About Me
My name is 01damage, and I have recently showed interested in music composition. I have done research about the fundamentals of composing music, software (includes DAWs, synths and plugins) and more.
[Audacity link]
Table of Contents
- What is Audacity
- Features included with Audacity
- How to make music on Audacity
[1] What is Audacity
Audacity is a versatile digital audio workstation (DAW). Audacity has pros and cons in contrast to other DAWs. I have experimented with multiple DAWs first-hand, and I find Audacity to be more efficient.
Softwares I have tried (chronological order)
- GarageBand
- Adobe Audition
- Audacity
One of the DAWs I have worked with (Adobe Audition) does not provide the feature of composing music.
Audacity allows the user to complete many tasks. Although it does not feature an advanced mixer nor a proper and professional way of manipulating music, it has components other softwares don’t.
First of all, Audacity allows its users to create music easily. All of the possible ways to create music on this software is consistent.
[2] Features included with Audacity
Audacity allows its users to gain access to many features. Once opening the software (on MacOS), the user is greeted with the following buttons:
First of all, let’s start with the “Audacity” button.
The only important button here is “Preferences” (cmd + ,). You can change your theme. There is:
- Classic theme
- Dark theme
- High-contrast theme
- Light theme
I personally use the Dark theme, but all the themes look nice.
Going into the “File” button, everything here is very basic, but I will demonstrate.
- “New” (cmd + N) opens a new project
- “Open” (cmd + O) shows all your projects
- “Open Recent” shows all your recent projects
- “Close” (cmd + W) closes your current project
- “Save Project” saves your current project
- “Export” exports the song to an audio file
- “Import” imports an already-existing audio file to your workspace
For the sake of length, I will not be going over the other buttons. They are all pretty self-explanatory.
[3] How to make music on Audacity
Once opening up Audacity, click “Tracks” then click “Add New”.
For this demonstration, I will be creating a “Mono Track”.
From here, click the “Generate” button, and it will show you all the sounds you can create (and also enabling/disabling plugins).
Once you have created your Mono Track, choose one of the sounds. For this demonstration, I will be choosing “Pluck”. Once clicking “Pluck”, it will show me this interface:
The pitch is how deep the sound is. The lower the pitch the deeper the Pluck sounds. The “Fade-out type” includes:
- Abrupt
- Gradual
Abrupt makes the sound transition more suddenly, while gradual “gives awareness” before transitioning. The user is easily able to edit the sound duration.
Now, this is how my track looks like (visually):
Note: the interface for every sound is different. Some are more complicated than others.
This is 01damage’s Audacity guide and fundamentals. If you have questions, or I didn’t cover your questions, contact me:
Next tutorials:
- Audacity – Tutorial and How-TOs [Complex]
- Audacity – Creating a First Track