Advice

MIDI Keyboards for Beat Makers

M-Audio Axiom 25 Key

One of the most important investments a beat maker will make is a good MIDI keyboard. There are some high end workstation keyboards like the Motif, Fantom and Triton that are MIDI capable, but these are not the focus of this article. I’ll be talking about the hardware that is designed for MIDI controlling as it’s only and/or primary function.

The most obvious benefit of a MIDI keyboard is that it allows you to control your various instruments through the piano keys. Instead of clicking your notes in with a mouse, you can play the notes just like on a piano. Because it’s MIDI, it controls any of your VST instruments. So you can lay down string parts or guitar in the same manner.

Some MIDI keyboard controllers also include extra features like knobs, sliders, buttons and even drum pads.

Drum pads are very useful if you like to play your drums with a more natural feel. Without the drum pads, you can use the piano keys to get the same effect, but the feeling you get playing the part is not as natural. Unlike an MPC that has 16 pads, many MIDI keyboard controllers have 12 or 8 pads. This is usually just fine. On an MPC the pads can also be used to trigger chopped samples or loops to play. With a MIDI Keyboard you can do the same, but unless it’s drums, I prefer to just use the regular keys for that. The main reason is that your have many more keys than drum pads which gives you greater control.

Knobs, sliders and buttons can also be very useful. The purpose of these are to control some aspects of the keyboard’s configuration such as setting the octave or touch sensitivity. But many of the more modern keyboards have rows of these controls for custom assignment. In other words, you can have them control things you see on a VST or in your DAW. For example, you might hook a slider up to your master volume control so it is always handy. Instead of using your mouse to drag the volume up or down on screen, you just adjust the slider on the MIDI Keyboard. Another common use is to control various parameters in your VSTs. You might have a filter cutoff frequency hooked to a knob on the MIDI controller. Then you can record and tweak the sound in real time.

Some MIDI keyboards also come with transport controls. These are the familiar Play, Stop, Record, Fast Forward and Rewind controls. These can be very useful at times, but are not as common on lower end models.

You should also be aware that models will usually come in 3 or 4 sizes. These depend on the mount of keys you want. Space is always a consideration. If you work on a laptop and want a small footprint youmight go with a 25 key model (see picture above). A standard desktop user might be good with a 49 key model. You can also find them in 61 and 88 key models as well. If you are an accomplished piano player you might prefer the larger models. As a general rule, the 49 key models are good for your average beat maker.

So know you know about the usefulness of MIDI keyboard controllers and what they are about. Hopefully you can use this knowledge to make a decision about what’s best for you.

Finally, the Amazon MIDI Store is a great place to find deals on a MIDI Controller.

Make Beats – Mixing in 3 Dimensions

A beat maker has many responsibilities to get a finished product. When you’re like me and you don’t have a full time on staff mixing engineer at your disposal, one of the most important things you need to do is mix down your song. Mixing is the act of taking all your musical elements and placing them in a virtual space for your listener.

A well mixed song has some common properties about it. A song should have a wide range of frequencies represented and a decent mount of width and depth to sounds full and complete.

There are a couple of ways of fixing problems with the mix. In this article I’m going to talk about why it’s important to approach mixing in 3 dimensions.

In everyday life, the three dimensions you are most aware of  is space and direction. Up/Down, Forward/Back and Left/Right are your 3 dimensions.

When mixing music, it’s the same except you are dealing with perception of sound. For example, a loud sound will be perceived to be more forward than a softer sound. So here’s what we can do to manipulate sound in 3 dimensions:

Forward/Back

The obvious controller here is volume. Louder means closer to the listener and softer volume means farther from the listener. The not so obvious controller is reverb. Reverb can be used to help make a sound appear farther back without as much reduction in volume. Think of a large room say a gym. Next you someone dribbles a basketball it sounds loud and crisp. Meanwhile someone at the far end of the gym also bounces a basketball. You hear the ball bounce at a lower volume and you hear the “reverberation” (or echoes) off the walls. Even if you couldn’t see the person dribbling across the gym, your brain would put two and two together and tell you it’s probably not that close. The downside to reverb is that the effect could add some “muddiness” and make the instrument less clear.

Left/Right

This one is simple to explain. It’s panning or balance of an instrument. In other words, you make an instrument play louder on the left stereo speaker and it sounds as though the person playing it is standing to your left. Easy right? Keeping on our basketball example from above, we can tell if the person is to our left our right when we hear the ball bouncing because the way we hear sound is in “stereo”. That is to say we have two ears and one ear will hear a louder sound than the other.

Up/Down

This one is easy to understand if you know about tones and pitch. When you play keys to the far right of a piano, for example, the sound of them are higher in pitch then the ones to the left. The far left piano keys are then much lower in pitch than the ones to the right. Almost all instruments occupy what we call a “register” which is a common range of pitch/tone that the instrument is known for. A flute occupies a higher register than a bass guitar for example. Knowing this and using our ears, we can then determine roughly where an instrument lives in the registers. Some instruments may occupy the same register and need to manipulated to sound good together.

Controlling your Dimensions.

Now here is the part you’ll need to really work on with your own mixes. Learn to identify the instruments that clash and use one or more of the dimensions to correct it.

Say you have a electric guitar and a vocal part. The guitar and vocals are often in the same or overlapping registers, so what do you do? Here are some examples:

• You can make the guitar lower in volume (Forward/Back).
• Maybe you can pan the guitar to one side (Left/Right).
• You can use some EQ to carve out the frequencies that might be causing the problem thereby changing the tone (Up/Down).

You don’t have to use every method, but generally you want to identify which of the clashing objects is the most important and concentrate on adjusting the other ones. If you had two competing guitars and a vocal, maybe you pan one guitar left, the other right and leave the vocals in the middle. Experiment and get creative.

Final Note

Beat Makers spent a lot of time picking out sounds and samples and we need to be aware of the big picture. Sometimes a killer sound has to be sacrificed for the sae of the overall mix. I have taken great string sections out of some of my songs just because they did not go well with the vocals. Be aware of this and be flexible enough to do this when it is required. And remember to have fun and don’t be afraid to experiment and break the rules sometimes.

Finally, if you want to learn a lot more about mixing, I highly recommend the following book called The Art of Mixing: A Visual Guide to Recording, Engineering, and Production by David Gibson. It covers the various frequencies of many instruments, and talks about mixing in 3 dimensions in greater detail.

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