Looking to get into Scoring for indie films etc. Need equipment advice...
 

Hello all. Well I've always been into playing music from guitar for the past 10 years to making beats a while back for a rap duo on my Boss DR-5 drum machine but the past several years, music has taken a back seat. I have some short films and have worked on others locally that just desperately need some music of some sort that is copyright free in order to get these films out to festivals or just to be worryfree about distribution etc. I'm looking mainly to work on non-vocal compositions with most of the scoring I see happening having a "darker" feel to them. So, I already have Sound Forge and Acid Audio but I need to figure out a great starter set of equipment such as a keyboard loaded with tweakeable sfx and sounds etc. to make my own. Do you scoring / music guys out there have any suggestions to get started? I want to stick to digital devices that can be integrated into my computer (p4 2.4 ghtz, 1 gig RDRAM, 370 gig HD, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz 5.1 sound card). Any vocals I'll be capturing on a AudioTechnica at897 mic through my DVX100a camcorder through firewire ports. Anyways, any suggestions would be awesome.....

hmm.. threare many ways to acheive what your considering.. and many ppl have gone down the SW route.

Aplications like Ableton Live, Reason, and Orion Pro Platinum are some of he best noicemakers out there.

Each utilise inbuilt samplers which run patches from almost any source, as well as synths so u can create ur own sounds

Orion has an awsome drum machine which could eaily pass as a TR909 and when tweaked can give u a bigger kick than a rhodes Polaris..

but all this stuff is no good if you dont know how to integrate the whole lot thru midi.

Yamaha have mLan which is basically firewire MIDI/AUDIO.. it literalyl uses the one cable for midi as well as audio output if ur pc is set up that way. You can get more info at yamahasynth.com

Persoanlly i use Hardware for performance, and SW for Patch creation and mastering.

My HW includes bits of Kit like Roland JP8000 Synth Keyboard, Yamaha RS7000 sampling workstation, yamaha a3k mkII rack sampler, as well as numerous other beat boxes, synths, samplers, mixers, outboard fx units etc etc
But since SW, i have sold off half my gear and only use what ive mentioned.

A combination of Both is a good flexible (and cheap) way to get started.

You definitely cant go wrong with Reason. I have been using hard samplers for years and once I tried Reason on my friends computer I plan on making the switch to all software. Id say it has the most bang for the buck even if you stick with the included sounds. Tons and tons of tweaking capabilities.