We will cover recording, editing, instrument plugins, velocity, quantizing, humanizing, pitch bends, drums and advanced track routing. Go from MIDI curious to MIDI expert in 22 minutes and 19 seconds.

Double-tracking will not only instantly make your guitar recordings at least twice as good, it will also automatically create space in your mix so your rhythms don’t collide with bass, vocals and lead guitars.

You can find links to the songs on every streaming platform conceivable here:

https://www.osirisdreams.com

In this video I share my workflow, let you in on some tricks to get your creative juices flowing and overall tips on song arrangement. We’ll also cover how to come up with riffs for verses, choruses and other parts, and how to match your drum patterns to those riffs.

I was going to tab it out myself, but then I found this awesome chiptune version of it, made in a tracker with all notes clearly visible in the video – very handy.

I also wanted to try out MuseScore as a new tool for creating tabs. There was a bit of a learning curve and I’m still unsure if it’s good enough as a guitar tab tool – it’s more of a general notation software. It supports tabs, different tunings etc. but it’s not all very visible when you are editing your song.

Even though it’s a short piece, it’s quite tricky to play. The patterns aren’t too hard (no big stretches or sting skips), but the switches between the patterns can be quite tricky at the high tempo of the song. It is also surprisingly hard to memorize since there are a lot of small variations to each pattern. I ended up doing a color-coded Google Sheet to see where there were actual repetions and where there were variations of patterns.

I’ve redone the lyrics generator to use the much smarter AI model GPT2, and I’m currently working a new song using lyrics made by that. Maybe I’ll use GPT3 as well and turn this into an EP.

I spent hours and hours on mixing and mastering and I’m still kind of unhappy with how it turned out. It sounds great on my monitors and in my airpods, ok in the car and horrible on sonos. Already remixed it and I think I can replace the master without deleting the song. I learned A LOT in the process and that’s great.

Quantizing can help, but doesn’t work very well with instrument with non-isolated notes like vocals or distorted guitars.

Learn how to correct mistakes in your recordings and turn them into awesome ones with Reaper’s built-in dynamic readjustment tool stretch markers.

The fullest version of the plugin, Professional, has 57 instruments with round-robin samples for each instrument, customizable techniques, mic positions and legato. . Discovery has 33 instrument with a single sample for each note of each instrument, and fixed techniques etc. But it’s still great for say a symphonic intro.

Here’s a test I made making one such symphonic intro for a metal song:

Tip: how you use the plugin is a bit non-intuitive. You need one instance of the plugin for each instrument / technique combo. So violins 1 long is one track, violins 1 pizzicato is another, cellos long a third etc. So a complete symphonic arrangement will be a lot of tracks.

If you want to learn how to make a full orchestral arrangement, here’s a great tutorial:

The standard of processing metal bass is to split it into three parallel tracks based on frequency, and treat those three tracks differently. When they are merged back together, they will make the perfect bass tone that glues with your guitars and with your drums. This video teaches you how!

Here’s the track template from the video. Unless you have the exact same plugins installed as me, it probably won’t work without a bit of modification.

The LePou plugins can be found here.

To help you get to a running start, I’ve made a tutorial video. It’s focused on Reaper and metal guitars with a digital amp sim, but most of it translates into any genre and DAW.

You will learn:

• What equipment you need
• What latency is, why it matters and how to optimize for it
• How to add tracks, arm and record
• How to tune your guitar with Reaper
• How to get a metal tone
• How to double track