Caltrops - No Stairway to Heaven





	[quote name="Fullofkittens"]Ableton Live is cool (and it is what I used to make the electro house I did when making the music I made for the Fwonk* label) but it is quite expensive and if your desired end result is "mp3s with music you wrote in them" then you have to learn both all about MIDI and synths and also dig through all the play-this-live-in-public metaphors that are the UX happy path in Live to get to the more hidden just-make-some-music UX paths. To make the album <i>A House is a Machine For Living</i> I used Cubase. It is very powerful and more straightforward than Ableton and if you have no desire to DJ or play live I would look there before Ableton. The first places I'd look for you, though, Jonesy would be: - <a href="https://www.reaper.fm/">Reaper</a> - which is an indie DAW that is very reasonably priced and does pretty much the same thing that Cubase does. I have friends that are indie acoustic rockers that do all of their recording in this and they love it. I have not used it myself but it is cheap and very well-regarded. - <a href ="https://www.renoise.com/">Renoise</a> - this is the DAW to use if you want to nerd out while composing. If Pro Tools is the Star Wars of DAWs, and Logic is the Star Trek of DAWs, and Ableton is the Marvel Cinematic Universe of DAWs...Renoise is the Primer of DAWs. It uses a "MOD Tracker"-style interface which means that a: instead of having any relationship to sheet music, it looks like you're typing into a spreadsheet and b: once you figure it out, you can make music <b>extremely</b> fast because every keystroke is another note in your composition. (I found Renoise while trying to figure out how in the world Venetian Snares could write the music he was writing during the breakcore era. It turned out Renoise was the go-to DAW for breakcore.) I used Renoise to make <i>Electronic Arrangements of Acoustic Music for Plants</i>. I would recommend figuring out how to make a song with software synths before figuring out how to deal with the problem of sending MIDI to a hardware synth and recording the audio back out of it. It's more fun audio nerd stuff but it's a bunch more money and hassle. Native Instruments' <a href="https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/bundles/komplete-12/">Komplete</a> is an industry standard and has enough synth power to keep a hobbyist busy for literally years. That's <i>before</i> you upgrade to the "Ultimate" bundle which adds all the sample packs and drum sets etc. Massive alone is two months' worth of happy tweaking; Reaktor is a rabbit hole that can never be escaped. So yeah: my recommendation to you Jonesy is to consider Komplete as your first set of synthesizers, and to take Reaper and Renoise each for a spin.[/quote]