Samples...

samples are simply the most effective tools for most of my composition. making everything from scratch is ridiculous when there's so much noise already out there for the taking.

Tom I'd actually agree with you there, I find that I enjoy adapting a noise for my own purposes rather than making something afresh. I suppose that it's mainly to do with the fact that I was never taught how to program an actual sound formula into soundforge or similar.

At the moment I'm using Reason quite a lot because even though the sound is not great (read: tinny as fuck) it's really simple to tweak. I was shown a bit about Cubase but unfortunately not enough to use it unsupervised! I've been told (and shown) that used properly it is a beast of a program.

this is better than nick's!!! argh korg fanboy argh really though it has the tr-style 16 beat buttons on the bottom which makes it awesome, plus ridiculous knobs and effects and really bizarre anti-aliasing artifacts from its nonstandard 32khz sampling rate.

I would just take cassette recordings or anything else I could feed into a 1/4" with a couple of adapters and male-to-male cables lying around and put snippets in, then program them as a loop. Endless fun to be had by all.