These days, anyone with a home PC and some freely available software can make music.

This doesn’t mean that the tone deaf will be instantly cured, but if the enthusiasm is there, there’s nothing to stop any of us from recording an original song that sounds as professional as anything played on the radio.

In this article, we’ll explain the various ways of recording music on a home PC. We’re going to talk about making music on a computer, but this doesn’t mean to say that your creations need to sound like computer music.

The beauty of modern samples, loops and software synthesisers is that they can actually sound as though they are real instruments being played by real people.

In the case of loops and samples, this is because many of them are real instruments that have been recorded by musicians in a studio and then organised into little chunks so that those of us with less natural talent can copy and paste them together to form original compositions.

In the case of software synthesisers, these include libraries of sounds that range from the deepest, darkest bass blips and pads right through to mandolins that would bring a tear to Captain Corelli’s eye. So, let’s look at the three main kinds of home recording setup.

Recording with loops and samples
The use of loops and samples involves taking short clips of music and arranging them to form songs. The loops and samples, which are usually represented by short rectangles, are dragged and dropped with the mouse into a main arrangement window.

This window is divided into horizontal tracks, a bit like the lanes in a swimming pool.

In a typical song, there might be one track for drums, another for bass, a third for keyboards and so on; separating the instruments in this way gives more control over the arrangement, allowing individual instruments to be muted and soloed, or have effects added to them.

Most programs include some kind of onscreen mixer, which makes it easier to get the overall balance of the sound right.