I've been playing guitar for 21 years and noodling around with computer music for around 15. I enjoy doing covers and remixes, but I also have a shitload of original music, so the sparse four songs allowed here may not be a true representative sample of my music at any given time.
As has been pointed out to me, I'm better at producing and mastering my stuff than I am at melodic composition. That's one aspect of my music I'm steadily trying to improve. My beats, however, are phenomenal. :)
Most of my work is done in FL Studio with various VST instrument add-ons, although I prefer Cubase for guitar tracking work. Mixing and mastering is generally done in Adobe Audition, but I'm slowly moving toward Cubase in that department as well. My music production environment currently consists of a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop running Windows XP Pro. It has a Core Duo CPU running at 1.66GHz for each core and 2GB RAM. I've found the onboard soundcard--which is capable of 24/192 recording and a claimed noise floor of -100dB--to be as adequate for music production as the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum I used to use for the purpose, shockingly enough. I use an external 200GB firewire drive for most of my programs and in-progress songs.
I play an Ibanez RG560 electric guitar and a custom-built jumbo acoustic which was a present from my father many years ago. These two are the first things I'd grab after my wife and son if the house catches on fire. I run the electric through either an ART SGX2000 rackmount effects processor or through Amplitube 2 on the laptop, via a Behringer Mic200 preamp. I do the same thing with the acoustic, using a Shure SM-57 microphone.
I don't use other peoples' drum loops, or commercial loops, or any loops at all with the exception of ones I've made from scratch first. Almost every drum sound in my music is programmed individually in a sequencer by me at some point. I say "almost" because one of my songs ("Pyari") does use Darbuka, an Indian drum creation plugin, in which the sequencer controls drum riffs rather than individual hits.
I can't sing, so the small number of vocal parts I've done so far consist of me with the mic and some heavy processing.
The background image I'm using for these tables is a screenshot from the amazing game "Defcon" by the very talented crew at Introversion Software .
