[Dave Ellington]

Hey man, now that digi(god bless 'em) has released this asio driver I too have been considering my sequencing options. If you play everything in real time, even synth stuff, and simply use the sequencer to record that then PT should suffice. There are many products like the roland spd series which are drum pads to play your own rhythms in real time, btw, and can trigger midi devices. You do not need the piano roll, or a special drum grid. If you do want all the little midi extra's then pro tools aint what you want; unless version 6 imrpoves things this will be true for some time to come. And, PT isnt exactly optimal for softsynths with PC's.

If you want to get into the virtual studio thing cubase handles software synths the best, and in sx there is system link which allows you to connect a second pc if you so choose. This is great for soft synths like tassman and reaktor which are notorious cpu hogs. When I downloaded the cubase demo, the first thing which struck me is this program is really confusing compared with PT. But, the vst instruments work superbly with this program. I know many people who use soft synths with cubase, it works quite well.

Now, Acid was mentioned. And so I feel it necessary to tell you, if you decided to try cakewalks sonar, then you wont need acid. There's a loop player thing which does the time stretch and tempo matching stuff built into the program. It also has DX plug ins and DX softsynths. They will be releasing an asio driver for sonar early next year, and then it will be compatible with digidesign hardware. And, sonar costs $300 less than cubase. Also, this program sports rewire support which works superbly with reason and ableton live. Personally I'm leaning towards sonar at the moment. But, I might break down and buy cubase if I cant stand the wait for sonar to go asio.

If you want a really easy way to make a drum beat, which can be imported into pro tools to build around with other instruments, then you should also check out fruity loops. It may seem like a toy, but its dead easy to create rhythms in the program and therefore is a serious tool.