All music is made up of individual sounds which are mixed together in different ways to create the finished piece. This is true of an orchestra with it's many instruments combining to produce the music and it is also true in computer music production where sounds, samples and loops are combined by the sequencer to be recorded and played back.

One of the important features of computer music production is that the sounds do not have to be combined live by musicians all playing at the same time, but the finished piece is developed slowly and painstakingly over time with layers of music being created and many different combinations and possibilities are tried before the work is finished. In fact it is a problem for many inexperienced computer music producers to know when a piece is "finished" and to record it and move on.

Allthough the pages in this course are written to be read in sequence, in practice during the process of music creation the techniques discussed in the early units will need to be used over and again throughout the process. In this first section Sounds, Loops, Samples we will explore the world of sound creation and how to prepare a set of sounds, samples and loops for use in our musical piece.

For this section the only software required is a sound editing program. Popular titles include Sound Forge and Wavelab. Many modern sequencers have sound editing capability too. To illustrate the examples we have used Audacity which is an open-source and free sound editor. Audacity is available here