El NeWbee

[~nevets]

hey people ..im looking for advice on the equipment i will need as an aspiring music producer ..im not into mixing others music but i wanna make my own ..mainly trance/techno type stuff.i play the guitar and the bass and ive already invested in cubasis 4.0 for my pc back home ,and im looking into buying a roland v-synth. im just not sure if im gonna need more equipment so that my keyboard and instruments can work with my pc ..im new to all these terms like interface /sequencers.i also need to know if me investing in cubasis 4.0 was a good idea for the music i wanna make.i cant remember what type of soundcard i have because i havent seen my puter in 6 months ..but if i dont have a good soundcard ,what other hardware would i need to get going? thank you ppl
Godbless
El NeWbee

[~Dunkelwerk]

salute!

...to make it short and usefull:

1. buy a audiophile 2496 soundcard by m-audio/midiman. by it you can play vst synthesizers, record sounds, connect a midi keyboard and you also get a great soundquality.

2. buy some vst synths (fm7, albino, or the perfect halion vst sampler...there are a lot of interesting synths out there.)

if you have a good pc and this stuff you can start to produce the music you like.
you need a cubase vst version, i don´t know if cubase 4.0 offers this.

of course you can also use sample loops and mix up all the different ways of producing music.

hope this helps a little bit.

[~nevets]

thank you !Dunkelwerk i might just end up buying an audiophile 2496 soundcard...ive noticed a couple other people talk about it on one of the steinberg forums ..the one i purchased is the cubasis vst 4.0 ..i guess it does have vst capabilities ..and i will definately be looking for vst synths ..just hope my puter can keep up ...thanks once again and God bless
nevets

[~David Vesel]

I would concur. If you're just starting out and you have a budget to work with, that sound card is nice. Soft synths will get you in the door.

Once you build your skills, you might look into expanding into hardware synths. They never go obsolete. :)

[~nevets]

the only experience i have with synths is working on the bootleg version of propellerheads and the demo version of cubase sx ..ofcourse i couldnt get many of the features as it was a demo version ..but i also realised that life would be a lot easier with ...a real keyboard ..my budget is not that tight so i just wanted to try out a v-synth ...that would prolly give me some motivation to learn how to play keyboards...thanks a lot david ..i really appreciate the advice ...also .what is synthetic music ?
steven

[~skylla]

my advice would be to get a good all-round hardware-synth for starters and then use vst's for all the fancy sounds until you get a very good sence of what your sound is going to be like and get some experience. then you can expand with more sophisticated hardware synths that suits your specifik needs.

i don't make trance so i'm not sure what the best all-round synth would be in your case. we (my band) make synthpop and we use a roland jv-1080 (which you can get a hold of used pretty cheap) for all the basics. it doesn't do anything fancy, but it takes care of all the fill-in instruments and then we have a specifik synth for the bass sound we want (waldorf m-wave). for other sounds we use vst and samples for the drums.

[~dxtc]

The Roland V-Synth can indeed be used for trance and techno, as its analog modeling section is very similar to that found in Roland's JP8000 synth.

Come to think of it, the JP8000 might be the better deal, and you might find it cheaper than the V-Synth. The JP8000 introduced "THAT" SuperSaw sound-- you know, the one found on all the epic anthem-style stuff like Ferry Corsten and Ian Van Dahl. BT had something like six JP8000s in his studio at one time.

Of course, you'd have to use another source for drums and the like; the JP8000 is strictly analog-modeling. The V-Synth also has sampling capabilities, but still has no internal sequencer to speak of and can get limited in polyphony if your patches are complex.

[~nevets]

Hey People ,
thank you for all the advice on gear need for me to start ...i think im doing a pretty decent job learning about midi ,..what a sequencer is ..phasers,compressors.reverb units
i ended up buying reason ..a roland v-synth ..an M-audio soundcard and sp-5 studio monnitors .trying to figure out the v-synth was a real challenge ...still is .but its awesome .i figured out that i could control a lot of the parameters on Reason with the knobs, time trip pad and the dbeam ....my Question is what is the difference between between a patch and a wav ...and ..if anyone out there is working with reason ...what kinda files can reason recognise ...i wanna play the patches/wavs of my keyboard in reason ..thanks a lot ..cheers