I've always enjoyed the sound of pedal steel guitar, an instrument that is very difficult to master. One of my favorite software tools for creating music is Band In A Box, because it has many features that get the creative juices flowing, and makes it very easy to start new songs and come up with fresh ideas, like melodies, rhythms, etc. Well, I just upgraded to the 2008 version a couple of days ago and it is fantastic. A major breakthrough, I believe, they made in the music software department. They added some real instruments that you can now easily add to your songs. Pedal steel guitar is one, and also acoustic guitar and saxophone. They already had real drums in the last version, also fantastic. To my knowledge the pedal steel guitar has always been difficult to incorporate in computer music. Well, not anymore. Go check out my latest song "Merry Christmas To" and have a listen to some soloist pedal steel I added. Also there is acoustic guitar, and near the end, in the instrumental portions, you can hear a little of the real sax mixed in. I knocked this song out in a couple of days to demonstrate the new real instrument features of the software and to show how easy it is to create music with it. So, if you're looking for real instruments to spice up your music, and you don't want to have to mess with samplers and a whole lot of extra work, this is definitely the way to go IMO.