Help Dad Get Daughter Started!, A complicated (for me) Christmas gift Options

[chanzilla]

For Christmas, I want to give my teen daughter a "portable music studio." I'm not rich, but she has shown great promise in the studio, so I want to encourage her even more with the perfect gift.

Here is where I am. I am donating my Pismo 500 with Jaguar. I will upgrade to Panther if highly recommended. Um, that's as far as I got so far .

Here's what I'm aiming for. If she gets a tune forming in her head, I'd like for her to open up the Pismo, launch an app, and start fingering the notes together with an instrument of her choice. She can record the simple tune, and play it back for review, change the instrument on the melody if she wants to. She can create another track for drums, etc. Once she has her draft version, she can save the file or burn it to CD (there's a modular burner I picked up on eBay) to share. Is this possible? Can it be that simple, or is there a learning curve?

She does have a nice Yamaha keyboard I gave her last Christmas, which she enjoys and has shown enthusiastic talent for. It has a MIDI port, and I know I'm going to have to dish out for a USB-MIDI interface -- any recommendations? While she already has a music keyboard, I want her to be able to create on the road with just the laptop, if possible.

Also, if she wants to add vocals or a non-digital instrument (my acoustic guitar, for example), is it hard to do? Can she just plug into the mic jack?

What is a good program for recording music tracks? For a beginner with room to grow? Does it take more than one program to do what I described above? Where can I go to learn more about how all this stuff works?

By the way, if you haven't figured it out, I know NOTHING about music production. I am a mac addict, but that's about it. I need to learn just enough to help her get started. I appreciate any help, advice, suggestions, links, references, whatever you can provide to a fish out of water.

[chanzilla]

Thanks, Anadyne. My Pismo has 640MB, which may get upgraded to a full gig.

Unfortunately, I just found out that my G4 Workstation may not be coming through, so my daughter may be stuck with her Rev B iMac through the holidays. I still intend to hook her up, but I may have to wait a little longer .

In the meantime, I will be setting things up and testing them out. I've been playing with some freebie software I found here, and it has been a learning experience. I am playing with SimpleSynth and MIDI keys to better understand what's going on. First off, using the computer keyboard for input isn't the novel idea I had imagined. But I see now what a virtual instrument is, and MIDI channels. And, even though this is for my daughter, I myself am beginning to see why she enjoys this stuff so much.

Thank you so much for the personal testimony about the Pismo. RAM/ CPU useage are things I didn't really think about, and didn't realize that different applications/technologies would have different impacts on the computer. I use my Pismo for web developing and graphic work, using Photoship 7, a slew of plug-ins, Carrera, Poser, and VirtualPC (to run Frontpage2000 - I do ASP development, and Access 2000), Flash, and more, often simultaneously. Under OSX, it's not only feasable, but rather pleasant - OS8/9 couldn't really handle such demands, and crashes were horrific.

I've heard mixed reviews about Reason. My neighbor complained that you have to run 3 CD's to use the application properly. And keeping the disk images on the hard-drive takes up space.

I'll start checking out your recommendations today. What's Rewire?

I don't want to invest too much initially. I want to put something together to get her started. If she takes to it, and shows me she can use it, then I'll kick down some more bread. The more she gets into it, the more I'll spend. That way, if she turns out to not really want to do digital production, I'm not at a complete loss. I'm thankful for all your input to help me make the best decisions possible, and for not making me sound like an idiot when I present all of this to her.