Excerpt from “SOS Hardware and Software Connections” Music Row Magazine

In the last issue I covered the hardware needed to complete your home studio the computer and peripherals. I didn't say anything about how to connect them. Before we gel into the software aspect of the home studio, I want to briefly touch on this subject.

When you purchase your computer some software will already be installed. Most systems these days come with Windows XP Windows. Don't be alarmed if you've never set up a system before, it's easy. If you look on the back of the computer you'll see several connectors. Each is different. The printer can only plug into the printer port and the mouse into the serial or mouse PS2 port. The video and sound cards have their own connectors as well. The only connector that's duplicated is the game port. This is a 15 pin female socket. Most sound cards and super 1/0 cards have game ports. One of these must be disabled. This can be done through software on some cards or by setting a jumper on others. If you don't disable one of the ports, things won't work. Every card in the computer comes with installation instructions. Read Them! It will only take a few minutes, and you can save yourself hours of time and aggravation by getting familiar with each card before you install it.

You'll need to know which interrupt and port address to use. This may sound like gibberish now, but it will make sense after you've read the instructions. It will be up to you to install the midi card. Choose an empty slot. Be careful when pushing down on the card. It should slide into the slot without a lot of pressure. If it doesn't, check to see if a wire has slipped under the edge connector. This has happened to me on several occasions. If you put too much pressure on the card you can break a foil trace on the mother board so press gently. The card should go in easily.

When you get your sequencing software read the instructions before you do anything else. There may be an addendum on the floppy disk as well. Look on the disk directory for a Read-me or Text file.

Before I tell you how to install your software, let me explain in more detail exactly what a sequencing program is and how it records your compositions.

I'm sure that most of you have recorded on a tape recorder. To record a song on a tape recorder, you'd take a microphone and play an instrument into it. The sound is converted into electrical impulses and stored on magnetic tape. The quality of this tape is very important. Higher quality tape has less inherent noise.

You've probably seen Dolby or DBX on the better recorders. These are types of noise reduction processes that lower the level of ''hiss'' that's present on all tapes. This type of recording is an analog process. What you hear when you play the recording back is the sound your original recording.

Sequencing programs work in an entirely different manner. First they are digital. This means they don't need any noise reduction. Only a series of ones and zeros are recorded on the hard drive. Actually, a computer can only read ones and zeros. That's it. Every program, data sequence, or whatever, is just a series of ones and zeros to the computer. There’s no need for noise reduction here because….there’s no noise!

Secondly, the sequencing program doesn't record the music at all. What a sequencer records is the midi performance data. Every time you strike a key on the midi keyboard the computer records it. It knows how hard you struck the key, what note it was, what instrument it was, and if it had any tremolo or pitch bend attached to it. How long you held the key down is also recorded.

There is a case where the computer does record the actual sounds. when you sample a song or instrument you are converting the musical sounds to a series of ones and zeros and storing them on the hard drive. Sampling records the sounds not the midi performance.

When you play a sequence back, you can choose which instrument you want to hear. You may have chosen a piano when you originally recorded your song. But you can easily change the piano to any of over a hundred other instruments when you play it back.

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