Samples...

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.