You can now find a lot of great techno songs at JonLeger.com. In case you’re interested in creating music yourself, here’s how he does it:

FL Studio

His primary tool for creating electronic music is FL Studio. FL Studio has it all: a mixer, a sequencer, loads of special effects and filters. Truly fantastic. He strongly suggests you purchase a copy! It takes a while to get used to using it, but it really makes music-making a digital breeze.

MAGIX Music Editor 2.0

When Jon needs to modify, cut and paste the sounds he uses in his songs, he uses MAGIX. It was cheap — he got it at Best Buy for $30. It’s very handy for the wave-editing that FL Studio can’t do. He looked at their site (magix.com), but I couldn’t find it. Maybe they don’t sell it anymore?

Bink Video’s RAD Video Tools

He’s started making songs based on movies and TV shows that he likes, and sometimes it’s useful to extract sounds from the movie trailers and movie clips that are available online. To accomplish this he uses the RAD Video Tools from Bink Video. They’re donationware, so be sure to give them a few bucks if you find their stuff useful (he did).

Loops and Samples

Jon has purchased thousands of loops, samples and instruments for use in FL Studio. Two of the places he’s gotten the sounds from are PlatinumLoops.com and PeaceLoveProductions.com. Both have a large selection at reasonable prices.

Hardware

He uses an audio-technica studio microphone for vocals (AT3035), and an Edirol UA-25 USB Audio Capture device to record from the microphone. He loves the Edirol because it’s very small (perfect for my desk) and supports two studio microphones and has a digital output for headphones.

If you’re interested in creating your own music, he wants to tell you this: it’s a lot easier (and cheaper) than you might think. You don’t need a studio (even for vocals). He records vocals in his office at home. All of the software and equipment costs came to around $1,250 (including the loops). The equipment all fits on my desk, and the software runs on my home PC. FL Studio needs a good bit of memory, so Jon suggests you don’t have less than 1GB of RAM (that’s how much he has and it works fine).

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