My high school sophmore son wants to pursue combining his music and computer jones. I share these interests, but have zero experience with the whole digital music production thing. Is there a good on-line resource to help me get up to speed on all of the concepts and software categories?

A couple of specific questions:

- If I use Cakewalk Home Studio 2, can VDL be used to create percussion tracks?
- Do I still need something like Kontact/Kompact, or is this redundant?
- Is the notation capability in Cakewalk HS2 sufficient, or do I still need Finale or Sibelius for composition?
- I'm assuming that if I have a composition or transcription notated with one of these programs that I'll be able to somehow assign voices to the parts and combine these with additional tracks in a program like Cakewalk?

Sorry if this is completely incoherent. I'm trying to figure it all out.

Thanks in advance for pointing me in the right direction.

Dave

I'm not familiar with Cakewalk so I can't say definitively, but I do know that the way VDL is setup, the notes are spread out across a keyboard. So assigning sounds to the proper place might prove to be painstakingly difficult if not impossible.

The easiest way to me, is to get Finale or Sibelius (I prefer Sibelius) and Kompakt to load the sounds. Sibelius takes no time to learn and is extremely powerful.