Kevin 2:15
So I’m glad to have you and your piano and your Mac here. Why don’t you talk about yourself, like, what’s your background? And then we’ll talk about your setup afterwards. Yeah, sure. So I’m originally from Colombia. Speak English and Spanish, and then came over to England when I was quite young. Kind of my parents first of all thought I didn’t like music because I used to get really upset to sad tunes. But I think they eventually realized that I was just, like, very attuned to music, and I really liked it. And then I started learning songs by ear. Like, the first thing everyone was trying to teach me was Fleur de Lees.,
like, the first thing that I was trying to pick out by ear. And
has trained some of the best classical musicians of our time, and really lucky to get in there. I got in there when I was 10 years old. Studied piano for eight years and recorder as well. Just a recorder, guys who goes beyond primary, believe me, I did up to eight grade, eight on the recorder, green sleeve in my heart of like that. You know what Three Blind Mice leaves in my audition
Alex Man 3:48
Oh, yeah, so Don’t diss Green Sleeves.
Unknown Speaker 3:52
I was
Alex Man 3:53
I was saying that, yeah, Kevin is absolutely amazing. So I will play him a song, and he will hear it one time, and he will play it back to you on a piano. I will pop an audio track in throughout this podcast. Listen out for it. He’s playing on my grand piano. Yeah, I have a grand piano, but now to play it came with the house. Okay, don’t judge me.
Of me playing him a song. I was like, It’s a Chinese song, Kevin, play it. See if you can play it. It will be really cool. And then we recorded him playing it in 3d audio. So if you have headphones, put it on throughout this podcast, you’ll hear it later on. I’ll I’ll play it maybe towards the end. So listen up for that. But before we do that, maybe we can try to create some music, and he will talk it through. What’s his current setup?
Kevin 4:39
Yeah, sure.
Okay, so I’ve got here a MacBook Pro that’s plugged into a kind of an audio interface called a scarlet to it that’s. Has got my microphone plugged into it, which is also what I’m using to talk to you guys today. And all of this sound is going into the Mac, and I’m using something called loopback, which is kind of like a Virtual Mix, is putting all those sounds in there, and that’s where you can hear me, and you can hear voiceover, eventually, and you can also hear my piano, because you just need something to mix all that together, and that’s how we’re getting that sound through the Mac. And I just thought, I don’t know, I can show you, kind of like, the process of how I make a track, if you guys like and so first up, I’ve loaded up a logic track. So logic is what’s called a door, a digital audio workstation. The free version of this is called GarageBand on the Mac, because logic is about what 200 pound if you’re going to buy the fuller version, but you can play around with it’s really similar. The interface is really similar to a Mac to a to GarageBand. And if you’re
Alex Man 6:01
a student, you get it for cheaper, don’t you as well. So
Kevin 6:05
discounts that stuff as well.
Alex Man 6:07
Do we need a piano to play to create music like a lot of our listeners might not have, they might have the Mac, but they don’t have the keyboard, or, like a MIDI keyboard, or whatever. Can they play? Play using like something else
Kevin 6:20
you can use the on screen keyboard. So if you get yourself a Mac, if you’ve already got one, and launch logic, if you just do Command K musical typing, and it says musical typing, and then,
Alex Man 6:37
and you’re doing that on your quota keyboard, keyboard, yeah, you can your A, B, C, D, E, F, G, yeah.
Kevin 6:41
I’m literally going, S, D, F, G, H, wow.
Alex Man 6:44
I want, I want to know, how does Alex Mann sound like in music form? Can you type my name?
Kevin 6:55
Literally, that’s the first three notes, a, l, e, because it changes the x changes the octave. I think, oh,
Alex Man 7:01
okay, right. I wouldn’t do that then. So, yeah, that’s how my name sounds.
Kevin 7:05
Yeah, I kind of
Alex Man 7:08
like this. It sounds like the Mario
Kevin 7:11
Yeah, that’s a l e on the keyboard.
Mac 7:15
Toddle channel, strip meal.
Alex Man 7:16
So, how much was your keyboard?
Kevin 7:22
Well, I’m using a full length piano, so that was about 500 quid at the time, yeah. But you can also get yourself smaller controller keyboards that literally just, they don’t have any speakers or anything, but they plug in via USB to your Mac and they you can get them for about 80 quid, 70 quid, something like that, yeah. So if you want the full experience of playing a piano, because you might know how to play a normal piano, but not the computer piano, which, what’s Kevin was playing earlier on. So it’s really good to have that option. I think, yeah, I would recommend it, because, I mean, it’s good, you know, if you are just playing around this stuff, the on screen keyboard is fine, but you really, if you want to start playing, you know, nice, big chords and stuff like that, then you’re really going to be wanting to play a keyboard. But the on screen keyboard is, you know, if you’re really stuck and you just want to play and see if it’s for you, get yourself GarageBand and start playing around and see what little melodies you can come up with. Excellent so let’s make some music. Lets talk about what you’re doing.
Okay, yeah. So basically, I’m in the Mac. I’ve got myself onto my first track, and I’ve pre loaded all this stuff already to save time, and I’ve got the piano here. Yeah,
so I’m just gonna play around, see what I can come up with. And
Alex Man 8:49
so do you normally do the melody first or and then add your beats and drums?
Kevin 8:55
I think with a track like this, I usually have to come up with the chords, because basically, I just want really basic kind of piano thing, as we’re doing a podcast. Can you create, like a podcasty kind of music, like a little tune, yeah, like little intro tune, yeah, exactly. So I want something really simple, like piano, bass, drums, you know, yep, keep it simple, because we only got half an hour, exactly.
All right, so this plays do?
I’m just working out the chords here.
and
Unknown Speaker 9:57
see
Kevin 9:57
then we’ll do.
Okay, it’s done like that. So we got, we basically just been playing around. I’ve got myself a nice little intro, tiny little bridge, and then we polish off the chords. So,
yeah, let’s just record. That’s your melody, and now you’re going to that’s my melody and chords, yeah. So yeah, I’m going to record it. So what we do on that we just make sure that we turn on the metronome, which keeps us to time, metronome on, And then you press R, and then you Start Recording. I
Mac 11:22
You 20, 4b, bars four beats, four divisions,
And there we go. Let’s see one bar 123, wow.
on
Kevin 11:50
just turn off the image.
Six bar Okay, that sounds great.
Mac 11:56
bar one beat, 123, bars one beat, one, division, one tick to quantize it,
Kevin 12:00
which means that, you know, just to make sure it was it
Mac 12:02
was one bar, two bars, four beats, four division, 73, ticks, all right, five minutes, one beat.
Kevin 12:11
Okay, I’ve already loaded a base track, so if I go into the second Track, track two Ravenscroft, I should really rename my tracks one bar, one, but I won’t do that for the sake of time, so we’ve got our base. Yep.
Okay, so you know base, basically, I want to kind of fill out the bottom
Mac 12:36
of the chords. The Read, one bar, one beat, one division, root, note,
Kevin 12:39
three bar. So, um, we’re in a major here. So I guess first it’s going to be a, and then it moves to D, and then, so I’m just going to
Mac 12:50
pass four beats, four division, 73 ticks.
Alex Man 12:53
So you can move that to the start of the music
Kevin 12:58
I,m just like gonna try and mess around with that kind of vibe and add a recording. Okay,
Mac 13:17
you
Alex Man 13:42
so this is what you recorded earlier on, right? You’re
Kevin 13:46
it again, you’re playing that with the bass Exactly, exactly. So I’ve just been adding the bass line in there,
Mac 14:03
one by one, two bars, four beats four division 73 ticks, so we
Alex Man 14:08
so we can hear that bass now.
Mac 14:12
. I one has it? One bar sounds good. Two bars, four beats, four.
Metronome on
Alex Man 14:20
that allowed to use this term because it’s overused, but where do you drop the beat, the bass, even drop the bass?
I mean, this isn’t this that kind of music, because we don’t know. I don’t mean doo, doo, doo, doo the dum, dum, dum. Where do you add those spots to add that sound. Do you press a button or what do you mean the dum, dum, dum, oh. That’s literally on the first beat. Oh, so you can set it like that on a beat, and it’s intelligent enough to know what’s a beat.
Kevin 14:56
You’re led by the metrognome. Here you’re hearing 1234, and then going.
Doom on the first beat. Like that’s where I want the basically, I could always, you know, make, make it, put it in a different kind of location. Gotcha, if I already wanted to. But, okay, yeah, cool, cool. You can add anything else. It’s final product. Let’s add one more thing. Okay we’re gonna add drums here. Some drums mice.
Okay, edit this bit toggle
Mac 15:29
channel, strip solo on.
Unknown Speaker 15:35
Okay, we’ll go back.
Kevin 15:38
Okay, so we got some drums here. Oh.
Okay, l Let’s see what. See what we can do.
Hey, I’ve got a simple little intro, and we can always add a lot more. And obviously you’d like play around with it afterwards, and play music and and all of that jazz, and add guitars and maybe even some strings. So we’ll see what we can do with it. Nice. But, um, yeah, there you go. So we can now we just save it. Or do you save it like into an mp three or does that how it works? Yeah, so you can, you can, once you’ve got the project, you’d save it just a simple kind of command S situation, and type in your title, and then, you know, you’ve got different options, menu, button, logic, pro, file, fun, new, new, open, but close. Save. Command, project, prod, paper, import, export, select four regions as a region, slash, cell region for audio, selection as audio, select one track as all tracks as all MIDI, project as a project, score as new, score as project all one. Select, bounce, submenu, bound. Track in regions in place, Regent, track in place and replace all track, project or section ellipsis, Command B, so you can, you can do that like the whole project or whatever, and then that converts it all into an mp three file, and and then, or a wildfire, preferably. And then you can share it with your family and friends. Or there is also a share Option on the Mac, which is kind of cool, and you can share it directly through AirDrop or email, or you can and through AirDrop, you can share to WhatsApp and Dropbox and stuff like that. So that’s really that’s really cool.
Alex Man 18:26
if people have any questions or anything, how do theyreach out to you? To you like
Kevin 18:33
so probably the easiest way I’m available on
at Kevin said to the bar. So you can always send me a tweet.
Alex Man 18:43
Yep, I will include Kevin’s links in the show notes as well. Is any other tips that you would recommend for like newbies? Is there any resources that they can check out online? Maybe, or,
Kevin 18:56
you know, take a look at that. Where did you learn your you know, not, not the whole obviously making music thing, because you went to college and everything, but the whole Mac experience on, like, creating it with logic and GarageBand. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it I’ve learned through Googling, to be honest, some of it is Justin, who you all know, has been an amazing help as well, because he’s really good at mac and knows he’s a real pro at all of that. So I’ve been doing a lot of stuff with him. I’ve also been doing a lot of stuff by Googling and YouTube and just getting tips
and that way. But Google, especially, there’s some very interesting resources. Mac, by the way, logic isn’t the only door that you can use. There are others. There’s some that do similar things. There’s one called Reaper, and there’s lots of resources about Reaper called and if you go on REA, access, R, E, A, access.com,
and there’s lots of tutorials about that. So there’s that for
Alex Man 19:57
Windows users, yeah. And Mac, yeah. Oh, and Mac. So yeah,
Kevin 20:01
and that’s like, 60 quid for a lifetime license, so it’s a little bit cheaper, cheaper,
Alex Man 20:06
yeah, so that’s for you guys in on Windows. I mean, if you guys find today’s one useful, I’m on a Windows version, I can see if I can get another or Kevin, or get someone to do the Reaper side of it and that, because I know a lot of people might not use a mic because it’s quite expensive. But then we normally push for Macs over here in rsbc, because it’s, you know, it’s really accessible. We love your iPhones and stuff. So if you have a Mac then, you know, and you’re very musically talented, why not just try and make some music?
Kevin 20:35
Yeah, definitely. But if you do have windows, Reaper is definitely your best option. So R, E, A, P, E, R, definitely have a look at that and re access. R, E, A, access.com is the website
Alex Man 20:49
All right. Thank you so much, Kevin for coming on today. I will also share your information in the show notes. So remember that if you have any questions like always, please reach out to us, our rsbc charity, on Twitter or email me directly. Alex.man@rsbc.org.uk
and put on your headphones, if you wasn’t wearing headphones already, and listen to this amazing tune featuring Kevin Zissabelle and my grand piano.
See you later. Guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. Bye, guys, Bye,
