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[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.

[rickenbacker]

Seems like a good plan. Start slowly, gauge the interest and step up the equipment spec as the skill and passion develop.

There are some cool free or shareware software solutions on this site, plus others available on the web. The Computer Music series would be good if you can get hold of a copy of the mag and there's also Pro Tools Free.

You can get this from the Digidesign site, I think. It should run on your daughter's iMac in OS 9 without too much trouble - if the iMac has some sort of audio in (does it? I don't remember), she can record basic audio tracks using this sequencer. I think it handles 8 tracks of audio. Don't know about Midi.

There's also a new sequencer called Tracktion, which looks like it might be interesting. A demo of the final beta version is available from their web site (Google will deliver the URL).

Saying all that, keeping things strictly Midi for now will be a lot less strain on the ol' iMac's CPU. Midi has a tiny data footprint, so you can run dozens of Midi tracks very efficiently.

Finally, ReWire is a streaming protocol that Propellerheads (the developers of Reason) created to allow people who owned Reason to "plug it in" to, say, Logic or Cubase. It means you can have both apps open and run the outputs from Reason into your mixer in Logic. So you've got some great drums going in Reason, set up ReWire in your Logic song, there's your drums in the Logic mixer and you can then record your guitar, vocals, harp solo etc alongside the drums. It's a neat solution.

But you're right about the Reason 3-CD set. It sounds great, but it's 1Gb or more of data on your hard drive. Unless you buy a separate FireWire drive for all your sample CDs and audio tracks...