A Guide to Creating Digital / Electronic Music on Your Home PC

Tuareg is a great software package that can be purchased for $20 from www.brambos.com. The software is powerful and simple at the same. It uses short wav files and manipulates them to create the notes and phrases you want. It comes In two versions, freeware and full mode.

Tuareg comes with a small mix of sample files you can use built in to the program but I suggest downloading new ones as well. I have been collecting them for years, a little at a time.

But to get started we can use the ones they have supplied. Once you open the program you’ll see the layout may be a bit daunting at first. But let me guide you through it.

Synth Units

The first page that comes up is the Synth Units Page. This lets you choose your music creation method. You will most likely be using them all at different times. The ones you’ll see are Rage2 Amber Bliss Halo and Wav. If you are on the free version you’ll only see Rage2, Amber, and wav.

Rage 2 - Is the drum track creation tool.
Bliss - Is your main virtual sampler. It can create full melodies from 1 - 12 measures long with up to 4 voice polyphony
Amber - Is an Animated Modeling Synthesizer which gives you an unlimited number of possibilities to chose from. It is mostly to be used as the repeating background parts such as percolator sounds, etc.
Halo is a Programmable Frequency Modulating Synthesizer and is similar to Amber in its use.
And Wav is just where you can import already finished wav loops you have created.

A good place to start is the Bliss. Once you open the Bliss, you’ll see 4 spots for instruments on the left, a piano keyboard and an open grid. Click on the open spots for instruments and it should give you a list of the available instruments that came with the program. Choose an instrument by clicking and scrolling down and clicking on the one you want to use. Once you’ve chosen it go to the grid and click in the grid spaces. The grid is designed to show the pitch and length of each note you choose. Let’s start on C. If you aren’t familiar with a piano layout, C is the white key before the 2 black keys.