Getting Started With Midi Sequencing

[richiebee]

Well, in my opinion you need to decide to go one way or the other. Both ways require a fairly significant investment so it doesn't make sense to go both ways - you'll end up spending much more money, or doing without.

If you go with internal sounds (and I would... it makes life so much easier), you'll need a computer upgrade to do any signficiant amount of work without constantly freezing tracks to give you back processor overhead or RAM. Then in terms of software, you want a good DAW (like Cubase), a good sampler (Kontakt), a good few libraries, and possibly some synth plugins (maybe Reaktor or Absynth or one of the billions of others out there).
What style of music do you do?

[sicksgun]

we play punk, a little ska and some rockabilly kinda style.

[richiebee]

So it seems like external synths might do you then, and then use the editing capabilities of your DAW. Unless I'm missing something, you don't actually have a need for a sampler. Do you have a full band, or are you making up for something missing - like drum machine instead of a drummer or whatever...

[sicksgun]

it is just two of us, I am the drummer and I also play some guitar and some vocals. he plays most all of the guitar on other songs and plays bass, it is like musical chairs a little. we would not mind being able to sample maybe some speeches or weird random stuff, but we don't need any instruments.