Using a Synth help

Fuengi

Must prompt this by saying I don't have a synth yet, but thinking of buying one.for home recording.

How do you marry this with playing guitar? I've got a load of guitar ideas saved in software and a looper and I want to add some synth tones to these ideas. 

I don't want to play straight through my software with my guitar, at least until I've fully formed the ideas. The way I want to do this is to have a synth drum / bass / keys line running and tgen play 'live' through my amp and pedals with riffs and melodies. 

How do I do this with a synth? 

Winny_Pooh

Hardware or software? You can use a sequencer in the synth to play a pattern off the chord notes you hold down on your controller in real time.

For your purposes I'd do that/record live into your DAW and copy paste sections (relies on setting your DAW track tempo/bar legth first & playing to click) to build a base track. 

Fuengi

Winny_Pooh said:

Hardware or software? You can use a sequencer in the synth to play a pattern off the chord notes you hold down on your controller in real time.

For your purposes I'd do that/record live into your DAW and copy paste sections (relies on setting your DAW track tempo/bar legth first & playing to click) to build a base track. 

Right. I guess I'm thinking at this stage simply about producing a sound from the synth that I can play along to. I can record into Ableton and then play back but that seems a lot of faff. I'd like to just make some rhythm from the synth, loop and play, not sure how to do that.

Funkfingers

Fuengi said:

I'm thinking ... about producing a sound from the synth that I can play along to. I can record into Ableton and then play back but that seems a lot of faff.

To be honest, all of your options will involve some faff.

Fuengi said:
I'd like to just make some rhythm from the synth, loop and play, not sure how to do that. 

Record as audio. Trim to a loopable length. Copy and paste to the DAW bar lines grid.

The DAW Tempo needs to be the same as the synth sequencer. Luckily, these days, most DAW's have an automatic tempo detection algorithm.

The simple approach is to record your entire backing in a single pass prior to editing it into a loop. In the longer term, you might prefer to record the individual instrument parts separately. This will enable more sophisticated editing of the music content at a later date.

wave100

If you are using Ableton to record the guitar stuff then it is just as easy to record MIDI data from the keyboard as the audio - in many ways it is easier as you can edit the MIDI data after you record it. Are you talking about an analogue mono synth or a workstation type thing, or just a controller keyboard? Cheapest thing is to get a MIDI controller keyboard and use the synths and drums that come with Ableton. There are also loads of free software synths around.

Workstations usually have loads of sounds and a sequencer built in but tend to be more expensive, but some people seem to like them. Probably good for folks who want pianos, organs etc rather than synths.

Over the last couple of years I seem to have acquired a couple of analogue monosynths so my way of working with them is to record the MIDI part in Ableton then record the audio from it while twiddling knobs etc. I have an Akai APC Key 25 which is a cheap Ableton controller with lots of buttons as well as a teensy keyboard but that makes recording in Ableton a breeze. If I'm at home though I have a full size keyboard to play!

Fuengi

Looking at the MicroKorg or something similar.