Excellent tutorial Johnny,
 
As Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs professes I am a "permanent apprentice", always learning.  Presently I'm switching from a XP based desktop with Music Creator 6 to Win 7 based laptop with Home Studio.  Everything is familiar but nothing is the same so your tutorial is presented at just the right time for me.
 
May I suggest you add a reference to the default directory path of Studio Instruments? I had to "guide" the Home Studio browser to the location (c:/Program Files (86)/Cakewalk/Studio Instruments) before Home Studio could find the location.
 
Once again thanks for the effort.  It is helping me tremendously.

Extremely appreciated, much thanks!

 
Thanks once again everyone. I'm just about to dive into part 2 which will be creating a song from scratch  using midi as the "Band" . 
I will stick to very basic operations here or this will become a monster. 
I've already got ideas for a few more. I'm focusing on basic newbie stuff. We already have plenty of advanced tutorials here. 
I will avoid 3rd party plug ins as I want everybody to be able to follow along on any version. I might screw up with a feature or plug in that Home Studio or Artist might not have and will try and point out alternatives. It's hard for me because I don't have a computer with JUST Home Studio so my version has a lot of plug ins available. 
Please post any errors you might find here in this thread and I can quickly fix them. This is the beauty of having you own web site. Edits are easy and quick. 
 
I also have a lot of information about general recording with Sonar here: http://www.cactusmusic.ca/Recording.htm
 
 

Hi Johnny,
 
Very nice tutorial.  Besides changing from Music Creator 6 to Home Studio, I'm moving from a desktop to laptop and from the desktop's XP operating system to Win 7 Home on the laptop.  Nothing drastic but all the little things add up so your tutorial is helping me get started with Home Studio.

As good as it gets, Johnny. Totally understandable, comprehensive and beautiful to boot.

Just posted PART II,  will have to fix a few typos and errors tomorrow but it is a step by step on starting from scratch and shows how to draw a drum beat, clip looping,  and play a bass line on your controller. 
Somehow the screen shots for inserting SI drums got nuked, will fix that too. 
 
Thanks for your support.. I might attempt a screen capture video. of this? I have to learn about video editing and using Sonar to add the audio. I have the Debut software.