As composers, we live in an exciting and inspiring age as the rapid advancement of music technology has made some truly incredible tools available to pretty much anyone. A kid can compose and produce professional music on his computer in his bedroom, which is crazy awesome.

But navigating the ocean of hardware and software options can be a very daunting and seemingly overwhelming prospect for the beginner, as there are not only many great options out there but also many technical pitfalls just waiting for beginners to stumble into.

When I first began my journey composing on the computer in 2005, I found myself slogging through technical headache after technical headache, and felt like giving up countless times. Over the years, I've hard to learn the hard way, by scraping together whatever knowledge I could from wherever I could, and getting to where I am today has taken a lot longer than it could have.

So I decided to make a very basic, introductory course on everything you need to get started. This is the basic introduction course I wish I had when I was first starting out!

(NOTE: The material for this course was taken from the first part of my larger, 15-hour "How to Compose with MIDI and Virtual Instruments" course that I first released in 2019 (and have since updated with newer software and hardware thoughts and recommendations). I thought that having the first, most elementary and foundational part of the course available on it's own would better serve the many composers who are not necessarily looking for that entire body of content, or at least not all at once.