Waste of Time - my first go at MIDI

Hey everyone,

I've had some help from DB and I'm now finding my feet with Reaper and MIDI. Cheers Dutchy 

This is my first attempt at a song, no acoustic guitar here, all fake instruments this time

I am not too great at playing keyboard and my choice of virtual instruments is very limited so I chose a deliberately slow, dreamy sounding approach..

The lyrics are inspired by the lady whom we were buying a house from, she just changed her mind and decided not to sell up after all, thanks lady 

https://soundcloud.com/whitewinter-habitat/waste-of-time-midi-test

You wasted my time..
Not yours but mine.
What did you gain...
By causing me pain.
When you wasted my time?

Did you intend...
To delay and pretend.
To again put me out ...
And mess me about.
When you wasted my time?

All of my life
And all of my dreams
Hung on your words
Your unbalanced words...
As you wasted my time.

You wasted my time

By changing your mind...
For another time.
I'm quite unimpressed
Mildly depressed..
You wasted my time


Instrumental


I hope when you're old
You look back and see
The lies that you told
Got nothing achieved
You wasted your time

Hi John

It's great to see you try something different - and I'm impressed !   The keybs are great because they add proportional value to the song without overwhelming it.  But, what does it for me is that the keybs seem to bring-out your vocals to a new level.  I can hear much more emotion in here and this really lifts the song and makes it much more personal and touching.   

I was actually expecting something Hi-NRG (but maybe that's the inverse style I'll bring !!) - but this is great. 

One point on the vocals:  As this is fairly dark, I'd be inclined to drop a semi-tone on the verse When You "wasted my time"...... This will add more feeling and emotion.

two days ago or so

you where still trying to get sound out of your set up

I am very impressed

and i love this...this is so cool!!!

this track is ssoooooo coollll

AMAZING AMAZING wow!!!!!!

Wooohoo!!  !!
This was totally unexpected - and I love it! Very nice work, John

Great atmosphere, wonderfully slow pace and I agree with Jmac,  this really shines a whole different light on your vocals.
Completely different from what we've heard from you before, but again right on the money.

I sincerely hope we get to hear more stuff like this in the future

Thanks guys 

I've been meaning to learn midi for so long but I'm so glad I've finally started. I think once I've found my feet a bit more with Reaper and figured out how to remove mic noises and chop things about I'll never go back. I need to spend more time on it but for less than a week, I'm happy with this. It is also 'in time' so in theory it could be messed with further, maybe I'll try a dance remix 

I really enjoyed this Habi - I love the way you take inspiration from everyday events and turn them into songs - a true songwriter

I am really happy you are moving into midi - it really does open up endless possibilities

I know you like your vocals quite dry but this is one I would definitely play around with some effects to fit the song - a little delay suggests itself immediately to me 

Excellent song and progress though SIR!

Hi Habi,

for chopping up the track in reaper, you can put your cursor on the place where to chop and go to the pull down menu "item"" and then to ""split at cursor"

if you have your horse shoe button (in the upper right corner of the reaper screen)  activated, the cursor will go to the exact count location, so you can make tight dance music (also in the midi screen, after recording you can go to the edit menu and have some "quantitizing" on your notes so that they are exact or almost exact (you can vary the amount of quatitizing in Reaper) on the counts

for chopping your tracks...you can also just click on the track and take the right or the left edge and make the track shorter by scrolling with your mouse....fun part is that you can always scroll back if you regret what you took out, it is "non-destrucvtive" editing

and one more tip, one that i think is showing how excellent reaper is, you can also click on the track take one of the edges, but before you take the edge you press the "alt" key and keep it pressed, and the you can stretch the track or make it shorter......and the sounds keeps being good

ok one more, double click on the track and you can change the pitch, or the volume etc.

but important for mixing and remixing etc. reordering etc is that pull down menu....and then you can split tracks, when you do that with the horse shoe on, the split is exact on the count, and now you can just drag and drop these nice pieces, combine things, try things together etc.

have fun

* edit, and oh for all that exact count and quantitizing to work, you will have to play with a fixed BPM first, for this you have to activate the metronome, go to the pull down menu "options" and select metronome enabled...

btw also note that you can change the BPM at any time in that little BPM square in the lower middle of the screen. Note that even vocals and hard disc recorded tracks sounds identical, no elves on helium sound even if you speed up enormously......and it all just keeps fitting the new BPM.....isn't that great

nice! i like the little piano creeping in and out! feels like if you had the drums kick in it could explode into something, get that tempo kicked up a notch! your a dab hand at most things these days getting into this kind of stuff!

absolutely stunning Hab I agree, it brings a new level of emotion to your already amazing vocals I hope to hear more of this kind of stuff from you

MIDI certainly opens up many new opportunities doesn't in John?  Lovely selection of minimal piano notes - little additions like that make all the difference.  I eagerly await to see if you've been seduced by VST instrument and if we can expect a new John here in the kitchen.   Perhaps you'll leave your acoustic instruments to burn in the oven as you embrace the new toys that you've found. 

Very atmospheric and minimal use of instruments to add to charm to the song message.

Well done! 

Paul