[pcgumshoe]

You get what you pay for and what you put into it.

I think, and I may be wrong. I have not toured any of these facilities and I am not advocating that this is the truth, however, in my business plan, actual musicians are negated. God knows how Musicians can mess up the whole cart! Look at the Carol Burnet Show... Ever wonder why it isn't released on DVD? Because of the Musicians Union!

Well, you can take a Kar file and use it like a midi. With a midi, you can play it into a wav. and from a wav you can make a karaoke. How much time you spend on it and what type of equipment, now more software, will determine what you are capable of doing.

Here is my list of hardware:

A PC with a lots of RAM and a good Sound Card (for now I use Live & Above from Sound Blaster, but there are others I will be using in a mini studio)

A good set of headphones (mine cost $150 and I get the at cost deal because I have what they want - booze!)

That's it.

Now, for the software (and this is important but not absolute)

Finale 2002 (will be changing to Sibelius soon)
Sonar 2.2 XL
Reason 2.5
KPro (Very IMPORTANT and the ONLY SOFTWARE to USE!)
Microstudio
Word & Notepad

Now I will address why I use what I use and what I mean by, you get what you pay for (and what you put into it):

Finale: If something does not exist. I will find the sheet music, preferable the full score or the "Piano/Conductor's Score"

I will key in all the music into multiple staves and then I have each instrument's music represented. Then I convert it to midi (Save really).

Now I goto Sonar. In Sonar, I will break some of the instruments apart or have many tracks of the same intrument (a plucked violin and a tremelo)

I will use Edirol in Sonar for some audio and I will use Rewire in Sonar to open Reason.

Reason: this is a program that has wav recordings of actual instruments. There is so much control over the instruments. The premise here is that someone (and many people do this) took the time to painstakenly record into wav format each note on a particular instrument and then different styles to play each note.

The package comes with a lot of useful instruments and effects.

Now I play my midi file through all these components and I edit the style, I edit the midi, I tweak hear and there and then I have it sounding perfect. Now I mix down the audio to a wav file. If I have time, I will burn it to a CD and make sure it sounds the same on my Bar's audio system. Everything being right, I have a close rendition of the song I am trying to make.

I search for the Lyrics on Google, copy the lyrics to a txt file and then I select it all and copy it to word. In word, I select all and convert the fonts to "ALL CAPS" Then I copy it back to Notepad and I make any spoken parts in lower case, I add things like "INTRODUCTION" "INTERLUDE" or whatever else, sometimes if I don't know the song and where I would pause, I put ===== ahead so that it reminds me to pause. I break up words with "*'s" so that I tap 3x for a word lik "An*y*one"

Then I mix it down to a CDG and then I use Microstudio to burn it to a disk. I think I will make a post in the KPro Section on this topic and see what people think.

If you have any other questions, or comments for me personally on this, email me.