Making Music On Soundtrap
posted March 17, 2021, by Andrew Biedron
There is a lot of music making software out there. You’ve probably heard of some of the more common ones, such as GarageBand and Noteflight. Noteflight is a browser based application while GarageBand is one that you can download onto your computer. Every piece of software is different from the next though, and you should compare the product with your own needs before you choose one. For my band class this year, we are using a program called Soundtrap.
Despite being a browser based program, Soundtrap is pretty good for composing music. One of the features that I like about it is the realistic sounds that you can use. Most programs allow you to set an instrument to a staff in your score, but when you play your music back, it doesn’t sound at all like the actual instrument. Soundtrap, on the other hand, has very realistic sounds. They don’t have only the common instruments too, they have everything from a piccolo to an orchestral harp to steel drums. They also include a variety of sound effects to use too, like Horror SFX and Yodeling Alien (no joke).
Like every music composing program should, Soundtrap allows you to record yourself playing an instrument and then import it into your song. If you don’t want to do that though, it also allows you to use something called a piano roll. This allows you to place notes at whatever pitch and length you want, and then move and alter them in whatever way you want if it’s not right. You can also use a keyboard (both kinds will work, but a piano might make it easier) and then record yourself playing something like that. Soundtrap will take what you played, put it on the piano roll, and then you can change your notes around like if you had put them in with your mouse.
You can record yourself playing something using this keyboard here, either with your computer keyboard or a real piano keyboard that plugs into your computer.
Whatever you play will show up on your piano roll here, looking like this. Here, you can move and adjust your notes to your liking just by clicking and dragging.
There is a similar thing for making drum beats. You add different drums to your list, and then choose which beats you want each drum to play on to make yourself a rhythm. You can then repeat the beat for as many measures as you want by looping it in your tracks. It’s a very cool and easy system to use that can result in some pretty complex beats if you know what you’re doing.
Soundtrap also has some cool features that help to make your compositions sound much nicer and well produced. One is that you can snap your notes to the closest beat or other subdivision to make your rhythms sound cleaner. You can also change the time signature very easily, and there’s even a built in metronome that you can use if you’re recording yourself play to make sure that you keep the same tempo throughout.
One of the biggest downsides to Soundtrap is that in order to access some of the features, you have to pay. I was able to use the premium version through my school account, but unless you’re planning on doing quite extensive work on it, the only difference that really matters between free and paid is the number of sounds you can access. Another one of the issues is that it doesn’t allow you to see your music on a traditional score. When I write a composition, I want to be able to see what I’ve written in notes on a staff. However, the only way to see anything that resembles a score on Soundtrap is to look at your piano roll, which only exists in some scenarios and doesn’t really work like a score anyway.
After using Soundtrap and comparing it to other programs, I would say that the unpaid version of Soundtrap is about what you’d expect from a free browser based application. However, that’s not to say that it’s bad, it can be a very useful tool. If you want to use Soundtrap to write music in a traditional manner, you’ll probably struggle to effectively do that due to mainly its lack of a standard musical score. If you’re trying to do music production or something along those lines, though, Soundtrap could probably be surprisingly useful due to its intuitive piano roll, large variety of instruments and sounds (even without paying), and beat making feature that all allow you to be very creative with your music. So if you’re trying to compose an orchestral symphony, maybe find another program, but if you want to make a background track for a youtube video or something like that, Soundtrap is definitely worth checking out.