2017 Music Aspirations

[ODYARF]

Hi, another aspiring musician here. I'm going into the new year having saved a good amount of money (Christmas gift money including), and I'm ready to start composing music at home.

I've had experience with free trial FL Studio years back, like Freshman year of High School. It's been some time since I've touched any music program from that point, instead learning instruments from piano to guitar and from melodica to ocarina.

As I'm looking forward to my next day off of work, I'm Googling here and there scouring for reviews and comparisons on music software and DAWs. I'm drawn here, wanting to ask you, the Newgrounds Audio community. I want to hear your words of wisdom and your personal insights.

I'm between the latest verions of Cubase and Ableton. Both seem to have a steep learning curve, but I'm more than willing to learn.

[Bertn1991]

Here's a timeline of my musical background:

As a child I started out with Mario Paint's music composer on the actual Super Nintendo. It was a great way to be introduced to music making, though I would only recommend using Mario Paint as a novelty nowadays.

Next I used Noteworthy Composer. It's ancient, but I would still highly recommend it if you prefer writing MIDIs with actual sheet music. Don't let that scare that, though. It's super duper easy and fun to use, and you can export the MIDIs to be used in other programs like FL and the like.

Next I used a combination of Noteworthy Composer and Synthfont. I would write the songs in NWC and edit them with Synthfont. It's freeware and allows for the use of soundfonts and VST instruments and effects. It's quick and easy, but isn't the most powerful software out there. It's a good bit of software if you just wanna quickly make your MIDI files sound good.

Next I used a combination of NWC and Ableton, but now I've switched to using Ableton exclusively. As far I can see, it's the best of the best. It's actually not the best for writing MIDIs, NWC would be for that, but I just record everything now on a keyboard, so it's fine. I don't see myself switching to anything else really. Ableton does everything I want it to.

Anyways, I hope you found that somewhat helpful :-)

[ODYARF]

I did find that helpful, thank you.

[zybor]

I'm planning to switch to Cubase, and decided that FL Studio is enough for me. I have been using FL since version 7. Before that I was on trackers like Modplug and Impulse. Recently I did a slow migration to Bitwig, but the software is still under heavy development and not really completed. I'm satisfied with FL, Ardour and Bitwig since they both work fine on Linux. Not sure about Cubase, though I could use it on a dual boot Windows 10.

[Aistis]

I started with FL studio 9 and am with the 12 version right now (for some reason I thought I started on 7, teehee). What I like most about it is that it has free lifetime updates to the DAW. Once you buy it, all future updates will come for free (new VSTs not included).

But you see, I'm not a musician. FL was and still is like a playground to me. All I can say that after I had the chance to try out Propellerheads Reason and Cubase, I still stuck with FL Studio. But maybe that was because FL Studio was my first DAW ever and I felt quite alienated when I had to work with anything else.

[connorhawke]

- Hopefully push out at least a few more tracks. Got some rough ideas in mind.
- Possibly learn and use REAPER as my main DAW, partly for compatibility and speed.