There isn’t just one thing that truly makes any film great. Its a melting pot of ideas sculpted into a complete package of emotion and satisfaction. There are so many moving parts. It isn’t just the shots, the acting or how much they spent on special effects. Most of the time the music is the catalyst brings it all together. It makes it cohesive. The soundtrack to any film sets the tone for the whole body of work and making content for YouTube is no exception.
I think I’ve replied to about 100 comments about this in the last few months so I decided that it was time to talk about it. Something that is very near and dear to my heart and the one thing I spend so much time on creating that you may not even realise. The music behind Gear Seekers.
Yeah. That’s right. I make all of the music for Gear Seekers. Every almost single song you’ve heard on this channel has been made specifically for this channel. I’ve been making music just about as long as I’ve been building computers and they have always gone hand in hand with each-other. With that said I want to take you show what hardware and software I use to make it all happen.
Just as a caveat. I’m not going to show you how to make music or my process. This is basically a look at the hardware and software that I use to make the music. I know people will use different software and methods than I do. This video is basically to open up a discussion and see who else out there makes their own music as well. Lets get started. Lets start off with the hardware. Well the computer hardware.
To be honest this isn’t that important because you can make music on basically any computer regardless of how powerful it is. That’s why you see so many people making music on Macs. Because who needs performance when you can look cool and talk about how great your productivity computer is. Anyways.
The CPU is the Intel Xeon E3-1231v2 on an MSI Z97 Gaming 3 motherboard with 32GB of Corsair vengeance ddr3 cooled by a Cooler Master Hyper D92 Air cooler inside a Corsair Carbide 400C. Well for now anyways. I think the case will probably change to something more industrial in the near future.
Storage isn’t that important either because all of the audio assets and samples are stored on my network storage anyways and even crazy high bit depth audio can be transmitted over the network without and lag.
The main audio interface I use is the Presonus AudioBox iTwo patched through to the Presonus AR12 USB. I use a fairly old mic Pre-amp that I’ve had for around 10 years to warm up vocals. I use the ART Tube MP Project Series Pre-amp. This thing has been pretty bullet proof over the years. I think there is a newer version out but yeah. This one is my pre-amp of choice.
Monitoring Audio is a bit of a weird one because I use a weird system let me explain. The AudioBox iTwo goes into the AR12 and the AR12 has a set of Presonus Eris E3.5 monitors attached to it. Thats not the weird part. I have my SteelSeries Siberia 800s connected to the headphone output on the mixer and I switch the input on the control box so I can use my wireless headset to monitor audio when I don’t want the speakers on. Not sure if that makes sense.
Lastly my MIDI controller of choice. I used to have so many different keyboards and control surfaces and all of this fancy gear but all of that is gone now. The only type of midi controller I use these days is the Novation launchpad S. Its small, works like a keyboard and an MPC and it does the job.
Alrighty lets talk about software. This is the part that will get people riled up. Let me just say this and get it out of the way. I don’t like Ableton. I don’t have to like Ableton and I will never like Ableton.
I’ve had my windows install setup a certain way to make music for about 10 years and I don’t really want to mess with it and do something weird so I have backed up, imaged, upgraded and basically kept the same windows install in some shape or form for that entire time.
I use an odd combination of software. For almost all things I will use FL Studio or Fruityloops or whatever you want to call it because Ive been using it since version 1 point something back in 1998 as a kid. Its a very capable bit of software these days so I have dropped using a lot of the other bits of software I used to use like ProTools
Now I still have ProTools installed for some of the legacy stuff that I have but yeah. Thats the only reason I still have it. Don’t get me wrong I do love ProTools but its not the most efficient way for me to create music. Lastly is the software I use to record vocals. This has changed so much over the years. I went from Cubase to Nuendo to ProTools to Cubase but now I exclusively use Presonus StudioOne. Its fast, I own a license to it and it feels like the perfect mix of Cubase and ProTools.
