Intro to Signal Flow

Script

Welcome to our quick guide to signal flow. In this video, we’ll delve into the way that the gear in your home studio works together to record and reproduce sound. Let’s dive in!

Sound starts with a simple action. Here, a hit on a drum creates vibrations in the air that spread out as sound waves, which are heard by everyone nearby. This real world sound is referred to as acoustic. But we don’t want our sound to just stay in the room. We want our sound to be heard far and wide. To do this, we need to get it into our computer.

Here's a microphone, a simple yet effective device, ready to help our sound waves on their journey from acoustic domain to our computer. As sound waves hit the microphone, it converts them into electric signals.

As electrical signals, our sound will quickly travel through an XLR cable to reach our audio interface and computer. Here, our Audio interface acts like a translator and converts our sound signals from electricity into a format that computers can understand, enabling us to edit, process, or manipulate the audio in various ways. This digital domain is where creativity meets technology, expanding what's possible with sound with the computers' boundless capabilities, as we will discuss in our Intro to DAWs video.

When it's time, with just a press of a button, the recording your computer has captured will travel back through your interface and into your speakers or headphones.Your speakers or headphones will take these electric signals and change them back into sound waves, ready to be heard once more.

From a simple real-world sound, through cables and devices, to the sound in our ears, the journey from the acoustic to the digital domain and back is fascinating. And this, dear viewers, is just the start. Stay tuned for the next segment where we will learn more about DAWs. Thanks for watching and happy composing!