For score-writing and most of the playback and recording, I work in Sibelius. However, in the
light of the idiotic decision by Avid, the owners of Sibelius, to close down the entire Sibelius development team and move development to the Ukraine
or somewhere "cheaper", I'll be in the queue for the new Steinberg product
just as soon as it has all the features I need.
On the odd occasions that I feel the need for a sequencer, I use Reaper which is just as
good for my purposes as the (much) more expensive mainstream sequencers.
The crucial part of any electronic music production is the sample libraries, and for almost all my work I use the amazing
Vienna Symphonic Library. I occasionally get emails to ask which orchestra and conductor was playing
the music for such-and-such an e-card. Of course, the e-card music is necessarily subjected to a high level of MP3 compression (typically 80 or 96kbps
— lower for the older cards) which degrades the sound quality, but even so the fact that anyone could mistake these recordings for genuine orchestras is
primarily down to the quality of the VSL libraries (and a lot of note-tweaking)!
Occasionally we need singers, which you can't mimic with a computer; or solo strings, which you can but the real thing is much more
convincing. So I'm grateful to Izzy, Emma, Robin, Meg, Joy and others who have helped out over the years – not to mention the
wonderful team at Salisbury Cathedral Choir.
I have a wonderful Bösendorfer Model 170 piano, and most of the piano music you hear is
played by me on this piano.
Gearheads may like to know that I have a stereo pair of Neumann KM184s
which do a great job for all my live recording, except when I bring out my Sontronics Sigma
for that softer, smoother ribbon mic effect. And I have a Sony
PCM M10 permanently perched on the piano to capture any ideas that come to me while playing. In fact the Sony is so good I sometimes wonder whether I really
need the KM184s. For monitoring I have a pair of Focal CMS50 monitors,
and the connection between the real world and my computer is made by a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2.