The idea of mobile music making is not a new one. How many new albums and demos are roughed out on 4-track machines in dingy hotels? Nowadays remix's are made in cramped airline seats and scratch tracks are roughed out on laptops on commuter trains and in coffle shops alike. You can even go smaller though if you don't have, don't want, or don't always want to lug a laptop around with you. With computers as ubiquitous as they are you often don't have to take them with you because they usually will be where ever you arrive. The problem of course is not having your stuff when you get there. But that is not a problem if you have what you need on your trusty USB memory stick.
Most people don't know it but it really is possible to run programs off a USB drive to create music or other creative tasks, and almost any other function you may need to perform. The idea of the Key Chain Studio is that you have the ability to work yourself or even corlaborrate on musical projects when ever or where ever you are. If you unexpectedly wind up at buddies house you can show him a project song you are working on and work together on it(an imprompt jam session for the ditigal age.) That sure better than just simply play him a static track. Or you can turn that business like pc at work into a Digital Audio Workstation on your lunch break or when the boss man is trapped in a meeting. What ever. Where ever. The best part is you leave the PC you were using exactly as you found it. No, installation or changes required.
Reaper
Reaper is great software. It is powerful, light weight and easy to install. This makes it perfect to run off a USB drive. It downloads as a completely uncrippled version for you to try out. The noncommercial licence is only $50. Here is a run down of the features if you are not familiar.
- Uber-powerful routing of audio--functions as an entire virtual studio with patchbays, enabling all sorts of effects not possible anywhere else!
- FAST installation and execution, portable software that supports running from USB-key or other removable media
- Integrated network FX processing (use spare machines for additional processing power)
- Supports reading/writing most media formats on the fly, including WAV, AIFF, OGG, FLAC, Monkey's Audio (APE), WavPack, and more!
- Great editing features (auto-crossfades, ripple editing, arbitrary item grouping)
- Tons of built-in FX, user editable FX, support for third party plug-ins
Reaper is light yet powerfull. And yes, it can run off a memory stick. And the handy reaper-to-usb.bat included with Reaper uploads the program to your usb device for you. The cornerstone of a key chain studio as it turns a pen drive into a quality DAW.
Audacity
This one comes from PortableApps.com. It is thee site for finding applications that will run off usb sticks. They have numerous applications and a program that provides a start up menu that not only allows you to launch your portable apps but install and remove them. There also is a program that will allow you to back up your usb device easily.
Audacity Portable itself is a open source freeware editor much like Wavelab, Adobe Audition or Sound Forge. It features:
Audacity is an easy-to-use audio editor and recorder. You can use it to:
- Record live audio.
- Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
- Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files.
- Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together.
- Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
- And more! See the complete list of features.
Plugins
Since you have a host now it needs virtual instruments and effects. Reaper comes with some OK ones but there is a lot of other great ones out there. There are some things to consider. The most obvious is size. Your dealing with limited space so any large sample based instruments and effects are out. They take up too much room. Plus the fact that if you want to run well on any PC you might find you can assume there is going to be a lot of RAM to load samples into. Along same lines the CPU demand should be pretty low. There is still a lot of slow processors out there. So, basically convolution effects are not a good idea using both samples and CPU straining algorithms.
Collections:
You might want to check out some of these nice groups of free VST's for easy one stop shopping.
This set will cover all the basic needs. Real work horses that are familiar as they are useful. They are super simple and easy to use. Not flashy but get the job done without a big cpu hit.
These are another set of simple effects. Easy on the eye and the processor. Additionally you can download the whole collection it a zipped archive.
Wacky and fun. Think glitchy, grainy, and lo-fi in the eight bit sense of the word. Simple yet capable crazy sounds. Only tapeworm & field are sample based. The rest are are small and do not tax the CPU. toad is a way to get some sample free drum sounds although 8 bit NES percussion it is.
Drums:
This is one of the more difficult parts of a studio on a key chain. Most drums and percussion instrumens are usually sample based. Being that drums are the easiest to get good sounds out of when sampling it makes sense. Alot of drum samples if individual hits can be pretty small so sampling can work here but in the spirit of this endeavor I have decide to go another way.
E-phonic offers 2 excellent drum sythns Drumatic 3 which is a virtual analog plug and Dumatic VE aims for the sound of the old beloved Roland drum machines.
Andreas Ersson the developer of the great Iblit offers ErsDrums a drum sampler with very vintage drum machine like feel. His drumlar takes and interesting modular approach to drum synthesis.
Odo Synths is an FM based drum synth.
If you choose to sample your drum sounds be sure to check out these:
Grizzly is a great drum sampler from Majken's wonderful collection of plugins.
Dr. Fusion from the afore mention is Odo Synths is a sampler and synth in one.
Other Plugins:
The are too many excellent freeware effects and instruments to mention here. Luckily though I have mentioned them elsewhere. Mainly my Free Plugins List. While all of these are excellent plugins not all are easy on the cpu. So, if you are wanting a rig that will run on even the most underpowered system take care because not all of the plugins are cpu friendly.
Tips
Even if you really know your way now your way around a DAW music production & Reaper (if you need help with Reaper you can find it here) there are a few considerations for this kind of thing when using your normal workstation or laptop setup.
Space
First of course is the size. Thumb drives are getting bigger and cheaper all the time so this is less and less of an issue. Still you can't go crazy especially if you want to carry around a lot of projects. Audio files can add up quick. A 4 1/2 minute song at a minimum quality 16 bit 24 khz wave made up of 10 tracks would be around 450mb. Recording is going to less than ideal with the key chain studio so midi tracks and virtual instrument are your friend. Rendering tracks out after you think you are done with them can reduce processor load but it also will use up more space. It is a balancing act finding a happy medium between size and power sometimes.
Sound Card
Remember when you first tried to screw around with making music on the computer. Remember how well that sound card built into the motherboard worked. If you are used to your kick ass audio interface (sound card) forget about it. Your grandma's house don't have a 8 input firewire box with super duper a/d converters and near zero latency. And latency can be a real problem depending on how you want to work. You should stick with 16 bit 44.1khz sample rate on a regular machine. Also you might have to adjust the latency setting to get things to run smoothly. You might want to try another driveR also. All this accessible from the Reaper menu options->preferences->audio. After you do it a few time it is fairly simple. Sometimes you won't have a problem at all. It is a crap shoot.
Latency can be bad enough to make recording and live input difficult. But that is not the strength of the key chain studio. You are most likely not going to have a midi controller or sometimes not even a crap built in mic or headset made for gamers. Still things should almost work well enough to lay down scratch vocals until better versions could be recorded latter.
A Thumb Drives Best Friends
The idea is being portable enough to fit on a key chain. But if you always keep both your keys and a iPod with you use them in tandem. Your iPod can be utilized as a portable hard drive to store sounds and files of all types. Also some of the mics available for ipods are better than what you might find built into laptops or attached to a pc. It can function as a field recorder to collect and upload samples.
There are numerous online storage options now. If you had to you could up load them in a a pinch. I don't think putting all your files on them for use is a good idea. You would have to download and install them every time. You are counting on the loaner computer to have a good Internet connection without restrictions on download. You will find this is not always the case. I think it is a better and faster practice to leave the computer as you found it.
Other Software
PortableApps.com
PortableApps has a big list of applications in edition to Audacity that will run on a memory stick. Here are a few good ones that are listed below, but the whole list should be checked out.
VirtualDub
Features:
VirtualDub Portable is a video capture/processing utility. It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images. Learn more about VirtualDub.Codecs Note: VirtualDub uses the video codecs on the local machine, so if you wish to use a non-standard codec like DivX or XVID, you'll need it installed. This is unavoidable at the moment.
Ok, you are not going to use this to make the next blockbuster but it is handy for what it does. The interesting thing for audio manipulators is that it can peel off the audio to sample until your hearts content.
7-Zip Portable
7-zip is a free file compression utility. It will compress and uncompress 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR file formats and unpack all the other common formats. This is extremely useful to squeeze everything on your portable device like audio files.
InfraRecorder
InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features including:
- Create custom data, audio and mixed-mode projects and record them to physical discs as well as disc images.
- Supports recording to dual-layer DVDs.
- Blank (erase) rewritable discs using four different methods.
- Record disc images (ISO and BIN/CUE).
- Fixate discs (write lead-out information to prevent further data from being added to the disc).
- Scan the SCSI/IDE bus for devices and collect information about their capabilities.
- Create disc copies, on the fly and using a temporary disc image.
- Import session data from multi-session discs and add more sessions to them.
- Display disc information.
- Save audio and data tracks to files (.wav, .wma, .ogg, .mp3 and .iso).
(I haven't use this myself yet but looks promising)
Other Applications
Here are a few other applications not available at portableapps.com. All are useful and ultra light weight. If you are geeky enough to find yourself wanting to do this then like me people are probably always asking you to fix their garbage infested computers. A few of these apps at the portable apps site and list below will help with that. But I also like to keep a few installers for programs that will not run off a memory stick that I often find myself needing on my clean up missions. Just something to consider. You might want to check out pendriveapps.com & The Portable Freeware Collection for more apps also.
XYplorerFree
ExplorerFree is a handy beefed up replacement for windows file manager. It allows you to uses tabbed browsing to explore your files. ALso it allows you to add files and folders to a favorites list, color code items, etc. etc. The full version available has even more features for $25. Besides maneuvering through files quickly and easily it will preview most media files. This is great when digging through samples or music.
It runs great off portable storage but you might want to you consider installing on any computer you regularly use. Once I tried it I am not going back.
Hijackthis! & StartupList
These two programs are extremely use to getting rid of crap. Hijackthis! is good for finding browser hijackers. StartupList show everything everything that starts up with your computer as you might expect. If you think msconfig show everything you are going to be very surprised.
Process Explorer
Like StartupList is to msconfig Process Explorer is to task manager. A much more user friendly & powerful version of the task manager.
back to Music Production