don't be silly! nothing is free...
but you can find plenty of things stolen
thats right gigastudio is a pretty serious program.
the person i know who runs it properly has a pc for it (he uses a mac to do everything else, and a pc just for gigastudio. i suppose it could handle more than gigastudio but he prefers to use the mac.)
in addition he has 2 200GB hard drives loaded with samples for gigastudio. that's a good setup.. he is proud to say he has only the best samples. its cool actually...he's got several different styles of jaco pastorius' bass in there. the library is like Jaco - fretless, jaco - funk, etc... as well as several other famous bass players.
what i would recommend to you, is that you compose all the music first, and then buy some time at a studio which has a good gigastudio setup, and have one of their producers do everything for you. you should get in contact with the studio before you start working to figure things out. if you can write all the parts on a sequencer and include every info...tempo, changes, dynamics, staccatos and other effects, and its possible for you to just save that as a midi file and load it in (it should be) that would be ideal. the alternative of printing out the score with all the dynamics and other info (eg. piano...mezzo forte, etc) and having the producer input all that into the computer, is going to take forever and waste all your money.
but i know for a fact that if you write the parts as midi in digital performer, and save those files on a cd and bring them over, all the engineer has to do, is open the sessions in performer, and open up gigastudio, create the connections from DP to giga (ie say channel one on DP sends midi to channel one on giga, and then specify which patch to use for channel one in gigastudio), and then simply play the file while recording audio.
the midi you brought in will trigger the piano in gigastudio to play whatever sounds.
all you have to do is find a studio, and then find a program which you can use to record/compose with midi. record each instrument on a different channel, and make sure to edit the velocity to represent how loud parts should be (127 is the loudest, 1 is the softest). this way you have to spend the least time at the studio, but you still get the awesome quality of gigastudio.
if you are good enough at composing, you could just SEND the midi files to a studio and they'll be able to do it all for you.
contact me at
the_accolade@hotmail.com to discuss this further - i seldom visit this forum.
digital performer is only for mac, but its a great program, and would do everything you need.
but most software, with a midi controller keyboard to make things more convenient, will make a good file. midi is good stuff... you can have a file which says what notes to play, when, when to turn the notes off, and how loud to play them. so if you have a midi file controlling gigastudio, you're all set! way better than playing all the parts yourself or having the engineer play them. that's very time consuming
i'm not 100 percent sure but at least one of the following software should be able to make the kind of midi file you need
sonar
reason
fruity loops
pro tools
cubase
where do you live?
