This post is the week 2 assignment for the course Introduction to Music Production. You can find my introduction and assignment 1 in here: Visualizing Sound.

Quote my self introduction:

Hi, I am Conan, a programmer in New York. I taught myself DJing. After awhile I started to look into music theories and DAW (Ableton Live 9 in my case), I wish I can play my own works in parties one day. I think the course Introduction to Music Production is a perfect starting point for music production. I am looking forward to learning from Loudon and you guys and gals. English is not my mother tongue, please bear with me..

This time my topic will be focused on MIDI recording. I would like to use divide and conquer strategy to explain this topic. The following sub-topics will be covered in this tutorial:

  • Pre-recording preparation:
  • Recording
  • Basic editing

Pre-recording preparation

Checklist

First, let’s make sure the project is setup properly. Here is a checklist:

  • Proper project name and location
  • Digital audio preferences
  • Recording file type
  • Hardware settings
  • Buffer size

The following video showed how I did the checks.

Prepare recording

As you may noticed, the default template of Ableton Live came with the 2 MIDI tracks and 2 audio tracks created. For demo purpose, I will delete all the MIDI tracks, so we can preparing the track.

In the following video I will show you how to:

  • preparing the track
  • adding the instrument
  • config the click and countoff

Recording

Now we are ready to record some notes. Since I am bad at playing any instrument, let me also enable metronome to help me in beat:

Basic editing

In the final part, I will demonstrate how to:

  • modify notes length
  • change grid setting
  • quantize
  • modify velocity

Reflection

In the progress, I figured out how to config my MIDI device and DAW. And this time, I finally correctly using quantization. The process also helped me to know better the editing tool in the DAW.

Thank you for your time and feedback :)