John McClane

gotcha. sure. can't say i know much as I don't use quantize much but i'm sure i could screw around with a few beats to come up with something.

as to the VSTs, there should be a panel on the right with a few tabs on the top. one of those tabs is Instruments. click, expand out whatever, find the instrument, then literally drag and drop to the timeline. works a bit different for some third-party VSTs that use like Kontakt or whatever. ya. that's pretty straight forward so that would be cool. Not sure if you have Mai Tai with the Artist version, but that's a really fun synth than you can customize forever. in that case, click the Instruments (top right of panel), expand the Presonus Instruments folder (whatever it's called), then drag Mai Tai to the timeline workspace and boom. instrument added and the interface SHOULD popup for you to click a round. if you have midi keyboard connected and working, you can use that to play whatever sound you select.

new world for me, sharing, but if you're game for me sounding like an idiot stumbling around trying to figure something, I'm game in sounding like an idiot for a bit lol

heh, yeah. I understand that. It's funny how one interface can be so intuitive to one person and confounding to another. For me, Studio One just felt right. Everything was in reach and I never felt I had to click around to find something. It was just where I "felt" it should be and boom. There it was. But yeah, I know a few people that really do NOT like the layout. I'm glad garage band exists. Would be cool for something similar on PC, that is just part of the OS.

I ASSUME you spend time in a midi screen? clicking dots for beats on different instruments? Or are you recording stuff in real time? I've never really messed with midi till the last few months. Back in 2004 I was playing a lot with software drum machines. Like ticking marks to trigger a snare on a beat or whatever. That was slow going, but fun. I tried that with a midi drum kit recently. Was fun, sounded cool, but OMG it took forever lol.

I've used Presonus Studio One Pro since v3. I currently have 4, though 5 released a few weeks ago. They have sales often like 40-50% off too, so that helped. I think I started with it a few years ago because I was getting back into music and didn't know what was available. I liked the interface design, it was on sale, and had a song-writer "thumbnail" tool to quickly sketch out and block sections of a song. I figured that would be good. Honestly never used it lol. Too, I was reading a lot about their hardware and thought that would be a good ecosystem to invest---all branded and from the same developer.

I'm on PC and have heard issues with Mac users though. So if you're looking, be sure to check into that.

Back in like 2004 I was using Cubase a lot, but I couldn't recognize the interface when I decided to get back into things recently.

I don't trust it. I do agree that I don't think they are gone for good, but that stock doesn't have enough going for it for me to jump in at this point. I am still long in blue chips, and for mid/high risk, I am in on some oil/energy. I also have a position open on a biotech that just received FDA approval on a drug. Will probably close on that on a swing trade at the end of next week. Happy trading!