skewered logic

Very nice - Pro Tools is my personal first choice for DAW. I personally find Pro Tools to be more intuitive (coming strictly from a sound recording standpoint, rather than sequencing, filtering, gating, slicing, etc.) than FL Studio, but perhaps if all you want to do is use VST's and ReWire for your sounds, then FL Studio is probably the way to go. Another alternative would be Reaper (you can download an unlimited trial for free at http://www.reaper.fm), which is pretty easy to get acquainted with. You've got it right regarding interfacing between your piano and the computer. I think Clavinovas can function as MIDI controllers - I think that's what we used in the computer music studio at my school...? Not 100% sure. It is also my opinion that digital pianos generally don't sound too great; you can probably get better sound out of free/cheap VST instruments (the Clavinova is alright, but I still think you can do better). This won't make your piano itself sound better - just the sound that you record into the DAW. I don't really use VST sounds for vanilla piano - I record my mom's Steinway for that. Someone else will probably come around and give some advice with this though. As for other sounds, there are some really great guides on this forum about where you can get free/cheap VST's and soundfonts for whatever. The search function works quite nicely, and generally, you can find what you need in the Composition/Production forum here (http://ocremix.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=12) and its subsections (especially the Guides and Tutorials section...lol). Zircon has written some pretty comprehensive guides that should get you started. Just remember that not everything is in stickies, so you might have to look a little harder for what you want. Different VST's have different strengths. Synth1 is a lightweight (and still pretty powerful) VST that a friend of mine uses in our band (he can't carry around his main computer to all of our shows), and there are lots of other synthesizers, effects, etc. that come in the form of VST's. Some VST's also specialize in hosting samples of real instruments, for which you can download/buy special packages of samples (generally called soundfonts). They're pretty varied - so you're right on both counts when you ask whether they're focused or varied. It really depends on your scope - soundfont readers (samplers) focus on reading soundfonts (libraries), but you can get all sorts of cool soundfonts/libraries to vary things up. This is probably what you had in mind (regarding the one VST to rule them all). Similarly, synthesizers are focused on producing a sound based on some kind of wave, but the number of sounds you can get from a synthesizer is really only limited by your imagination and ability to use ADSR filter, LFO's to control stuff, HPF, LPF, and BPF, etc... If you read some of the guides around this forum you can learn a lot about this kind of stuff in a relatively short amount of time. Aside from actual sound generation/reproduction, there are also signal processing VST's. Examples are any guitar amp/effects modeler (not technically an instrument, since it takes input from an actual guitar), limiters, compressors, reverb, eq, stereo imaging... the list goes on and on. If you want my opinions, then I believe you'll never really find a good guitar sound without playing an actual guitar (although I'm starting to think otherwise, thanks to ISW's Shreddage at http://impactsoundworks.com/products/instrumental/shreddage - although this is really only good for heavily distorted guitar sounds). I don't have much experience with drum programming, but from what I hear in several remixes here, you can actually get a pretty decent sound with sequenced drums (from what I understand, NI's Battery has some pretty sweet drum sounds, and you can also visit ISW's website again and check out Groove Bias for some sweet vintage drum sounds). For sampled sounds I use NI's Kontakt, and for synthesizers I use Synth1, NI's Massive, and the Subtractor in Reason. For mastering, you'll want at LEAST a limiter and reverb, although most DAW's come with decent limiters and okay reverb now. My personal favorite for each of these is the Waves L1 (limiter) and the Waves IR-L (reverb). After you have the sounds, usually one would use a sequencer to put them together and save the sequence of notes/sounds. A good first sequencer is Reason, if you can get access to it, but if you're serious about this then I'd go with FL Studio for all of your sequencing/editing/mixing/mastering needs and just learn that. Regarding your last question, most VST's are usually compatible with pretty much anything. When you start really getting into music production and start switching DAW's and learning each one's idiosyncrasies, you'll get a better feel of whether or not a particular VST will work with a particular DAW. For example, although I love Pro Tools (and the studio/editing suites here on campus have lots of nifty Waves plugins that we use with it), for my personal stuff I usually use Adobe Audition (it's cheaper). Audition natively thinks of every track as stereo, even if it's a mono track. Can't use a mono limiter on a stereo track - only multi-mono or stereo limiter. Again, look around the forums here just a little bit more - most of your questions should be answered. The information you're looking for isn't just in the stickies, so you'll probably have to look a little harder.

AAHHHH IT'S HIROKI KIKUTA!!! Unfortunately, I probably can't do any recording until June

Howdy, name's Ryan, current hobbyist (and maybe future professional) in the noisemaking area. I went to MAGFest 8 last year and had a blast - unfortunately my friends from around here and I couldn't make it this year since the school semester had already started. I'm a stickler for guitar tone (although that doesn't necessarily mean I can play extremely well) - pretty much everything in my signal chain (from the guitar to the pedalboard to the amplifier) has been modified to fit my liking. It makes me sad when such skilled arrangers/performers have a crappy sound but I usually get over it. I usually prefer stick to jam/funk, but sometimes I stray to jazz, hard rock, and metal. I love analog effects, Phish, Persona, passive pickups, Beethoven's Pastoral symphony, Final Fantasy, and garden salsa sun chips. Me and my SM58 go way back. Nice to meet you all!