I bet now you wish you’d taken those piano lessons, huh? Here are two solutions. First, if you don’t know the first thing about music, you should meet Acid. Like CakeWalk and SoundForge, Acid has packages available in “demo model” form. The main difference is that Acid frees you from the need to input any raw sound at all!
Acid is about loops and beats. Rather than the mixing board-type console you use in recording of actual sounds, Acid has a square, boxy interface divided into beats and measures on one axis, and loops or musical phrases on the other. And the net is just littered with beats and loops which can be easily integrated into a real-time recording.
This approach to music production, known informally as pulse-controlled modulation, really only has two drawbacks. In the wrong hands, the resulting production can come out sounding boring and repetitive. Also, it’s not equipped for live input, so if you want your tune to have vocals, they have to be recorded and converted to digital before they can be integrated into Acid.
That last point is actually kind of a two-edged sword, because, once you have recorded the vocal into digital form, that track can be broken up into “snippets,” each of which can be re-integrated into your song at will.
And, if you do know at least a little about music, MIDI can set you free! Actually, MIDI, (an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is available in one form or another with all of these approaches.
But, with a MIDI keyboard, which can retail for as little as fifty bucks, you can input a melody from the piano-style keyboard, and then cut, copy and paste to your heart’s content. Or, change the instrument for a track you’ve already recorded. Or use it to trigger a digital effect. In point of fact, a MIDI keyboard can do anything you want it to!