Howdy Fred,

Thanks for the encouragement Don't let anyone fool you - flattery will get you a lot of places ;)

As for the rough sketches, if you listen to those pieces so designated, you'll understand. Some of the pieces I have up now on SoundClick have me singing in one of your ears, and my guitar playing in the other Along with miscues, and such. I put them up mainly to sort of help some folks (some of my students, and you folks, too) to see how I work through the process of coming up with a song, and then working through fleshing it out.

For me, once a song "hits" me, it's pretty easy to get it to the "me and my guitar" stage, but fleshing it out used to be nigh unto impossible, until Composer came along

Fred, for the "three bands recording and no headphones" syndrome, it sounds as if you may have latency problems. I know this issue has come up before with other users, and one of the best solutions I know is to try using the ASIO4all driver. This driver can be used with multiple devices, and is available for FREE at www.asio4all.com (sidenote for present users: he put up the new 2.6 version just this past April) I've been using this driver with all my devices, and I have absolutely no latency issues when it comes to recording or playing "live" at all. You might want to give it a try.

The short version of SynthFont - you don't use it directly with Composer. You use Composer to put together your composition, and then you can use SynthFont to utilize soundfonts for the performance of the piece. I'll put a bit more in another entry under "Third party software" stuff.

ttfn,
Sherry