My nephew has taken up the wonderous art of rap lyric writing. Recently he was complaining about not having beats to write to, and I reminded him he has the most wonderous music maker ever created in this beast at which I sit typing.
I don’t really relish the idea of listening to it, but you gotta encourage thier creativity.:rolleyes: So, having put my foot into it, I come to you asking…
Are there any archives or simulators out there he can download for free. If not, any music making programs you can recomend, preferably cheap (as Teens are notoriously low on funds) programs to recomend?
there are indeed.
depends what sort of thing he wants to do really…
there are music creators which allow you to drag samples
or loops into an arrangement and play them back together
to form music. (These samples & loops consist of short sections
of various instruments (eg one bar of drums, one bar of bass
guitar, a weird synthesiser sound etc etc) which you build up into
full pieces of music) There are literally thousands of samples &
loops available on the internet, magazine cover disks etc so your
end result doesn’t have to sound like all the others !!!
A good program to start this might be one of
these products. There are several
different versions, but they’re all pretty much the same but
with different styles of samples/loops.
These retail for about 30 gb pounds (~$50 ?), but if you
have a look in your local newsagent for a magazine called
“computer music” (from future publishing), the current
issue has a free version on the cover cd !!!) - see
here
If that’s not suitable, how about looking into a more advanced
music making applications such as cubase, cakewalk, reason
etc etc. Many of these have smaller budget versions (in fact
i use Cubasis, the cut down version of cubase) which costs
less than $100.
Welcome to the wonderful world of computer music.
Grrrrrrrrrrrr. This is GQ, so I must restrain myself. If you can find a way, please encourage your nephew to create actual music, instead of percussive doggerel. 
Or he could create vivid poetry with clever rhymes you never would have thought of and set it to an interesting beat. :rolleyes:
Anyway, I’m not familiar with many good online or free beat software, but there are some good ones that aren’t too expensive to buy. Sonic Foundry Acid is the first that comes to mind. He can download samples, or use those from the discs it comes with, and mix and match to his heart’s delight.
The program Fruity Loops is really great for composing beats.
I thought you were going to restrain yourself?
Anyway…there’s a pretty decent free drum machine called HammerHead. It should be somewhere on the first page of a google search.
I use FruityLoops when I want to mix up some phat bizzeats, though I usually do more techno music…I don’t want to say “Writing”, so I’ll say “Pushing the buttons until I go ‘Ooooh, that’s cool’.”
I’ll throw in my vote for fruityloops. It’s incredibly easy to get started programming beats and there’s a free demo that disables the save feature (I suppose you can record the audio).
If he grows tired of that there’s other programs like Propellerhead’s Reason that includes samplers, beat boxes, synths, mixers, the whole nine yards. It’s more expensive, of course, but it’s pretty awesome. It’ll really work out the computer.