Getting Sounds From Head To Powerbook, Beginner needs sound advice ;) Options

[lladell]

Greetings all. Great forum. Perused a pile of posts, perpetually perplexed. Long letter looms.

I do a good bit of live solo work here in deep southern New Zealand. With guitar, vocals, and sometimes piano. But it gets lonely (and some venues won't pay enough for another human to play along), so I thought I might bring along my Pismo 500Mhz PowerBook with Panther and 512MB ram for company. And if Bronze (that's his name) could go ahead and take care of playing some bass and drum parts while I flail away on my guitar, so much the better. But I'm clueless, and I don't know what I need.

When I write stuff with Finale 2004, and Finale plays it back, it uses either Quicktime musical instruments
or SmartMusic Softsynth playback . But neither of those produce bass or drum sounds I'd want to trot out through my P.A. in public - even if only the bartender is listening. Plus Finale strikes me as great for creating printable sheet music for when I play with other humans, but crummy for accompanying me.

I'm guessing I need some kinda sequencer to accompany me. And I'll bet there are better sounds out there too. I tried the PlugSound demo, but it no work with Finale, near as I can tell. Do I need to sample me or a buddy playing bass through some nice bass rig with some nice bass, for example? Or is there already some great sample of some great bass player with some great bass out there that I could (gulp) buy?

Finally, any thoughts on the best way to tell the sequencer what to play? For example, with Finale, I write it out, and I'm happy with that, because it doesn't require me to go buy a heap o' midi stuff (keyboard controller or guitar midi pickup, etc). I just tell the bass to play a G then a B-flat, etc., and I don't have to play those on a midi keyboard into the Mac. Folks on this forum have mentioned that some of the sequencers (PT, Logic, but not DP?) have notation. I presume that feature is there to let people write what they want the sequencer to play rather than play what they want the sequencer to play. Am I in the ballpark?

Thanks for any advice.