You program like a beast.

And using SID based expanders (like HS4U, with Goattracker or the Vice emulator) , you can get the "Real" C64 sound without having to use older hardware (apart from the SID chips of course.. get ready for your Ebay account))

But I admit that playing around with a good old C64 and a 1541 drive is also fun and Messiah seems t be a real cool hardware kit .

cool, thanks. im just curious how one goes about using a comodore 64 for 8 bit music. i dont like being completely ignorant about things.

There are very good hardware carts that make it pretty easy, as smendrick said. Mssiah is very nice. Other than that, you just buy a c64, and a disk drive and read the manual. Then you could use any tracker you want. You can use the synthesizer right from the commmand line, which is fun. But probably you'll end up using someone else's software.

Also worth checking out is Cynthcart:
http://www.qotile.net/cynthcart.html

and MSSIAH:
http://www.8bitventures.com/mssiah/

thanks