Why Am I Doing This?

So, some background by way of introduction.

I'm a <cough> year old that has persisted with my musical hobby for more years than my wife deems seemly.

I usually spend my time playing my Babicz Spider acoustic guitar (awesome - the guitar, not my playing) and singing along (awful).

I thought I'd listen to just how bad I sounded to my family by my turning on the audio* recorder on my phone and after listening back started thinking, in the manner of true obsessives everywhere, how it would be if I could replace the bit where I hit a bum note (often) or the bit where I sang the wrong note (always). Or how it might be with drums, or two guitars, or an electric guitar, or some effects, or a cool Baker Street style sax solo, or, well, you get the idea.

As computers are my day job I though it would be simple to turn on my computer, run up a recording application and play around. It really, really wasn't.

If you haven't yet come across the arcane world of DAWs (see what I did there? If you're like me you're now going to have to look up the acronym DAW. Are you back? Good) and their associated hardware, software add-ons and  their many, many acronyms, technical terms and plain old gobbledygook.

It turns out that unless you're a teenager with an obsessive interest in what I now know (and you don't want to know) to be EDM then entering this world is hard. Really hard. Beats. Loops. Control surfaces. Live sets. Just a sample of the things I don't know about.

So it's time to learn.

As I always make notes when starting a new project it seems reasonable to make those notes public for the old fogeys like me who need to start at the beginning, have their hands held and make some progress towards making computer music.

This blog will, therefore, undoubtedly be useless for those who actually understand this stuff. There will be people screaming that they don't need all of the explanations. They'll want me to jump to altering the MIDI signal route to change the patch (no, me neither). Don't worry. There is a whole internet out there for you. As well as a bunch of magazines geared to the experts. This is most definitely not that.

So I hope that this is helpful if you stumble across it in the bowels of the world wide web. If not feel free to let me know in the comments, just don't expect me to do anything about it. 

Enjoy.

*Fun fact for word nerds and Scrabble nuts. Audio is not recognised as a single word in some dictionaries, instead they insist it is used a part of a compound term such as audio-visual. It is my considered opinion that lexicographers are stupid. (Susie Dent excluded.)