Thinking of a song is hard, making it is even harder. This is why I am going to start a series of entries documenting the software, hardware, as well as the techniques I use in making some of your favorite Bright Club songs. I'll also be giving you a glimpse on my thought process as well as give you guys a sneak peek on upcoming songs and projects.

READY??? Let's do this.

Let me give you a quick introduction on the backbone of my software arsenal in song making, the music production suite.

I will mainly be focusing on 3 items that I have used throughout the years and give you a biref review of each one in order to find out if any of these fits your needs. Who knows, maybe with the help of these tools, you might whip up something of quality and turn yourself into a Timberland of sorts.

FRUITY LOOPS/FL STUDIO
http://flstudio.image-line.com/

When I decided to write songs, I tried to find the most user friendly tool I could through music forums (on a side note, anybody interested in home studio recording have got to check out http://homerecording.com needed for good recording.) Anyway, I stumbled upod Fruity Loops or FL Studio and it made a very good impression. Upon installing it, the software loads up a premade song, showing you exactly what it's capable of.

FL Studio's interface is very easy to understand which makes this perfect for newbies and aspiring musicians trying to break into home/digital mixing. It is kind of limited though, the amount of tweaks you can do especially for the default effects as well as the plugins are kind of limited. And though it is compatible with almost all VST instruments (more on this on a future episode) it's support for midi arrangement isn't as versatile as I would have liked.

Overall, this is a good starter suite for those who want to get their feet wet. Personally, I used FL Studio to arrange specific intrument tracks from the VST intruments I've downloaded (BFD and HarcoreBass) and imported these tracks to my next recommendation...

ADOBE AUDITION
http://www.adobe.com/products/audition/

To be perfectly honest, being a web designer made me gravitate towards the Adobe brand. So considering my need for a better arranging tool, I chose Adobe Audition which was good and bad at the same time. The software had ALOT of options to tweak each track and each file of your songs. I even managed to do a little mastering with the help of some plugins namely Izotope's Ozone 4 and Spectron that even made my shitty recordings sound even better, more on this later.

Adobe Audition was also my go to software for live recording. Considering that my recording methods at the time was kind of crude (line-in and mic inputs ring a bell?) I didn't have any problems managing and editing the files on the spot need be. Everything was done inside Audition from recording to mastering of each particular sound byte, instrument track and song.

What's the downside? Audition is a bitch to navigate! Like any other Adobe product, this has a very steep learning curve and it is advisable that you read up on exactly what you want to do to get the most out of this tool. I didn't dabble much on Audition's more advanced features since I really didn't need it but it seems simple enough for fixing sound levels, adding effects or just basic cleanup on your recordings.

Overall it is a very very good package! What else would you expect from Adobe. My advice in handling Audition would probably be is to know exactly what you want to do and do some advance reading on how to go about doing it since Audition is not very newbie friendly.

CUBASE 4
http://www.steinberg.net/

When you are old enough to sit on the grown-up's table you would probably be graduating to Cubase. CUBASE IS MASSIVE! It can handle notations for songs, recordings, virtual intruments, mastering, monitoring, and more. I always was afraid of it since it is such an intimidating piece of software but after spending the last couple of months fiddling around with it, I could honestly say that this is THE software to use if you are serious about making songs.

What do I like about Cubase? What do I don't like?! My favorite thing would probably be the seamless integration between the different modules into a single timeline. Yes, now I can mix my virtual drums and bass with my live recordings for vocals and lead guitar in ONE TIMELINE! It also can manage effects on the spot making it easier for me to tweak the sounds abit or add a bit of ooomph with guitar rig.

It also manages midi inputs very well and is able to create custom layouts if need be. I have a custom drum map when I am making beats with BFD2 and could easily switch back to a keyboard layout when I go back to Kontakt for guitars. It's very very convenient and it makes the need to open other software to manage the other needs the song may require obsolete.

So you might have already guessed what's wrong with Cubase. It has the biggest learning curve I have ever faced in music production software! There are so many things that are independent of each other that it is so easy to get lost in something you weren't interested in the first place. It's so confusing that I had to watch DVD tutorials on how to watch it properly and if I haven't said this before, I'm saying it now, I HATE READING/WATCHING MANUALS!

I am also having some problems with compatibility with ASIO4ALL an sound driver I use so that I could use my Alesis Multimix Firewire mixer as inputs and let the audio go to my wireless headphones. Not really sure if it's a compatibility issue with Windows Vista 64 and the lack of driver support for my mixer but it is so frustrating to have to restart my machine just to get all of my devices to play nice. Of course, this might not a problem to anyone who is not using a setup that is as complicated as mine.

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Overall the progression in the list is pretty straight forward. When you are starting out Fruity Loops or FL Studio is a good playground to get a feel of music production. At this time I would suggest playing around with VSTs and plugins which is a big help especially to those who doesn't own expensive recording hardware or those who don't play instruments as well as they hoped.

Adobe Audition and Cubase are both very good followups for those who want to take their craft to the next level. I would suggest reading up on what you plan on doing, what options you have as well as your needs for each software in order to decide which one is best for you.

Will be doing video very very soon so watch out for brief run-throughs of the software I mentioned above as well as some other ones I use around the studio that you might also find useful.