The Cox School of Business provides full-time M.B.A. students study abroad opportunities to immerse themselves for two weeks in Latin America, Europe, or the Pacific Rim.

MAKE YOUR OWN BAND!

Being a one-person musical outfit isn't that much work, and it doesn't have to cost very much, either. Scott Douglas outlines what you'll need and how to get started:

1) A vocal harmonizer. You can find these at a local music store that sells electronic musical instruments -- keyboards, guitars, and the like. They are made by several companies, including Akai, Antares, DigiTech, Roland, and TC-Helicon. Be sure to get one that accepts MIDI from a computer or other electronic musical instrument -- that way, you won't have to "drive" it yourself when you sing. Typical Cost: $400 to $600.

2) A MIDI-capable electronic keyboard or sound module.You won't need to know how to play it; a computer can do that for you. Typical Cost: $400 to $600.

3) A personal computer (PC or Mac) running the Band-in-a-Box software program. You'll use the computer as the intelligent conductor for all of your background instruments and singers. You'll also need a USB MIDI interface, such as the Edirol UM-1SX (www.edirol.com) to connect your computer to your musical equipment.

4) A microphone -- you gotta sing into something!

5) An audio mixer -- for mixing together the vocal harmonizer sounds with the electronic keyboard sounds. Alternatively, some keyboards have a line-level input that allows you to mix the sound from another source (a CD player or vocal harmonizer, for example) with the keyboard's sound -- so no mixer is needed!

6) A pair of headphones to listen to the tunes that you create.

7) Cables for your microphone, MIDI connections, and audio patches.

STEP #1: After you've got all the equipment, connect the computer to both the keyboard/sound module and the vocal harmonizer using MIDI connections. Band-in-a-Box will use these to play the right sounds and harmonies when you sing.

STEP #2: Connect the keyboard/sound module and the vocal harmonizer to the audio mixer so that you can hear these two devices at the same time at the mixer's output. The headphones are handy to listen to the mix as you create it.

STEP #3: Choose the song you want to perform. Band-in-a-Box has sample songs, or you can download whole libraries of songs in the Band-in-a-Box format off of the Internet. If you're musically minded, you can enter in your own chords, but remember -- if it is a popular song, somebody probably already has typed in the chords for you somewhere!

STEP #4: Choose the harmony preset that suits your song. Most harmonizers offer lots of choices -- from tight four-part harmonies to "gender bending" sound effects.

STEP #5: Play the song using Band-in-a-Box. If you've done everything right so far, you should start hearing your instrumental backgrounds through the mixer's headphones, and you'll see your harmonizer's display changing to the chords of the song.

STEP #6: Start singing into the microphone. With only one voice in, you can easily make four or five voices with the vocal harmonizer, and the background music is perfectly matched with the harmonies that are being made. Sing to your heart's content!

How these audio examples were made

To make these recordings, I used a DigiTech Vocalist Workstation voice processor, a Yamaha CBX-K1XG electronic keyboard, an Apple Powerbook laptop computer, an Edirol UM-1S MIDI Interface, and Band-in-a-Box Version 7. The Yamaha keyboard has a "karaoke-type" line input on it, so I didn't need a separate audio mixer. Both the vocal-only and full-blown audio mixes were recorded simultaneously onto portable MiniDisc recorders and then subsequently re-recorded onto the Apple Powerbook using Audacity.

Enjoy!

Back to the main page