sequencer advice please

[Ojustaboo]

Hi all, here's another "how long is a piece of string" type question

I have a Korg M3 with exb-Radias as my only keyboard, purely for use at home. I have a small Peavy usb mixing desk linking both the M3 and my PC to my active monitors.

My PC is fairly high spec, I7, 6GB RAM, 60GB ssd as main hard drive and around 2TB of other internal disk space, Asus D2X sound card, evga gtx465 graphics card,Gigabyte motherboard, dual monitors etc running Windows 7 pro 64bit.

I want to use my PC as the sequencer rather than the M3.

I have discovered things have moved on a good deal since I used pro24 and Cubase on my Atari ST many years ago.

Which is whats leading me to my confusion. It seems that nowadays software packages concentrate mainly on recording audio, whichever sw I end up choosing, it needs to be able to act like a top class midi sequencer.

I looked at both reaper and ableton but there were a lot of negative comments about boths midi capabilities, unless I'm missunderstanding. It sort of looks like many s/w packages are designed around audio and the midi is an afterthought.

I see that they all seem to have s/w synths nowadays, and that is something I could obviously make good use of to accompany my M3.

I'm happy to purchase say the full version of Cubase 6, but as these sorts of s/w cost a lot of money, and I cant seem to find demo versions of many of the top end s/w packages (can find a demo for cubase but have to purchase a usb key to try it if i read correctly, and that sort of thing bugs me and makes me want to look at the competition)
can any of you guys and girls point me to packages that handle midi sequencing very very well, if they also have soft synths then that's a bonus.

I realise to a large part it's personal preference

Many thanks

Joe

[Ojustaboo]

Looks like I will be getting cubase.

Have downloaded the demo of cubase elements and I like what I see.

best

Joe

[synthjoe]

Logic from Emagic (now Apple) is another good sequencer SW. I haven't used it since version 5, but then and before I was happy with its MIDI features - it also was more of a MIDI seqencer than audio, back in the late '90s.

An option to get a 'simple' version of Cubase (or Logic, sometimes) is to purchase some cheap MIDI controller, synth or MIDI module and you get the sofware (usually Limited Edition, or similar) with it. Has most of the useful features and costs a fraction of its bigger brother.

[Ojustaboo]

Thanks.

My daughters at Uni, that's another way to get Cubase at nearly half price

[49erkid]

You might want to go the hardware route, I found a second hand Roland MC-50 MkII, this is a 8 track midi sequencer, it is extremely easy to use and as a bonus it can read SMF files (midi files) and play them back on your gear. It is a good piece of gear if you dont want to fuss and muss with a computer based software sequencer. Check one out if you can, here is a link to a picture of one:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10821867/IMAG0862.jpg

[Ojustaboo]

Many thanks

Already brought cubase 6 though

[49erkid]

Ok cool, I like Cubase too to track audio into it. I usually record my midi sequences with an MV-8800 and then sync it to cubase, then all my audio lines up, then I cut and paste and arrange the sounds, till I get the desired song outcome. The mc-50 is a low cost hardware sequencing alternative. Cheers my friend.

[WmsKX]

My question is how to insert several sequences one after the other to create a song? This is what I have been trying to do with the kronos X?