To this day I've not found any more immediately joyful piece of software for music composition than the mighty Buzz.
I recorded pretty much all of Speaks Your Weight using it, some years ago, and have recently been using it again to do new stuff - see here (groinchy doom noises) and here (cheery synth pop) for examples, which should give you some idea of the versatility of the thing.
It also runs quite happily on the old IBM Thinkpad I lug up and down on the train to London each day, which is a bonus.
The best things about it are:
* The immediacy of "tracker"-style pattern programming
* The huge number of synths and effects - my favourites are FSM's Infector synth, and the PanzerDelay ping-ponging/filtering delay unit
* The total routability of everything - you can split an effects chain at any point, or route loads of things into the same distortion unit, as if you were jacking real boxes into each other
* That it's free, which in 1999-2000 was still a major concern for me...
I recorded pretty much all of Speaks Your Weight using it, some years ago, and have recently been using it again to do new stuff - see here (groinchy doom noises) and here (cheery synth pop) for examples, which should give you some idea of the versatility of the thing.
It also runs quite happily on the old IBM Thinkpad I lug up and down on the train to London each day, which is a bonus.
The best things about it are:
* The immediacy of "tracker"-style pattern programming
* The huge number of synths and effects - my favourites are FSM's Infector synth, and the PanzerDelay ping-ponging/filtering delay unit
* The total routability of everything - you can split an effects chain at any point, or route loads of things into the same distortion unit, as if you were jacking real boxes into each other
* That it's free, which in 1999-2000 was still a major concern for me...