I found a great musical resource for any steemit musician on a budget - Pro Tools First. Also Original Music Inside
Last week I made this post. It's me playing guitar with my loop pedal but I asked a question as well that nobody answered.
"Is there a free alternative to Pro Tools?"
Although nobody answered, I found the answer out on my own.
The answer is;
Pro Tools has a free version for anybody to use!
It's called Pro Tools - First
Here's an original song I made last night while messing around with it. I call it... Messing Around
I'll admit I was skeptical. There is no way Avid (the company that makes Pro Tools), with the great lengths they go through to prevent people using their software without paying, would put their program out for free. Well it turns out they did. Mind you, it's a bit of a stripped down version, but it has a ton of the great features the main program offers.
So far it's working great. There is some limitations, though. For one, you can only have 3 saved projects at a time. If you want more you have to get a subscription. I think there is also a limit of 4 simultaneous inputs and 8 tracks total that you can use without the subscription. Not bad for free though. I've noticed more and more companies going this way with their software. It's great for people that aren't serious, but who just want to dabble in things like music creation. And further down the line, when it becomes more serious, they can easily upgrade and already know the program. This song only took me about 2 hours to throw together as a test. I've been using Pro Tools for a good 10 years now, though, so a new user might be a bit slower. Once you get it all figured out it's super easy to throw things together and make a song.
You can get your free copy here.
I may check out the subscription for a little while in the near future. Maybe in the fall when it isn't as enjoyable to be outside. A 12 month subscription is $32 CAD a month. This is a little steep for the summer time. What the subscription also gives you is access to their cloud for collaborating with other artists across the world. This seems like a great idea but at least one person needs a subscription to host the project I guess.
I was also messing around with OBS Studio last night to record my screen. I was using VSDC screen capture before but I couldn't get 60 fps and it was messing everything up when I tried to edit it in HitFilm. OBS Studio seems to be much better and the ability to broadcast live will surely come in handy in the future. As you can see, I was able to get everything lined up perfectly and it didn't cause me any trouble.
So if anyone out there is using things like Audacity or LMM to make their music, this may be a better option. A workaround for the fact that you can only have 3 projects open at a time would be to save all your tracks individually in a folder when you are finished with the project. That way if you ever wanted to go back and remix something, at least you would have all the audio. The only thing to do would be to add in any effects, volume changes, etc.
You can use Quicktime player to record your screen for stuff like this - it's how I record mine for beat videos. Super convenient.
Have you messed around with Reaper? It's either free or very cheap, in the $40 range I think, and it's a pretty solid DAW. My bandmate uses it and we're able to do fully produced songs with many tracks that way, so it might be worth looking into.
Yeah I didn't know about reaper. I just downloaded it and can try it for 60 days. The program is only $60. Way cheaper than pro tools for sure. I'll have to play with it a bit to get used to it but it seems just as capable as pro tools. I was just reading about using quicktime to make screen recordings today actually. I'll have to give that a shot as well. Thanks a lot for pointing me in the right direction.
thanks for the tip! :) Great post!