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[Mr u Suk]

ya know stuff like Fruity Loops, but im looking for something free. Ive wanted to start my own band for a while now, but sadly the only musicians in my school are guitarists, and im a guitarist so i really cant create much of a band from that. ive seen that there are a good deal of musically involved people here so i was thinking you guys might help me out.

i would buy Fruitly Loops, but im dead broke because i just bought a new guitar.

so can you help me out please? (b'_')b

[Johnny C]

Shame you don't have a Mac. GarageBand is great and I can't think of any free equivalents.

Save up some money and buy yourself a drum machine or something. Or get a cheap Casio with a bunch of drum settings built into it.

[David_Dovey]

There are many *ahem* less than legitimate ways in which you can acquire these programs

Jus' sayin'

[Scytale]

I don't know what you're after exactly, I use Audacity for the digital recording stuff (guitars, Vocals etc) which is free even has some signal processing effects like delay and echo.

I have a USB device I plug into my keyboard (music keyboard not the computer sort ) to record the drums and keys. There is literally hundreds of free midi sequencers on the net, I use linux which cuts my choices down a bit, if you're using windows I'll reccomend Anvil Studio that will let you compose midi tracks like you were writing sheet music, you can even do the drums in it (click here for snare, crash cymbol etc...)

Now midi sounds shit on its own, unless you have a hell expensive sound card, with its own midi table. This is where sound fonts come into it, there are hundreds of these on the net for free, you can usually find a decent sounding patch on the net for stuff like drums and since I use a lot of choir sounds in the stuff I do, I have a couple of pretty decent choir patches as well. Anyway, soundfont patches are basically samples of real world instruments someones gone out and made. You can then use another free program called Timidity, which can wrap these soundfonts onto the midifile and output the file as a digital (.wav) file, which can then be loaded into audacity and mixed in with you're guitar and vocal tracks. Thats pretty much how I record stuff.

You could probably cut out the keyboard entirely (by manual inserting the notes manually into the midi files), but I prefer to have the physical instrument sitting in front of me as I find it a hell of a lot easier to compose on, also saves a lot of mouse clicking

[lb969]

Sibelus is a good Midi composing software. I used to use it for a videogame project I worked on.

Alas, A Hdd crash wiped the software and I forgot where I "aquired" it from....


Here is a quickie I did back when, when I was trying to learn the software.

Its loosely based on "Unforgiven" by metallica. I was going for a futuristic sound, but its all traditional midi instruments.

Its a 35 sec demo I did.
DJDK Demo

[fish across face]

There is a huge amount of free or very cheap audio software for Windows if you don't want to use cracks.

Do you want to record stuff you're not doing on the computer? (guitar etc.)
I second Audacity.  Free (or is it GPL? available at no cost, anyway) and does the job.

Do you want to write out melodies and such and have them played back on instruments and drum machines? 
You could try Buzz.  If you want a more traditional looking thing there are lots of MIDI sequencers, Scytale suggested one, a cheap (not free) one that I know a lot of people enjoy is Energy XT.

Do you want to manipulate sounds, either live or recorded earlier, and maybe do some crazy improvised shit?
You could try Audiomulch or Plogue Bidule.  Neither are free, but they're both cheap and phenomenally powerful and can do all kinds of crazy shit. My friend and I did a whole CD using only Audiomulch and it was awesome fun.  Trent Reznor bought a PC solely so he could use it.  Whatever you think of NIN (I think they're quite poo) the guy does love his production textures.

Do you find maths and/or coding (HTML or whatever) easy and want to assemble your own world of destruction from the ground up that can do anything you fucking want??!
PD (Pure Data).  It would not be good if you want quick results and "musicianly" stuff.  But if you want to set up a whole environment in which to either compose or perform, then this is a ... well, completely insane option.

Do you want to find your own way?
Go to KVR Audio and use their ridiculously comprehensive search engine to find something that suits your needs.


If you want to explain more about what you want to do or how you imagine making stuff, I'd be happy to make further recommendations.

[Scytale]

Audacity is GPL'd and is cross platform written in C++ with the Wx toolkit.

I've used it on both Windows and Linux. Friends of mine have run it in OS-X so should be no drama's if you have a Mac... There are also heaps of plug-ins and things for it.  I would definately reccomend it.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/

[Mr u Suk]

thanks all. im going to try out Audacity, it sounds like what i need

n_n

[Evil_Lathander]

Actaully, if you can get a decent drummer and a bassist, you're all sety, why not trey the twin-axe apraoch?

[Misereatur]

Audiomulch

I second Audiomulch, it's pretty awsome. It takes some time to figure it out but it's worth it. Perfect for Drone/Noise/Ambient and everything glitchy.
I havent used my copy in a long time though. I should get on that.