Depends what kind of quality you want.
If you want to produce something half-decent that you don't have much control over, using software that's easy to use... eJay or Fruity Loops would be right up your street.
However, I intend to get the entire of RB hooked onto a little program called Reason. I
highly recommend that everyone interested in creating professional beats check this shit out right here. The website is
here. I couldn't even begin to go into detail about what this program lets you do. Suffice to say, it was used to create the music from the Matrix lobby scene, the theme tune for Alias, ALL of the Prodigy's new album except the vocals and the bass (only because they wanted a very specific bass sound, Reason has excellent bass synth). It is the ultimate soft-synth studio, offering excellent software emulation of about twenty studio boxes, from a Scream box to audio mergers and splitters, mixers, samplers, synths, a drum machine, reverb, chorus, flange, parametric eq, a vocorder and a bunch of other really amazing stuff.
And no, you don't have to pay for this stuff. But if you don't, then you're a criminal. Can you live with that?
