Tools: Mixcraft

There are a lot of tools I have found, some cost money, some cost more money. Though I have done this fairly inexpensively, as it is a hobby not a vocation. There are a few free tools out there, I will talk about those also as I get more experience with them. Mixcraft is relatively inexpensive, and you can buy 1 license and use it on your laptop and your desktop if you want to take it with you.

I have talked about arranging. Let me be clear what I am talking about. I am not taking "a Canon in D" and arranging it for a middle school band, which is something my father-in-law Jack could do probably during his lunch break, but that is what he does for a living, and he is very good at it. What I am talking about is quite literally arranging music samples or loops as they are sometimes called, into something that sounds like music.

 

So here is the library of loops that come with Mixcraft 6 arranged by "song kit." That is pretty much exactly what it sounds like a complimentary set of loops that work well together like a kit. As you can see the loops range widely in length. This kit has loops that range from 1 bar (4 beats) to 32 bars (128 beats or just over 1 minute at 120 BPM).

Here is an example of the mixcraft interface with 1 loop inserted in it.

You can see the loop, this one happens to be 8 bars or 32 beats long which at the 120 BPM tempo is roughly 15 seconds. 

Now I am not going to get into all the advanced features in this blog. If this is something tha interests you, you can download a demo version and try it out. You can aslo find many instructional videos on their web site and on youtube.

It is pretty common for a song to be between 3 and 4 minutes in length with some going a bit longer and some going a LOT longer. So when you are arranging your loops, some math must be done to figure out how long everything is. At 4:4 time and 120BPM, 120 bars would be 4 minutes. So you have to put quite a few of these piecces together to make a full song. With each loop generally being one "instrument."

What a full project looks like:

This one is a version of TechJazz1 so you can see a lot of little parts go into making one big thing. But all I did is take a number of small puzzle pieces and arrange them in the order you hear them in. Pretty cool huh? All it takes is some time and an ear for what you like. That's it. No special skills required.

So for the time being, if you read about me doing arranging, this is what I am talking about. If you hear me refer to sampling, it is crating the loops to be used here, whether by playing them and recording directly, or by figuring out what I want it to sound like, and using a MIDI editor. Something that is also pretty easy, we will get to that later.

Thanks for playing along.