Garage Band

I like using garage band.  One of the functions I like in it is the auto tune.  There are videos on you tube on how to make the T Pain type voice.

Protools

Pro tools came as the operating system with my Mbox2. Purchasing the Mbox family is a great way to get hands on experience with the protools system. I love working in protools. I had a few problems early on, with my Vista windows operating system, so I had to stop my Windows updates (and in some cases uninstall them). The Windows updates seemed to deactivate this software preventing my music software from working.

Protools is considered industry standard and is so good that some of the industry professionals almos feel its like cheating. This programme has a huge operation/ instruction manual around 600 odd pages (depending on which version you have aquired). This programe has some great plug in instruments and I will review these in due course. Some of these plug ins and their accessability change with free upgrades of the operating system.

MBox 2

It all started with this. I purchase one of these to record my original guitar songs. I started playing with some of the plug ins that came with this system and developed an interest in electroning music.

Some of the music I am writing can be found here;
http://rfm4y.com


and here;
                                                                 http://www.broadjam.com/pewana

I have only just started and will review some of the best tools I am finding along the way. Good luck readers.

About the make a hit blog

This blog is designed to document my journey into music creation. I feel these are new times and more and more musicians are making use of their own studios to produce music. This blog is fully independent. I am not receiving any financial incentives from any of the music software companies I am reviewing. There are no advertisements from any of the software producers.

Due to time limitations and the nature of this site this blog will not negatively review software. Rather it will concentrate on positive reviews of the software that I will continue to use. ' The good stuff'.

Please contact me on this blog should you want me to review your music software.

Band in a box

Band in the box is a great tool for learning. It is also a powerful tool when combined with other programs such as reason. For example you can use band in the box to compose midi files and transfer them to reason and re edit them, or just change the instruments using reason.

You have to know what chords to type into the program and they program does the rest. A great time saver for budding composers. If you compose on the guitar and know the name of the chords you are playing this is the tool for you. I rate it. I wrote a song and changed the genre making the song sound better than my original composition. It reached number one on the Broadjams rock grunge count down.

Reason

This is a very powerful tool. This is easy to use straight away especially functions like the Dr Rex player. The very realistic drum loops and sound mastering make this a must have tool. For the home garage user you can have great drum tracks at your fingertips. All facets and functions of this tool can be difficult to master. Like all good things, the more difficult it is to master the more creativity you have at your finger tips. Just when you think you have got this sytem sused you learn some other function to make things even better. I found this is good to use in conjunction with Band in a box. You transfer the Midi files in and change the insturments in reason. Reason has some of the best quality instruments that I have come across.
Reason is also a great protools plugin especially for flexable quick and effective drum track production. Great for singer song writers.
I love making use of the loop function. There are some great loops that can be used in this program. They call their loop files rex files. See also recycle later.
  I have recently upgraded this and I like what's happening. I am doing more and more in this program.