Virus TI for me?

[Timo]

Originally Posted by willit

At this point I should mention that I'm interested in producing Ambient/Chillout music and eventually Trance music when I feel confident enough, so I'm looking for airy and rich pads, deep bass, appregio type monosynths and of course, electronic percussion. The pads are the absolute most important to me though, which is what programs like Reason and Reaktor seem to lack.

A Virus will give you all that by the bucket load.

I'm thinking an ideal setup/investment over time for me would be a 4ch mixer, a virus TI desktop hooked up to my mac, an m-audio oxygen to my mac, and some sort of drum machine thats good for dance music... does that sound about right?

I'd hold the drum machine. Samplers are a much better choice, imho, as they will let you upload your own drum & percussions sounds instead of being stuck to a drum machine's own synth.

If you are adamant about going hardware-only, then a sampling groovebox type machine may be good for integrating any of your sampled drums and other stuff. Otherwise a software sampler (inside a PC/Mac) would be great, and very flexible, and you could trigger it from hardware via MIDI if you wish.