What plug in am I looking for?

[microchip]

I am using Cakewalk. Let's say that instead of performing music and recording it, I am directly writing it using the staff view for MIDI instruments.

One this song gets done, I want to be able to assign many, many different instruments to the parts and not just the General MIDI that the computer comes with. I don't need to record samples, I just need software that enables me to take a MIDI part I have written and have a choice of MANY different instruments to assign to that part and be able to manipulate the sound of that instrument any way I want.

So, do I need a software sampler? Or is there some kind of item I am overlooking?

And when I see a disc that advertises as having sounds on it that I can use, are these discs designed to be entered into a sampler, or are they more like plug ins?

Micro

 

[Eurythmic]

You've got lots of options, depending on the hardware you have now, and whether or not you want to upgrade.

This is a really good page, illustrating the differences between various MIDI hardware and software...

http://www.queststudios.com/quest/compare2001.html

Tom, the owner of the website, is very pro-Roland - but with good reason. I've got an MT-32, and I love it. It has an amazing reverb that I wish I could duplicate - light-years ahead of the hardware reverb on my Sound Blaster Audigy, and it's a 15 year-old synth. Not bad. Problem is, you have to be a rocket scientist to get the most out of an MT-32, because the sounds are tough to edit.

That's why I also have an Audigy. The SoundFont format is the easiest way that I know of to turn your MIDI into whatever sounds you want. And the card costs about $50. Not to pimp myself or anything, but at my mp3.com page ( http://www.mp3.com/P_o_T ), you can hear examples. Every song I do has SoundFonts in it somewhere. If you use good samples, and sequence carefully, you can get really great sounds. After a while, you'll get people who will mistake your sounds for real instruments.

Or you can get a hardware sampler, but I don't know anything about those, so I'm not the person to ask.

If you don't want to upgrade, you can go with a software synthesizer. Yamaha makes one, and I think that Roland does too. That's also something I don't really know a lot about (I've never really looked into software synthesis, because it bogs down your CPU a bit), but it's an option.

Did that answer your question at all?

 

[microchip]

Yes,

The info and the comments you made DID help me in finding out almost all of what I was looking for.

Thanks again!