Playing music via PC

yeah i am talking about music, again..

I never thought a pc/laptop have the potential of creating nice sound for my guitar & keyboard. since i just bought the usb midi interface for the laptop, recently I tried a few software which I think is very good for home musicians, ie musicians who play their music at home :). i also bought an audio-technica headphone to go with the interface so i got all the sound to myself without disturbing the family :)

Amplitube

It is basically a software based guitar multi-effect & amp modeller. It has all the effects a guitarist would want, like distortion, overdrive, chorus, flanger, wah-wah.. you name it. On top of that it also simulates the sound coming from guitar amps. so u don't have to buy expensive tube amp for your guitar. i don't know how good it is compared to the real ones coz i never had real ones anyway. but i can tell that it sounds good to my ear, at least. i do have an old multi-effect, the zoom GFX707 but this software certainly sounds better & with a lot more effects, more flexible settings & fine-tunings. i can tune it to try to match the guitar sound of certain songs, & then i just save the file name for easy recall. hey, now i have settings to sound like the police, carlos santana & sweet charity!. I learn that i can get preset guitar sound of famous guitarists as well by downloading from somewhere. but for now i'll be busy exploring the sound it already has on board. actually it is kind of learning experience for me as well to know what effect does what sound. for example, i'm quite sure that rosli muhalim used some kind of FLO filter for his sound, which i'm trying to copy. I am not sure whether this software is suitable for live playing or not. i might want to use it on my next jamming session. the only issue would be that i need to use the mouse to select the effect that i want instead of a foot switch. the company does sell a foot controller to go with this software but that would be beyond my budget.

Luxonix Purity

This software is what people call a soft-synth, which i think stands for software synthesizer. It has all the sound you can think of like your normal piano, organ, strings, brass & electronic synthesizer sound. it sounds much better than my yamaha keyboard. what i like most is it's user-friendly menu & UI. i can easily set things straight away without having to read the manual. in other words it has very short learning curve. the only thing i needed to refer to the manual was when i need to set different sound for my left & right hand. i like the "glide" setting very much. it sort of lets the sound change gradually & smoothly from one key to the next, & not discreetly like say a normal piano sounds. it's kinda like you press a key & play with pitch wheel. this is how synthesizer normally sound, like you hear in some sweet charity songs. talking about sweet charity (again!), i always want to find the synthesizer sound as in their sejuta wajah & now i think i almost got it! again, i donno how good it would be in a live environment but i certainly would love to try it out.

i look forward to explore more of this during the long break end of the year..