I think over the years most home musicians will have the urge to create something for their home studio, whether due to budget, or purely the creative tinkering that led us to music in the first place.

My own DIY home studio creation is limited mainly to home made monitor speaker stands, but I'm sure if I was into vocals I would whip together one of those DIY pop-shields I've seen some of you mentioning. I'm not sure I could go as far as building my own guitar - or even completely overhauling one from scratch, as I know some of you have done!

I'd love to hear about your DIY projects in the studio.

What would be one piece of DIY home studio advice you'd offer to someone starting out with a low budget?

I'd like to welcome MakeTunes latest site sponsor, Loopmasters for stepping up in support of our community of upcoming musicians. They're excited to be involved with our vibrant community

Loopmasters have a HUGE selection of quality loop and sample products in basically any musical genre you can think of, and available in all the major formats.

I'd urge you all to check out their site, and keep them in mind if you're considering getting some audio products to give you some new direction or inspiration!

Well it's here folks, the first MakeTunes Guitarist Competition! I know many of you are really looking forward to this one. I've lined up some great commercial VST effects software from Ohmforce as prizes too - I'm sure you guitarists can have some fun with the premium Distortion and Phaser VST effects we've got on offer!

Who can enter?
This is a competition for guitarists - you're free to put whatever else in your track that you like, but the track should clearly have you playing some type of real guitar in it! A focus on your great skills as a guitarist is likely to wow the judges most of all! Show us what you can do, and have fun with it!

What can you win?
Ohmforce have been kind enough to donate almost US$700 worth of their great VST effects products (they also do VST instruments, check their site for more info).

1st Place
The winner of this competition will receive:

• Ohmicide:Melohman (Distortion VST)
• Mobilohm (Phaser VST)
• Predatohm (Distortion VST)

2nd Place
Runnerup in this competition will receive:

• Ohmicide:Melohman (Distortion VST)
• Mobilohm (Phaser VST)

3rd Place
3rd place in this competition will receive:

• Ohmicide:Melohman (Distortion VST)

How long do you have?
The guitarist competition will end on 20 August 2009.

What are the rules?

• Up to 2 songs can be entered into this competition.
• Must feature you playing a real guitar of some kind!
• Should be a song you recorded for this competition.

Who will be judging?
Matt
The Sole

How do you enter?
Just record your song, upload it to maketunes, and post a link to your track as a comment below...

Can't wait to hear what you lot can do with this competition, and no matter the outcome, I'm CERTAIN there will be loads of inspirational and entertaining musical creations as a result of this!

Hey for any of you on Facebook, come join the MakeTunes fans page I just made! :) I'm so lonely as the only fan! :D

Go go go! It'll only take a second, you know you want to!

If you're wanting to learn to play the drums, it might seem a bit daunting at first - trying to get some good sounds out of the drum kit you've just sat down at. As with anything music related, practice makes perfect, and so you'll need to be realistic about the time it may take to learn to drum.

However, with the right guidance from an experienced drummer, you're going to be able to pick up some great drumming advice, and start to play more confidently sooner than you would have otherwise!

Here are a series of free online drum lesson videos, which explain each drumming learning stage very clearly.

Drum Lesson Video 01 - The Money Beat

See below for the other 11 free drumming video lessons for beginners!

It's probably one of the most discussed "missing" features of Propellerheads Reason - the inability to record audio tracks within the program.

Well Propellerheads have now announced their new software package, imaginatively called, "Record".

Record allows the user to, well, record audio tracks, and apply a multitude of effects to them, in a software style and layout that should be very familiar to Reason users. I should clarify at this point, that Record is a standalone program, you don't need to be running Reason as well - though it's likely that many people will choose to run both I would imagine.

Propellerheads Record - Introduction Video

Read more below!

Ok, so technically it's not home studio specific, but I'm sure some of you will find this interesting to play around with. It's a simple little online sinewave synthesizer and 16 step sequencer! There goes your day ;)

You can come up with all sorts of tunes by just clicking on various points on the 16 step sequencer, which is always looping. Check it out!

This is so freakin cool, you're gonna love it!

This guy Kutiman took a whole heap of totally different unrelated home musician videos from YouTube, and remixed them into 7 sweet new tunes! WATCH THIS NOW! :D

The mother of all funk chords

Its from ThruYou.com. He's got a whole bunch of other YouTube remixes as well.... I'm off to check them out now!

Ok, wow. He's made remixes in heaps of different genres, all still from totally unrelated home musician videos on YouTube. These are so well done, I hope you all take the time to check them out.
See more below...

http://www.illusive-mind.com/mix/maketunes-mix/

This is my first DJ mix. Have a listen and check out some music by your fellow MakeTuners.

For those of you using Vista on your home studio DAW, it's been a bumpy ride, but many manufacturers finally have Vista driver compatibility issues sorted out it seems.

M-Audio drivers for Vista 64-bit and Vista 64-bit SP1 are now available for almost all the M-Audio products, including the following hardware: