Music Making anxst!

[Rum]

I am pretty musical - creatively so. I play the guitar and also keyboards and I can pick up stuff quickly. I enjoy creating new music. In fact when I was at art college I was lucky enough to have access to some of the early synthesisers - the size of a room in those days and given the freedom we had there I spent weeks immersed with it . I have also messed around with keyboards/synths which you can get different sorts of sounds out of. I am however infuriatingly, annoyingly and frustratingly stuck with getting anywhere with using a so called 'DAW' (Digital Audio workstation).

All I want to be able to do is create my own sounds or use existing ones, play and build them up using a midi keyboard and lay down tracks - and play them back as a recording. I have a midi keyboard and I have a few trial or cut down DAWs avalble. I can get as far as a little light on the DAW flashing when I depress a key on the keyboards - so something is happening! But I can get no sound at all.

Clearly I am missing some fundamental step. I have even board a 'for Dummy's' book - but no luck!

I realise the odds of anyone here knowing about this stuff are remote - so I am just ranting really! Will probably cut and paste this to an electronic music forum at some point.

[Thinking Aloud]

I had a similar problem when I "went digital" a few years ago. Then I realised I had to actually load an instrument voice into my software.

The setup I have is Midi controller keyboard, running via an external audio interface box thing, and using Cubase on the Mac for midi and audio recording. Lots of VST instruments make up the sound library, and for making my own sounds I've got Absynth, which is fun.

[Rum]

I had a similar problem when I "went digital" a few years ago. Then I realised I had to actually load an instrument voice into my software.

The setup I have is Midi controller keyboard, running via an external audio interface box thing, and using Cubase on the Mac for midi and audio recording. Lots of VST instruments make up the sound library, and for making my own sounds I've got Absynth, which is fun.

Well I certainly have no 'voice' and what you are saying makes sense. There needs to be an 'instrument' for the keyboard to play. Perhaps we have light at the end of the tunnel here! Thanks!

[Thinking Aloud]

I had a similar problem when I "went digital" a few years ago. Then I realised I had to actually load an instrument voice into my software.

The setup I have is Midi controller keyboard, running via an external audio interface box thing, and using Cubase on the Mac for midi and audio recording. Lots of VST instruments make up the sound library, and for making my own sounds I've got Absynth, which is fun.

Well I certainly have no 'voice' and what you are saying makes sense. There needs to be an 'instrument' for the keyboard to play. Perhaps we have light at the end of the tunnel here! Thanks!

Some DAWs come with a small library of "standards" like piano, bass, drums, and suchlike.