you can get the gist of it. Also, Google is your friend. If you don't know, Google it.