Greg,
I doubt that I said that MC5 was difficult of work flow and getting you head around it. I've never used the program, so I don't know. What I *may* have said was that the concepts of computer music itself were a steep learning curve, and they are.

I would highly recommend getting some books to help you move from 'noob' to at least having some of the concepts. They will answer a lot of your questions about the hows and whys that you are going to be invariably asking. Two that I would recommend would be these:

http://www.amazon.com/Recording-Studios-...9086&sr=8-1

and

http://www.amazon.com/Home-Recording-Musicians-Dummies-Strong/dp/0470385421/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b

Don't be put off by the 'for Dummies' moniker, these are very well written books, and I have each of them sitting on my bookshelf.

For instance, the Studio book covers Computer Recording Basics, the very basics. It starts with the components of the computer studio and explains what everything is for. You'll also see how to set everything up so it sounds good. It covers Choosing and Installing Computer Hardware. This is the gear talk, and what many of us talk about as 'G.A.S.', or 'Gear Acquisition Syndrome.' Very deadly to your wallet and credit card, if you get a bad enough case of it. However, this will get into what kind of gear you need to make a recording, audio and midi interfaces, mics, mixers, etc. Choosing and Installing Recording Software is the next part of the book, and while you have a lot of that already, it still is worth reading for future reference, and to see how your choices will work. Then, from there, it gets into ideas for making sure your recording is the best, working with plug-ins and more.

The Musicians book gets into very basics, starting with the studio itself, almost a primer for the Studio book. It talks about digital recording systems, and again, studio set up. It gets into Recording 101, mixing boards, mics, MIDI and such. The next part talking about Laying Tracks: Starting to Record, and explains the fundamentals of how and why to use a sequencer. It also gets into some stuff like mic placement, how to use a compressor, and basic editing principals. The next part goes into the Mixing or Mixdown principals, or how to take all the recorded tracks and turn them into a highly polished finished product, and then there's even a section on burning a CD and posting to the internet for others to listen to.

Both of these books are a great starting place to learn about the basic concepts and principals of what you are doing.

Now, to get to your specific issues, since you have most of your stuff as just chords, lyrics and melody, Band In A Box is where you want to start out in. Either using Real Tracks or MIDI, it doesn't matter at this stage, lay out your chord structure, find a style that suits your needs, and press play! All of a sudden, you're going to have a complete back up band that you can play in front of. Play with the different styles, and learn the nuances of the program. When you find something you really like, you can save it as a MIDI file, and then you can open that MIDI file in Music Creator 5. Once you do that, you can start to add tracks to it, either MIDI tracks from your KeyRig, or audio guitar parts from your guitar, mic or direct in box.

Say, for instance, that you've created a backing track that you really like. You can import that into MC5, and then add your live guitar to that song. Now you have a complete song. But, say you want to use a different guitar to replace the MIDI synth guitar that BIAB created. Now, you can add another track of you playing a different guitar and mute the BIAB guitar part. Maybe you want to add a third guitar part to the song, something in the background, like a finger picked sound, and you can add that as well.

So, you can see where BIAB was able to *start* with the backing tracks, but you were able to expand everything in MC5 to give you more. Then, you'll be able to mix all of that down, use plug ins, and recording techniques learned from the books to create an AR ready song.

Hope this helps some.

Later on, when you get comfortable, we can start talking about audio interfaces, MIDI interfaces, and external hardware synths that will make your recordings even better.

Gary

I'm blessed watching God do what He does best. I've had a few rough years, and I'm still not back to where I want to be, but I'm on the way and things are looking far better now than what they were!