Producing Your Own Spoken Word Music

Money is a serious issue. The real estate market is busted, gas is $3-$5/per gallon, and college tuition has increased over 300% since the baby boomers were in school. Nobody can afford to lose money!! Especially Spoken Word Artists.

If you prefer to perform with music but cannot afford a music producer we have two alternatives for you.

1.Produce your own music and yes we’re going to help get you started.

2.Use Trackmasterz.com prices range from $30-$100 USD no royalties. They will be making a special page for Spoken Word beats this month and adding tons of new tracks. Read the post about trackmasterz on this blog. We tested and evaluated their services earlier this month.

(hear samples for free at http://trackmasterz.com/shopfortracks.html )

If you opted for choice #1 read on. In the interest of time and space we will post this blog in five different segments.

                                    

                                                 Producing Music for Spoken Word Part I

Recording studios do not have to be expensive. The have to be efficient! What does this mean? Thanks to technology, home recording studios can produce the same quality sound that million dollar professional studios can.  How? COMPUTERS!

Ten years ago only the wealthy could afford computers. Today almost every household has one. The same was true of the recording industry.   Only huge record labels could afford computers and recording software, but now anybody can!!

Mac Vs PC
One is not better than the other I don’t care what your neighbor or the store clerk says. It all depends on the user. Pick whatever you know best. If you know both then you have to pick the recording software you prefer first. Why? Not all recording software works on both Mac and PC. For example, if you decide you want to record in Logic, then you have to buy a Mac. Logic only works on Macs (we’ll get into software later). If purchasing a Mac go with a Power Mac (Desktop) or PowerBook (Laptop).  For those of you who want to use a PC here are our minimum requirements.

Minimum Computer Requirements :

Processor: Intel Pentium IV (Duo processor preferred, NO celeron processor)
or
AMD 64 bit Processor (Duo is preferred)

System Memory: 1GB of DDR2 Ram (pc3200 is lowest grade allowed
we prefer pc2 5400)

*If you buy a computer the RAM will be built by
that manufacturer (i.e Dell). If building your own, here
are a list of brands we recommend*

RAM brands we recommend:
Kingston
Crucial
Corsair

Video Card: Card should have at least 128 MB. Today most come standard
with 256 MB.

Brands/Chipsets we recommend:
ATI
Gforce

Hard Drive: SATA minimum 80GB (do not get one bigger that 250GB.
Takes longer for your computer locate
files. Big deal when recording music)

Must have Firewire and USB (USB 2.0 ports are standard now, but if using an older
computer you might want to check).

Windows XP is better for recording than Vista. This is true currently. However, as Vista improves it will take over. Most music recording software is platformed to run on Windows XP for PC of OSX for Mac.

Everything else on the computer (i.e cd burner, dvd burner, monitor type) really does not matter. Make sure it has the minimum requirements listed above

***Studio computers should not be used on the Internet if possible. You do not want a virus. Timbaland does not surf the web while making beats.  Also NO RECORDING DURING A THURNDERSTORM!!! You could get a power surge and fry everything. Make sure you unplug the computer when your not using it (and during storms) to avoid power surges.**

We’ll continue later

Beat for Spoken Word Artists Courtesy of Trackmasterz.com

We thank Trackmasterz for their support and graciousness. We asked them if we could post one of the tracks we purchased and they said YES!! However, we forgot that this blog does not allow audio uploads. Yes we know, we should have checked the formats before going through all this trouble. GOOD NEWS THOUGH!!! You can still here samples of Trackmasterz beats free on their website. Go to http://www.trackmasterz.com and click on shop for tracks. There are little mini players to the right that allow you to preview a snippet of each track. Make sure you read the track description. It lists the genre, tempo, track name, and length. Remember, they sell other genres as well so be careful when listening. You might like some of the tracks that are not categorized as Spoken Word.