What music software do i need to be able to create and produce high quality classical music.?

There's a couple of irrelevant responses in this thread I see- of course the ever-so predictable "nothing just live instruments" well that's not helping the questioner given what he asked so such answers are irrelevant, if not obvious! Of course live instruments will always be the most realistic, but it's very impractical to assume that anyone has a personal orchestra to their disposal.

Joshuac... gives a solid answer.

1. A notation program for inserting the notes. Finale and Sibelius are both productive, user-friendly programs. However, using that specific form of notation is not necessary. Many producers just enter or record midi data into a piano roll. Considering that you are producing music and directly exporting to a waveform, doing your final editing in a piano roll is recommended, as a sheet music leaves too much room for interpretation.

2. A Digital Audio Workstation- This houses your synthesizers, samples, midi & digital data you use for composing/sequencing/arranging, and the mixing board. Having one of these is not necessary, as you can do all that within a notation program, but to a lesser extent. You can replace your GM midi instruments with Garritan Personal Orchestra. You can also route the midi output in the notation programs to an external synthesizer or sample library but the dynamics, expression, and latency usually doesn't work as well as Garritan.

Reaper is a solid and useful DAW; I prefer FL Studio for it's high quality GUI and user friendliness. It's also one of the cheaper DAWs while still being very powerful. However, it contains poor stock samples and virtual instruments for making orchestral and realistic sounding music.

3. An Audio editor- eg. Audacity and Adobe Audition. This is mainly for in-depth sample editing and mixing and recording instruments. Not necessary; most DAWs have these capabilities anyhow.

4. A Sample Library- these are the actual instruments that generate your sound. They contain layered, real-recorded ("one-hit") samples of live instruments that while are no replacement for the real thing sound very authentic and are commonly used in film, television, and video game scores. They are not synthesized (although both methods may be paired together). These are great sample libraries, which are compatible with any DAW that offer third-party plugin support

Vienna Symphonic

East West and Native Instruments

Tascam Gigastudio

Edirol Orchestra

Miroslav Philharmonik

Garritan Personal Orchestra (as mentioned above)

if you want to go the free route, look up specific instruments in soundfont or .VST format. The first answer recommended DSK instruments, I second this- they have some decent quality ethnic/world related instruments that you should check out.

As a matter of fact, the above answer could be related to any genre of music, not just classical.

First off there are many different categories of music software. To have a complete studio you need lots of software including at least 1 notation software, at least 2 sample libraries, at least 1 mixing program, and probably a few different effects/generations programs.

Notation programs like Sibelius and Finale that are really only good for creating scores and parts. The built in playback for most notation softwares is very mechanical, it's only meant to give a rudimentary idea of harmony and timing.

Then there are programs for creating sounds like Max/MSP, Reason, Soundhack, PD, and CSound. These kinds of programs let you make noise from scratch and do live manipulation to the sounds you have.

You also need at least 2 sample libraries. If you're interested in having your computer generate realistic sounds this is really the most important thing to have. You can plug Sibelius into a better sound library to get more lifelike sound, though to a trained ear it's still obviously not a real performer.

Mixing programs like DigitalPerformer or ProTools are where all the other softwares are fed into to create your final product and do global effects to the entire piece.

If you're on a budget DigitalPerformer is the one to go for. CSound has a tough learning curve, but is extremely versatile once you learn it.

Personally I use Finale Songwriter 2010, but I would not suggest you to buy any of those as I found that it is much more tedious to create musical notes digitally than to write it out. Furthermore, the MIDI music that is produced from the playback is often very dry and lacks tonal colour. Unless you are planning to buy the musical software for orchestral playback, I would say that it really isn't worth the price to buy music software for composing (Even the orchestral playback sometimes doesn't sound good at all). Just get yourself a pencil, eraser, some manuscript books and perhaps just a simple keyboard to play, since you are going to record it by yourself anyway. Playing classical music using real human playback would always be guaranteed to definitely sound more higher in quality than compared to digital human playback systems.

Have you happened to read the Twilight books, the first of which the Twilight movie was based off of, bringing us "Bella's Lullaby"? I have. was also active in Books and Authors for quite some time, so I came in contact with more than a fair share of crazed Twilighters. It's a plague. You have to deal with the movie music in Classical, and that's pretty bad. We dealt with four books, plus plenty of talk about possible sequels and movie discussions and stupid little add-on books in B&A. The people in Movies and Polls and Surveys are fed up to, and even Comics and Animations have been upset. And that's just the surface. Everyone with half a brain is pretty ticked off with all the hype right now, and probably will be until the last movie is out and there are no more add-on books to be had. And the terrible, sad part is, most Twilighters can't be explained to. It's just not worth even trying 90 percent of the time. They'll keep posting idiotic things, and if you get testy, they'll get angry and won't listen to a word you say. If you express any dislike for the stuff, you're not letting them have their own opinion and are being rude, in most of their minds. So, all you can do is be as polite as possible when expressing your opinion if you choose to do so. If you do that, you've done your part to steer them on to better things than Twilight. That's not snobbery, and it's in no way wrong, when done within limits. ** Hi, Papaganda! Yeah, I'm kind of scattered about right now, and not very active. I don't really see much point anymore. But I decided to answer this question.

There isn't a piece of software out there than can beat the human brain in composing high quality classical music. And not all brains are created equal.

There's more to music than a bunch of notes strung together.

I beg to differ about my answer being "irrevelant". He asked about "high quality classical music". There are programs that will produce "music", but the quality comes from a human that can at least discern it when they hear it from musical gibberish. It's like people who use autotune to fix their voices being convinced that now they are great singers.

Reaper + instruments from DSK Music is a good combination. KVR Audio might be useful too, they have a database with thousands of instruments. For synths I'll recommend Crystal and Native Instruments Komplete.

That's funny. I was just going to suggest the Finale Notepad after only seeing your question and not your details.

I use the Finale Notepad for school, and I like it a lot. You can choose between tons of instruments--including all instruments that are orchestral. You can also easily print out everything. I hope that this helps.

"High quality" classical music is only produced by live instruments and real humans.

The software that you use has no bearing on whether our not the music you create is high quality.

I doubt that the music that you are making is even classical.