Help with software

[pharmakos]

Hello there.

I don't really post here or, well, anywhere really but I wondered if anybody could offer me a bit of advice please.

The band I'm in is in the process of having a fairly enormous change in style (or 'direction' if you want) but I'm having a bit of trouble. The idea is that I don't play the drums any more and we construct layers of beats to play over and I just get to do the clever stuff over the top. It's supposed to sound a bit amateur-ish and in no way like Red One or whoever, we quite like the sound when we feed fairly ramshackle beats through the P.A and they all collide together.

The only thing is that I really don't know where to start in terms of what software to use. I'd quite like a free trial or something to see if I can figure out what on earth I'm doing before buying anything.

Anybody attempted anything similar or have any sort of a grip on beats programs in general?

Cheers.

[BzaInSpace]

Hello and welcome...

Red One

Nice one. Don't see that mentioned here very often.

Some years back I used a free version of 'Fruityloops' to construct layered beats, attempting to emulate Primal Scream circa 2000 or The Prodigy...It was pretty basic to use but i would thing there are way better prograns out there now.

Have you tried doing a simple google search? There seems to be a vast amount of trial downloads or older programs out there for free...

http://beat-maker-software.blogspot.com ... -beat.html

[scratch]

I don´t exactly understand what you want to do.. also the choice of software depends on your hardware.

If I was to use the computer with a band I know I would probably use some midi sequencing software like sonar, nuendo or cubase and then play/program vst:s inside of those. For this you of course need a "pro" soundcard with asio.
You can probably find an ok used one for 50£ or so.

If you already have a low latency audio interface then I hear that ableton is good for doing loop-based things in a live situation.. but I don´t use it myself.

and fruityloops is not so basic anymore.. but it still has a little sequencer if you dont wanna use midi - probably a good one if you just want to make beats (but capable of using any vst plugins).

[TheWarmth]

We (The Warmth) use Nuendo instead of Pro Tools and frequently utilize Battery when we're making rhythm tracks:

http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/ ... battery-3/