Home music studio equipment?

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I thought I'd ask on here as I'm not making any progress searching about this online . Basically I've always been a pen and paper composer. I did use the Sibelius software at uni, but that was more for the sake of producing neat scores. Anyway, I'm wanting to get back into writing some music, but this time I'd like to try having a little home studio. I'd like to have some reasonable quality sound files I can start to make a portfolio of. I always enjoyed doing the film music projects at uni where we'd be given a segment of a film with the music blanked out and have to write some music for it. So any software or technology where I can play with sound and images would be interesting (if it exists). It's writing original music rather than remixing existing pop songs that I'm interested in (don't know whether that affects the type of software/hardware I'd be looking at). Preferably something I can program using a mouse, I don't know why but oddly I enjoyed clicking notes into Sibelius rather than using a keyboard.

Just looking for any pointers as to where to start as I'm a complete noob to anything techy. Any useful websites or books which might offer tutorials or info on software/hardware to look at. I realise this is probably a pretty vague post, so if you need more info on what I'm looking to do, I'll try to explain better

I may well be the least qualified person to respond to your question, but why should I let my own incompetence stop me? And if you don't have an iPad, most of this will be pretty useless.

I have Symphony Pro on the iPad for writing stuff down. Because I don't know what I'm doing, I haven't used it very much, but it seems like a pretty full featured composition app. Obviously there is no mouse interaction, but you can enter notes by taping with your fingers.

I also use a number of iPad synth apps such as NLog Pro and Korg's iMS-20 app. Both can be driven by an external MIDI keyboard. NLog Pro can record both MIDI sequences and wave files. I can't remember if iMS-20 can.

Anyway, I run the audio output into a notebook computer running Soundtrack Pro to record and mix the layers of audio. The results are technically adequate for my purposes, although from a artistic standard, they are pretty much only good for scaring away the local possums.

Don't forget (good rated) studio monitors or your mixdown will sound like beyond crap.

Contact a local professional sound engineer who sells gear & software, he might help you better than anyone on here.

Hey Fiona. I have a home studio. It's PC based. My sequencing software is Cubase 5.1. For notation I use Cubase 5.1 and Finale. I used to have Sibelius but it's not as "audio" friendly as Finale; that is, you have to jump through several hoops with Sibelius, even their latest incarnation, to set sounds. With Finale this was streamlined from the beginning. Since you want to write audio for video, you'd need a fairly powerful system to push all that information down the pipeline. My computer has a quadcore CPU (i7) with a SSD so it holds up to abuse pretty well. My audio driver is ASIO4all. It works pretty well - when it works. My midi keyboard is a Korg SV-1 88 and my monitors are Alesis m1Active 520USB.

Thanks for the replies guys. I don't have an ipad at the moment jagatai, but that does sound like an interesting piece of kit

Redrobin - thinking about it I did play about with some basic early versions of Finale in my pre Sibelius days, so I might start with that and see how I go on. I do like the idea I can make scores in Finale too, should I ever need to down the line. Cubase confused me a lot when I tried using it a while back, but I didn't have internet access back then, so I might be able to fathom it out. I'll probably look at getting a higher spec computer just for studio work in the next year or so if I can get back into writing well enough to justify the cost

You really don't need a really high spec computer to do audio with. What you will need is a decent AD/DA conversion interface. You can get away with using a midrange computer, or even one that 5-6 years old to run DAW software. On the cheap end you could use software like Cockos Reaper (@ $60 for a personal use licence) on Windows XP, or you could use a DAW-centric Linux Distro like AV Linux with Ardour to get decent results.

That being said, your biggest investments in this will be Mic-Preamps and DI, the above mentioned AD/DA interfaces, which can often be bundled togeather with the Mic Pre's such as something like PreSonus FireStudio gear. Decent mics will be a substantial investment, but probably the biggest investment will be a pair of Nearfield monter speakers. --You will want to invest over $1K for a good pair, such as KRK, Tannoy, Genelec, Westlake, Etc.