Robert987

IMHO, I'm going to say that it is a mistake to only judge a recording with headphones. Typical speaker placement creates a 30 degree angle between the left and right speakers and the listener. But with headphones, the left and right stereo are too spatially spread apart. While headphones are great for catching detail in a recording it seems that you need to also evaluate your recording the way it will ultimately be listened to -- through speakers.

If you have a decent sound card on your computer you should be able to "record whatever you can hear" from the sound card. I have a Sound Blaster Live Drive card and it comes with a midi synthesizer and a number of different Sound Fonts to create different midi instruments on the synthesizer. So if I wanted to make a MP3 recording, I would first create a Wave (.WAV) recording by selecting the "record whatever you hear" feature in the Sound Blaster Mixer, and it would record whatever sounds the Midi Synthesizer is playing, plus I could also simultaneously mix in 2 audio tracks (vocals, guitar, etc). Then finally you would need to get a software conversion utility to create the .MP3 file from the .WAV file. It's not hard to find such converting software for a low price. Sounds like you want to create a finished recording by using midi synthesizers. If so, try to find some copies of Computer Music magazine, they frequently deal with that topic and suggest hardware for that purpose.

I try to avoid musical instruments until I get everything from my head into some kind of symbols on paper. While still avoiding a musical instrument, I'll come back to the paper the next day and see if it still clearly represents my idea. My feeling is that if I too quickly try it out on a musical instrument when not really having a vivid image in my head what I wanted to do, the musical instrument's voice might confuse my original source idea.

I don't know if I could recommend Cubase. I had a lot of problems with it and it would frequently flake out when I was recording. But I was using it on Windows, so it might work better on a Mac.