Hi, My name is Pamela García.  I’m from Guatemala, Guatemala.  I’m going to write a lesson on How to prepare a Project in your DAW, from Introduction to Musical Production, week two, of coursera.org

HOW TO PREPARE A PROJECT IN YOUR DAW

The first thing to do, is to open your DAW and give your new project a proper name.  I’m using for this The Adobe Audition 1.5. 

Go to File, and the option Save session as.

Choose a location for your folder.  In this case, I choosed  C: \User\Pamela y Neri\Desktop\Pame\Estudios Berkley\Music Production,  and I named my project “Assigment week two”.

Once you have this, you can continue with the project.  Now you have to set your digital audio preferences on the DAW.  I’m going to start with the sample rate, the beat depth and choosing the mono track.  In the Adobe Audition, this options are in the same window.

Go to the Window of “Edit View”  and go to “File”, “New Waveform”.  In this windows you can choose your sample rate, I picked 48000.  Mono Channel, and Resolution of 32-bit (float).  In the Adobe Audition there is no choise of 24-bit.  So I choosed the 32 for recording. As in the picture above.

To change the buffer size, go to Options, then Settings, and it will open this windows above.  There you will look out for the option Recording buffer size, and change it to 128. As in the picture above.

All this set, you will continue with the recording. 

In the lesson seen in class, it was told that you have to choose first the file type and put the name of the track before recording.  In this case, as I am using the Adobe Audition 1.5, this steps will be the last ones, because the software doesn’t save the audio while recording it.  You make your recording first and if you are happy with the result you save it.  And you will have to save it every time you change something on it.

After having your first recording, that you made on Edit View, you can save it, choosing the file type and the name of the track.  Go File, and Save as… option, as in the picture above.

In the Save As window, you will choose the file to save your audio tracks.  I choose

C: \User\Pamela y Neri\Desktop\Pame\Estudios Berkley\Music Production\Assigment week two

This means than in the Music Production folder, where I saved the session, I created also a folder named as the session “Assignment weed two” , and here I will save all my audio tracks, or midi, or any other type of track I create.  As in the picture above.

In this same windows of Save as, I will choose the type of file.  I choosed in this case, Windows PCM (*.wav).

 

MULTITRACK VIEW

If I need to record something else, I have to go to the multitrack view, I will drag my track to the multitrack window, and now I can record a new track listening at the first one.  Before recording, I have to enable the key  Record.

You can see in this picture, how the first track has the key record enable, while in the second track is not.

In this next picture, you will see that in the first track, the key record is not enable, and the second one is.  This allowed  me to record in the second track while listening at the first one.  You’ll also see at the buttom of the screen, that there is the record button.  When you use that button, the recorging mode will start, and it will record on all the tracks that you had enable the key record.

Arter the recording, you will have to go to edit view and save the new track.

You will see at the end of the screen too, the monitor record level, there you can check the volume of your microphone or instruments.

After setting the volume you can start recording. 

You have to remember that every DAW is very different, and the important thing is to research your DAW,  explore it until you find the basic things that you will need to use, and from there you will be able to explore more and more each time you use your DAW.

This is all for this lesson, I hope this information was clear.  Please feel free on giving me your opinions.  My first language is no English, so it may be some mistakes on the spelling or the grammar, if you can help in that area too, I will be gratefull.