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anonymous 14 March 2005

I'm kind of new at this, so please forgive me - and let me know - if I'm not making sense.

I’m in the process of preparing a theater piece – piano, horns, strings, woodwinds, drums and vocals. I wanted to do it completely on the computer (maybe not the piano...) I already have a good system. I wanted to know what would be a good choice of program(s).

I need to have good sounding samples, and be able to record vocals (and maybe piano), mix and burn a CD. I’d appreciate it if it wasn’t horribly complicated, but I'm not afraid of having to tackle a learning curve. I have a passing acquaintance with Cakewalk and Pro Logic, but I’m not hopelessly devoted to anything in particular.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

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David French Tue, 03/15/2005 - 17:59

David French here.

There are several nice apps for the job such as Logic, Sonar, and my fave, Cubase/Nuendo to name a few. If you are into using a sheet music interface, I'd recommend Sonar since it is the most useable for staff note entry IMO. Your computer sounds fine prima facie. You will need some samples also. A nice place to start for an all-in-one solution would be Garritan personal orchestra.

anonymous Wed, 03/16/2005 - 09:50

Thanks for the response. The Garritan personal orchestra is new to me. I checked out the website and it does look like a good place to start (and at a great price). I’ve been able to watch a few people using Cubase, but I was only paying attention to the results, not how they got them. Time to take a closer look I guess.

What do you think about Kontakt and Gigastudio? I’ve heard Kontakt is good but Gigastudio is “difficult” on the tech side.

Thanks again for your help.

anonymous Fri, 03/18/2005 - 01:20

Kontakt is cool but loading samples can be a pain sometimes - GigaStudio is awesome but you need a whole new system for it cause it can be heavy and buggy sometimes....

A good solution for sounds is always Reason. Although the sample CDs that come with it can be cheesy and the drums are completely dated, you can use the many reverbs to thicken the instruments out & phatten things up a bit too.
But most importantly, if you have an akai sample CD collection, you can convert it to nn-xt sample patches and use them to rewire directly into your fav host app (cubase is definitely a #1 pic for ease of use, stability, and fun.. :lol: ) Out of all the samplers available, I still think that Reason is the quickest for getting sounds together, mixing them in and so on...

you also can load wav drums & instrument in 2 seconds and start using them - so if you have just 1 good string wav or horn, it will auto spread itself on the nn-xt sampler in 2 seconds and you're playing it streaming through Cubase (or your fav app), mixing it, and mixing it down w/ no frills...

its quite fun... :?

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