Just Gettin' Started, What software is good for starters Options

[rickenbacker]

Charlieb: you might like to try Storm 2.0 from Arturia. It's cheap (around £100) but pretty good if you want to create ambient, electronic music quickly. All you'd need is a Midi keyboard with USB connection.

As soon as you bring audio into the equation, well everything gets more complicated!

You'll need an audio interface, but there are a few USB solutions with Midi and audio so really it's down to how much you want to spend.

You can't record audio directly into Storm - you'd need a dedicated sequencer for that. The Logic Big Box might be worth looking at in that case: excellent value, plus excellent Midi and audio tools.

Addendum!
Oops. My mistake. Turns out you CAN record audio directly into Storm 2.0 (as long as you have a USB interface or something else, of course). So Storm 2.0 or Logic Big Box: it's all good. More control in Logic, maybe, plus some really cool extras in the Big Box, although Storm isn't too shabby either.

I wouldn't sweat the "Logic learning curve". It's only as complex as you want to make it. There's a lot of power under the hood, but you can always just get in and drive.

[charlieb]

Wow, this is all so complicated!
I spent a few days looking around, and my head is spinning.
There are sequencers, synths, midi interfaces, VST plug-ins, and a whole lot of other stuff!
I am going to simplify what I asked about last time.
EVENTUALLY I would like to create my own music and then add my voice doing hypnotic relaxation inductions.
But as everyone has told me, adding the audio makes things more complicated.
So, for now, I want a unit that is expandable for the future but for the time being I just want to create some fairly simple ambient type music. Will I wanting a midi interface to accomplish this?
I really am not 100% sure what they do.
Will I want to pieces of soft, one sequencer and one synth, or is a combo package OK?
So a new round of suggestions for software, please. Money is not THE major consideration, but I do not have money to burn either.

Thanks for any and all help.

charlie

[nyc_joe]

Hello and thanx for the advice. I've gleened a lot more just lurking. So, this recommendation of Reason and Live together with the Edirol UA-700 sounds good to me. With this set-up could I record a bass guitar and capture a midi sequence of someone "playing" the Reason drum machine at the sametime? What I mean is could I capture the sequence of triggers for the drum machine not record the audio? And, when I review the bass guitar track the drum machine would playback allowing me to then tweak the drum machine to add fills and such? I could then use the same approach with any other synth in Reason? TIA.

[charlieb]

Charlieb: you might like to try Storm 2.0 from Arturia. It's cheap (around £100) but pretty good if you want to create ambient, electronic music quickly. All you'd need is a Midi keyboard with USB connection.

Hi Rickenbacker,
What is the purpose of the midi keyboard with USB connection?
Sorry if this sounds like a totally dumb question, but I don't understand how this adds to the capability of whatever software package is selected.

Thanks,
cb

[rickenbacker]

Charlieb: with a USB Midi keyboard, you just plug it in to your Mac's USB port and it should be recognised automatically (in OS X, anyway). Then start playing. That's it.

This does away with the need for a Midi interface if all you want to do is have one keyboard controlling something like Reason or Storm. If you want more Midi channels (ie more than 16), you'll need two keyboards etc and thus a Midi interface. Or you could get two USB keyboards and a USB hub, although that might not work so well.

M-Audio's Oxygen 8 is a popular USB keybaord, plus there's a new M-Audio one called Radium and two from Edirol, the PCR-30 and 50, which all have 8 knobs and 8 sliders. These allow you to tweak your virtual studios knobs and faders using your Midi keyboard.

NYC-joe: as far as I can tell, yes. You could record the bass guitar to an audio track and the Reason drums to a Midi track. I've never actually recorded two signals at once this way, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. Though I have to say your friend had better be pretty tight with his finger drumming!

[rickenbacker]

Charlieb: with a USB Midi keyboard, you just plug it in to your Mac's USB port and it should be recognised automatically (in OS X, anyway). Then start playing. That's it.

This does away with the need for a Midi interface if all you want to do is have one keyboard controlling something like Reason or Storm. If you want more Midi channels (ie more than 16), you'll need two keyboards etc and thus a Midi interface. Or you could get two USB keyboards and a USB hub, although that might not work so well.

M-Audio's Oxygen 8 is a popular USB keybaord, plus there's a new M-Audio one called Radium and two from Edirol, the PCR-30 and 50, which all have 8 knobs and 8 sliders. These allow you to tweak your virtual studios knobs and faders using your Midi keyboard.

NYC-joe: as far as I can tell, yes. You could record the bass guitar to an audio track and the Reason drums to a Midi track. I've never actually recorded two signals at once this way, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. Though I have to say your friend had better be pretty tight with his finger drumming!

[charlieb]

M-Audio's Oxygen 8 is a popular USB keybaord, plus there's a new M-Audio one called Radium and two from Edirol, the PCR-30 and 50, which all have 8 knobs and 8 sliders. These allow you to tweak your virtual studios knobs and faders using your Midi keyboard.

Rickenbacker,
Thanks so much for your very useful reply.
No need to answer if I "got it".
If I understand correctly, the different controls on the MIDI device will correspond to different controls (knobs and sliders) showing up on the software screen, and thus one can be a lot more creative and fluid using a MIDI device, rather than just working with the mouse.
If this is it, great, I got it.
If not, please clarify.

Thanks for the product suggestions as well.

Arigato,
charlie

[rickenbacker]

Charlieb: exactly. That's why these new keyboards are so popular!

But now for some bad news...

Turns out you can't use ReWire in OS X. It's an Apple OS thing, so even though Cubase SX, Reason 2.0, Live 2.0, Storm 2.0 etc are all "ReWire 2.0 ready", they can't be connected yet because of an OS X issue that I understand (from talking to a Steinberg rep yesterday) only Apple can really deal with.

Whether that's the case or not, it means ReWire does not work in OS X, even though the software sepcifically written for it is ready. If you see what I mean.

Everything is fine in OS 9, so if you really want to use two programs simultaneously (ie Reason and Live), you'll have to ReWire 'em there. I use everything in OS X and I've been using them separately for the past few months, getting different sections ready in different applications - I just assumed ReWire would work when I came to need it. Found out yesterday that ain't the case!

So OS X STILL isn't fully music ready, even after 10.2. Aargh!

[charlieb]

But now for some bad news...

Turns out you can't use ReWire in OS X.

Rickenbacker,
Your statement about ReWire as quoted here, leads me to understand more about what I don't know!

When I looked up ReWire it said:
A typical application supplying audio via ReWire would be a software synthesizer or a multimedia authoring application with audio output. Examples of an application receiving audio would be a software audio mixer, processor or recorder.

SOOOOOO
1. I am a bit confused as to how and why I would need ReWire.
If I get a synth and a sequencer program is ReWire meant to enable these two different programs working successfully together?
2. Am I understanding the following properly yet primatively?–
Synth soft is used to generate different kinds of sounds and different patterns of sounds interacting.
While
Sequencing software is used to cut, paste, shake, bake, shape and craft an actual piece of music, but is not meant to be the software that generates a full range of possible "sounds".
It seems to me that a number of products claim to do both. Is this so?
For instance, I am guessing that this is what the Logic Big Box bundle is meant to do.

Thanks for your support and patience.

Regards,
charlie

[ryosode]

Turns out you can't use ReWire in OS X.

Hm... I don't claim to be an expert here, but this Steinberg rep must be lying to you, cuz I can have my Live and Reason (both OS X version) talk to each other via ReWire. I could record my Reason sequence to Live flawlessly via ReWire, without going through lame export and import. Do you know if that rep happened to be a marketing guy or a customer support? I never trust either of them...

On the contrary, it is true that Logic and Cubase are not yet ReWire compatible. I imagine it takes a long time for the code to be re-written in order for ReWire to work under OS X. But I think emagic people are working on it. As for Steinberg, I don't believe what they say anymore after realizing that they are still pushing for ASIO and VST even though Apple, as a way of showing their dedication to the music industry, has given us wonderful CoreAudio and Audio Units.

Sorry, I guess this was off topic, but couldn't help.