| band in a box is pretty cool, better, in my opinion for practice playing along to things rather than writing ideas, though you can do that as well. Its a little more fiddly to use than a nice DAW like Reaper or Cubase but it does have a lot of good features, and is definitely more suited to scratch ideas and practice!
Theres also things like guitar pro? Then you can write your ideas in tab format and put simple beats behind them. No audio recording though so you have to have your ideas in tab/notation. Good for learning to notate rhythms though!
For writing down ideas in the same way power tab is good too, but doesnt have drums unfortunately (and power tab is FREE!)
All of the big daw's will do what you want, but they all have a bit of a higher learning curve, and some of them have a big price tag. maybe something like Reaper? very cheap, and although you'll have to work a bit for the first few days it will end up doing everything you could want. then later on you can upgrade this setup easily if you want to get more into recording. With band in a box there is not much 'upgradeablity'
there are other simple alternatives, i'm not much of a fan of Reason-Record but it will do the job for you very well, fl studio is an easy drum editor with audio recording.
there are a lot of free programs which allow you to record bass, but which don't have midi drum loop editing capabilites. Audacity is a free wave recorder. You could always get a free audio program then download/sample from tracks/buy drum loop sample sets to play along to, there are tens of thousands out there in almost every style. Magazines like Future Music give away samples with most issues.
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Last edited by Charling : 11-13-2009 at 07:54 AM.
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