So lately the urge to just create things has come over me. Writing, drawing, legos, and music. Listening to alot of soundtracks like Pirates of the Carribean, Modern Warfare 2 (Hey, that is a damn good soundtrack!), Diablo 1 and 2, Golden Sun, all of these things have got me really wanting to just make some music of my own. The problem is... well... where am I going to find a darn orchestra? I don't even know the name of the sounds, I usually just pluck strings or blow in certain ways and that's how I remember the sound.


So, onto the point. I am looking for a very, very good music making program. One that has all kinds of instruments (the kind you would find in a orchestra). Allows to me choose which sound the instrument plays for whatever second of the song I want it to play for. Setting up the pitch, and giving me a infinite amount of time (or sheet-space) to work with. User friendly would be a plus, but I understand that's hard to accomplish with something like this.

I have done alot of googling and youtube searching, but alot of the programs I see seem to be geared toward a more... hip-hop/techno crowd? The main thing im looking for is a wide variety of instruments and the ability to mix them up together, and so I ask my fellow Bethesda Zombies. Do any of you have any recommendations or know of such programs that would suit me?

Ableton, Reason, FLStudio, and a bunch of others I can't remember off the top of my head.

You'll need to find VSTi's that sound how you want by yourself, but thats' half the fun.

Edit: There really isn't much difference between a "techno DAW" and a "Classical DAW" other than the colour scheme and splash image.

Edit 2: Also be aware that getting a synthesized classical instrument to sound real, or even sort of real, will take a lot of tweaking.

I know http://www.crypton.co.jp/mp/pages/prod/vocaloid/cv03.jsp is not what you need, but I can't help.

start with fruity loops, it's great

It has a great price too. You can get the Fruity edition of FL Studio for like 99% iirc

No one has mentioned http://audacity.sourceforge.net/? It's an excellent program.

Audacity is great for editing music but you can't really use it to create music from scratch.

FL Studio + Audacity is a good budget combo for those who want to start making music.

That's what I get for not reading the OP. I'll be checking out some of these suggestions also, then. So you can actually create beats and stuff without needing to record anything?

Of course, that's what "electronic music" is...

OP: A bit of advice; you're going to have a massive learning curve if you don't know anything about writing music or musical theory already. If you start off trying to write an orchestral piece you'll be so overwhelmed that you'll loose the urge to carry on, so try to start with small things first

FL Studio is what I use and highly recommend.

I know a lot of professional composers who are working with orchestral samples and such use GigaStudio (I think it changed companies and might be called something different now) plus a sample library (East/West and Vienna Symphonic are the two big name ones). Mind you, a lot of this stuff is resource and cost (assuming you actually purchase them) intensive. I think in strictly professional circles FL Studio is kind of looked down upon as a sampler/sequencer, but it's what I'm personally familiar with, and from what I've heard, it's made a lot of positive strides in the last few versions.

I had a blast with Reason back when I used to work with it.

No credible professional would look down on FLStudio and discourage people from using it. All the DAWs have reached a point now where it really doesn't matter what you use for production. FL may not be a great choice specifically in a live recording studio environment, but neither is Reason and you don't see nearly as many people trying to discredit that program. You could use something else like ProTools for recording, then do the rest in FL or anything else you feel like. The most important thing is that you should be comfortable and familiar with the interface while working, and FL has quite an intuitive one at that.

Many years ago I had a program that would record music via MIDI cable and convert it to sheet music. I could also take the blank sheets and manually input the notes to my composition and have the system play it back. I'm sure there must be something similar around today, considering I ran that software from DOS on a 386 IBM.

Considering the musical knowledge needed to use such a program I'm not sure how helpful a modern equivalent would be to th OP, but if there is something like this out there it would be helpful to me.

Finale and Sibelius are the notation software programs I normally hear about the most. You can either manually input the notation or use whatever MIDI capable instrument to play into the program. It also plays back, and you can rig up the playback to sounds that are better than general MIDI soundbanks. You can also export the MIDI and import it into another program (such as FL studio) and replace the instrument sounds from there and get into a more serious mixing mode.