Yoozer

How the hell do you people come up with budgets like that. Save up, you'll see your options expand like crazy. Also, $120 is probably not going to get you an RD-100, unless someone really needs a little cash really really fast. Thing is, most of the other options will suck, too. If you've been playing a real piano, anything with less than 61 keys is going to feel cramped. Does it have to make sound by itself? This does.

You don't have to own Omni to know that this is apples vs. oranges. Did you mean psychoacoustic? You can pretty much bet your piggy bank on it that the people who are the first in line to buy this are going to use it, with a minimum of tweaking, on movie trailers, commercials and other assorted stuff. See zircon's points, nr. 3 and 6, nothing's stopping you from doing that. No. Expensive is plonking down $3000 (old-fashioned greenbacks) for an S3000 sampler, or $14000 for a Jupiter 8 (when they were new). Making music has never been cheaper. Spread the money you spend on such a thing over 2 years or so - the time that, at least, you're going to use it. Now find out what it costs you per project (not per day). If you manage to use it at least once per project and you make 2 tracks per month, that's 480 / 48 = 10 bucks at a time. To have the full choice of what you are going to use it for plus saving your programming time, that's cheap. It gets even cheaper if you're more productive than that .

Set the "range" to 0 instead of 2 (NN19) or 7 (Malstrom).

I really want to know why people mess with the text sizes in their posts intead of just increasing the fontsize in their browser (try ctrl+numpad-plus or hold ctrl and scroll up). In other words, please don't do this. Since you didn't mention a budget, I'm going to take the candy store approach: http://www.pspaudioware.com/ http://www.mcdsp.com/ http://www.sonnoxplugins.com/pub/plugins/home.htm http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?id=guitarrig3se < I've got this one but don't have a guitar http://www.rndigital.org/inspectorXL.html

Controller keyboards like http://www.zzounds.com/item--MDOAXIOM49 don't make any sound by themselves - they're merely remotes. Controller keyboards like http://www.zzounds.com/item--MDOPRO88STAGE do make sound by themselves. A good rule of thumb is that they don't, unless specifically specified otherwise. This is why the name "controller" is used - any keyboard with its own sound source and MIDI can be called "MIDI keyboard". "Controller" implies no sounds, sliders/knobs/pads, and USB (besides the regular MIDI). As for FL and the manual: if the manual does not contain an actual tutorial, it's of course not of much use. You are still unfamiliar with terminology, and when something like "LFO 3 in the modulation matrix controls oscillator 1's pitch and pulsewidth at the same time" appears your eyes glaze over. Do keep in mind that the terminology has a good reason - like the aforementioned controller/MIDI keyboard - it saves you from typing out a 3-paragraph description. Even when someone bothers to write it out like this, there's still terminology in there that is unexplained because whoever writes this may skip the fact that you're coming from absolute rock bottom.

1) the last version is 8 2) it comes with a manual.

Don't ask to ask, don't say "HELP!" don't ask "Question..." - state your question clearly and in a concise way in the title of your topic. If you need help picking a digital piano for around $1000, ask "Which digital piano for around $1000" instead of "I'm wondering...". The former's good and gives you good answers, the latter is useless. Big load of bonus points if you've already visited a few music stores and looked at certain models, because this tells us you're not afraid to find information yourself. The first list of questions for anyone posting topics like "complete beginner" is: - show us what you already have (e.g. nothing at all, a computer, basic keyboard) - tell us what you already know (you know nothing, you play a little guitar, you DJ, etc.) - tell us what you're willing to spend (edit: AS A NUMBER of UKP, USD or EUR. NOBODY KNOWS WHAT YOU MEAN WITH "CHEAP" OR "NOT TOO EXPENSIVE".) - tell us which direction you want to go (e.g. playing live, sounding like artist x, how to expand studio) The first pieces of advice for complete beginners are: - MIDI is not audio, like sheet music is not a CD - one tells you what to play, but not how it sounds; the other tells you how it sounds, but not how to play it. - gear does not give a rat's ass about genre. There is no trance synth, no hiphop drum machine. The fact that certain pieces are iconic or often-used still doesn't mean much, actually. - using the same gear as your favorite artist won't give you the same results - it's going to take work. You won't find presets that exactly mimic that sound at 1.45 in an obscure b-side of some indie electronic artist only 6 people including their grandparents know about, so this means you have to make the sound yourself. - don't buy everything at once; build it up slowly so you get to know your equipment - get to know your equipment intimately; if you want to produce music at home, you have to turn into a jack of all trades. This takes dedication and study. The more you can squeeze out of your gear, the less you need to spend. - download trial/demo versions of all sequencers on the market and see if you can make a song in a week. If it feels like the software is hindering you, switch. - the software route has a high initial investment of a computer, soundcard, sequencing software, etc., but expansion is cheap - you can download several free softsynths and effects. - the best route is what works for you personally - your rig should act as an extension of your brain. You should not have to think about mundane tasks.

Also, typing keyboards are supposed to be expendable unless you're one of those ergonomy weenies like me. You'll end up with a music keyboard full of unsanitary gunk thanks to typing on it for a year or so.

You've tried to deinstall it?

If you want your fingers to thank you, don't get mini-keys if you're older than 7.

Read The Fine Manual.

Actually, that's your GC being gigantic faggots and not installing it correctly. You don't have to pay out of your ass for Cubase either and it'd be good if people would purge this meme. It's not like 90% of the people here need all the features of the big version 4 - the Studio version is more than enough in almost all cases, and even the LE version is pretty good. As for the dongle; it's a blind spot for many companies, but seeing that 4 managed to survive 1 year of the hacker community working frantically to crack it, it was worth the loss in sales of annoyed users for them (and since Cubase has been using a dongle since the Atari days, they were used to it).

Okay, just asking. So why is that one not usable? (again, anything new that has to be cheap also has to be better than what you have now).

Actually, there's an ASIO soundcard built in in the Ozone and there are Vista 32 beta drivers on the M-Audio website. I don't know if this comes as a surprise?

Your post lacks all the vital information 1) nobody knows what you mean with cheap or not expensive, so specify a budget in actual numbers 2) tell us what you want to use it for. You want to record vocals, guitar, keyboards, you just need it for low latency and softsynths - we can't guess what!

The idea of using eBay or the classifieds is that when you buy it and your family's right, you can sell it for the same amount.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001160.html Yes and no. Yes, it helps if you can hear melody, it helps even more if you have a large set of licks/grooves/ideas to use as a basis. Being able to play (piano, any other instrument) and knowing music theory helps because you're not spending time to guess for the right notes.

Yes, those things exist. They're called diode clippers. http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_3/chpt_3/6.html D16 Devastor seems to have something like that.

They're not expensive (well, USB MIDI controllers, that is) - especially not secondhand, and they make your life a lot easier, if only for the fact that you can't play chords on a software keyboard controller with your mouse. edit: good lord, you confuse some major terminology here. Start reading.

Use an equalizer to bring out the attack part more. Dip at 400 hz, boost at 4khz, throw a brick wall compressor over it. Some reverb with the lower frequencies removed (before the compression) adds some nice ambience, too. edit: I typed this before the reply above here was made, I just hit reply later .

If you would've said "FL Studio and Kontakt 3", I could've understood, but you're comparing apples and rhinos. Both have a demo. Try these first. In short: FL Studio is a complete environment where you can compose songs. Kontakt is not a library, but a software sampler. The fact that it comes with a bunch of DVDs stuffed to the brim does not mean anything. It won't record what you make, it won't do things with audio tracks. If you want to play burps or farts or dog barking like on toy keyboards, you first have to record this sound, then save it as a .wav file (using a program such as Audacity), and after that you can load it into Kontakt. That's it. Keyboards do not care what kind of computer you have, as long as (in the case of those with USB) there are drivers (for either Windows or OS X). Keyboards which only have MIDI on the back do not know anything about your computer at all - there's no drivers to install them, and whatever you're going to use will have no idea what you just hooked up to it. MIDI is not audio. MIDI is to audio as sheet music is to a CD - MIDI will tell you what to play, but does not dictate what it should sound like. A CD tells you what it sounds like, but not how you should play it. Keyboards like these here: http://www.zzounds.com/item--MDOAXIOM61 do not have any sounds built in. They connect using USB. All this does is that it tells your computer that you've played a certain note - it's up to the software on the computer (for instance, FL Studio or the shell around Kontakt 3 when it's run in standalone mode) to do anything with this. Keyboards like these here: http://www.zzounds.com/item--YAMPSRE213 do have sounds built in; they don't have USB, so you need something extra like this: http://www.zzounds.com/item--EMUXMIDI1X1 that connects them to the computer. This little box here is already built inside the Axiom. The sounds of that Yamaha PSR by the way can not be "uploaded" to your computer - neither can you "download" sounds from your computer in there. In fact, it's safe to forget terms like that for pretty much any synthesizer. For everything? Have you read all the FAQs and sticky threads? If not, do so first. Get the demo versions of FL Studio and Kontakt 3 and you'll find out really fast what the difference is between them.

Whoops, selected the wrong part to render. It's fixed, the mp3 now actually makes sound.

http://www.theheartcore.com/music/nkotb_strings.mp3 < this is how the Proteus sounds - I think it gets pretty close, taking into account you don't have to do anything for it .

Ah, it said "not available" so I didn't bother to click any further. Anyway. This is a Mellotron string patch but it's pitched up - there are however some double strings (2 playing, one octave higher) presets for it if I'm not mistaken. Required software : G-Media M-Tron, or one of the presets in the free Proteus VX (preset 003:077 MeltroniKnbD - play the C4 and C5 notes). The sound stops suddenly because a Mellotron is an analog sampler - it plays back 8-second tapes, and when you release the key, it has to rewind so you can play again.

Video's no longer available (and you didn't mention the artist and song anywhere).