Caltrops - No Stairway to Heaven





	[quote name="Fullofkittens"][quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"][quote name="Fullofkittens"]Most hardware synths are going to do more than just play samples, though. Is there a particular sound you're hoping to make? [/quote] There are two goals, really. Thank you for asking. Right now I will encounter songs without vocals on the Internet, usually they are electronica, dubstep, chillstep, whatever. I fall in love with the song and try to contact the creator to see if I can license it in Cyberganked. This has become expensive if you take what I have paid and think of it as a lump sum. It's not THAT bad when spread out over 6 years and counting. I can recognize that some of it has very easy chord patterns. I can make songs like that, I believe. From a joyless, robotic sense, I can intellectually play chords, tweak the virtual instruments and make a three minute track of something that would be OK in the background of a game. If I can do that then the cost per minute of song goes to nothing. I don't think this process creates better songs than talented people who are doing it now, but sometimes it is OK to have background music. [/quote] This is the happy path use case for GarageBand. If all you want to do is make bespoke music that you don't have to pay for then GarageBand is the safe bet. You just click and drag some loops together: when it sounds acceptable, export to mp3. The loops are all royalty-free. This is how RedLetterMedia creates their background music. [quote]The hardware synthesizer piece to this is very interesting to me because it's a piece of technology to learn and experience. [/quote] This is a third goal. I enjoy this as a hobby myself but it requires a much deeper dive than goals one and two. [quote] The other thing I want to do is lay down a drum track, bass line and keyboard track for songs that exist in my head. A friend of mine in our college band moved to Colorado, so I can easily drive to his place and record his saxophone part on it. Another friend lives in Kansas and is all-in on this virtual music stuff. He plays guitar. Once all that is done, we convince our vocalist to sing on them and we have another record after a brief 20 year hiatus.[/quote] This is what I assumed you were going for when I recommended Reaper + NI Komplete. If you want to make CGI versions of real instruments then an outboard hardware box is not the way to go, what you want is sample-based instruments that you control from within the DAW; don't bother using cables or outboard boxes at all. (If somebody in your remote-office band already has a DAW then probably the smart way forward is to get the trial of what they're using and open a video chat where they explain how they're using it, since you will likely want to share project files.)[/quote]