This is a crucial question when musicians wants to do their own … music. I’ve been using for more than a year one of the most underrated software for making good stuff … Audacity.
Just kidding. True, I’ve recorded my first songs on Audacity. the output signal right in the mic. input of my computer. No fancy, I wanted to make it simple (with crappy noise I used to hide by making even more noise. Pretty roots, I admit)
I would like to get your feedback, why is a software indispensable for you, how intuitive (or not) it is, etc.
I’d like to record soon, any shared experience is good to me. Hope to read you all.
Most of the time I use Guitar Pro to capture new ideas, however if you aren’t used to writing our your parts, it may stifle your create flow.
Whatever works for you and keeps you writing new stuff is fine.
Cheers!
P.S. if I’m in a pinch or away from my computer, I’ll also capture ideas using a simple recording app on my phone. Doesn’t sound great, but it makes sure that I never forget an idea
If you’re on iOS, checkout Apple’s Music Memos. It’s the best app I’ve seen on this platform for quickly capturing, cataloging and finding ideas. Just hit the record button to capture inspiration then add any tags or text notes you like. It has some rudimentary chord-detection in it which works well for certain kinds of music.
I’ve been using Logic for probably 10 years now for recording/ writng music/ pre-production.
After several years spent on Cubase and Pro Tools, I must say Logic fits best my needs, it has everything I may need and even more. Previously, with other software, I alway had to buy/install some additional third party plugins to be able to have the work done. Now, all problems solved with Logic.
My advice is, whatever DAW software you choose, just stick with it and learn it, in order to be able to work fast and focus on making music instead of trying to figure out how the software works every time you have an idea to record
Very useful advice indeed It reminds me the time when the final product of my recordings was part of discovering the software. X)
Thank you all for your contributions ! I think it is also very interesting to see how many and why people are in a software than an other. Could be interesting to build a sort of catalog with different softwars currently used by coders, examining plus and minus of each one, based on what a guitar composer could wish.
By the way, is there some Keyboardists here except Troy ? What fits the best to record any line and modify it note by note ? I know FL studio, but it seems more electro-friendly
… What do you think?
Nowadays all major (Cubase, Pro Tools, Logic…) DAWs (digital audio workstation) share similar features and are keeping up with each other updating the software regularly with new features. Some have strengths in Audio editing, others might work best with MIDI, etc…at the end of the day, it’s a matter of personal needs and preferences.
As for recording keyboards, any DAW will do the work. DAWs are boundled with plenty of plugins/sounds available out of the box. The same applies to Drums, bass…sounds as well
Been using my stock voice-memo app on the iPhone for on-the-fly ideas and notes. Guitar Pro to arrange/transcribe ideas and then Reaper for recording demos. I’ve also got a crappy free keyboard app for finding notes when I don’t have an instrument handy and I paid a few bucks for a really awesome metronome app. My bandmates and I all use Dropbox to send demos out and rehearsal recordings.
OH and it would be remiss of me to not mention JamUp Pro by Positive Grid. I paid the $30 or whatever for the full suite. I use it to practice when I’m not near an amp and it’s got a cute little 8-track recorder that I use once in a while, plus a sampling setup and I often use the “jam” function to practice soloing ideas over my band’s demo tracks and other backing tracks I throw together.
After going through all kinds of DAWs, in the end, it’s very much personal preference. What ever works and is easiest for you, is the one you should use!
I prefer the ones that allow me to get in and get ideas down, with the basic EQs and such (most of the time.) For example, I primarily use Pro Tools for all the mixing / mastering of a song, but I usually use Reaper or Reason to get ideas down. When all the “basics” are there, I pull it into Pro Tools. This is also because most studios use Logic / Pro Tools, so easier for them to import. But I tell you what, I’ve had more “frustrations” with issues/bugs/hardware on Protools than any other DAW. Not to mention the harsh “hardware” cost, and fees that go along with it.
It also depends if you do a lot of sequencing/midi music too, as that lends itself more to Cubase & Reason, than Pro Tools.
Tried practically all DAWs, also in a professional setting when I was coproducing stuff. Studios used to use ProTools exclusively, because of the high end hardware, but this is not the case anymore.
For home recording, ProTools has some disadvantages. It’s expensive, you need a dongle, the MIDI capabilities are not up to par with say Cubase or Logic and it used to work only with dedicated hardware.
After using Logic and Cubase, I was frustrated that I couldn’t mix and match tempos easily between drumloops and audiotracks and trying different song ideas. Then I discovered Ableton Live and everything changed.
For composing, sketching out ideas and jamming, I feel Ableton Live is unbeatable.
You can load clips, manipulate tempo, trigger different clips with the press of a button, easily tranpose clips in the “Arrangement View” and then when you are ready to track the “linear” way, you can do it in the Tracking View.
Ableton enables you to have practically unlimited different drum grooves, audio files of all lengths and song parts on one page and you can change the tempo of the audio to whatever tempo you like, but it also has the conventional view of other DAWs.
It easily has the best algorithm for slowing down audio without artifacts, so if you want to hear Yngwie licks and solos at tempo 60, go ahead.
When you have sketched out your demo, you can either finish it in Ableton or record it in Reaper/Cubase/Logic/Protools.
They all work basically the same, but Reaper wins hands down by being extremely cheap ($40)and very flexible and customizable.
Also, to make decent demos as a guitarist you need a good guitar amp simulator (Guitar Rig 5, Amplitube, Scuffham) and good drums (Ezdrummer 2 or Superior Drummer 3).
I use Guitar Rig, Scuffham and SD3.
For people that don’t know Ableton, give it a try, when you are used to it, you’ll never look back.
I recently bought Logic Pro and I love it so far. It’s a giant step up from Garage Band which is what I used to use. Like others have said, most DAWs can do pretty much anything you need. You just need to pick one in your price range and learn how to work with it. I have a little Alesis MIDI controller keyboard that I use sometimes to write parts. I usually just use the software instruments built into Logic, which are great, but I’m probably going to upgrade to the Kontact sound libraries in the future.
I have Guitar Pro, but I rarely use it for composition. I use it more to Tab out stuff for students or bandmates. If I’m composing and arranging, Finale is my go to notation software. I’ve used it since I first started college and it still holds up. A plus for it is that once you’ve arranged a part, you can export it as a MIDI file and drop it into Logic and control it there which is pretty awesome!
I do this too, though with the caveat that I only bother with Guitar Pro if I need to share a riff or idea with someone else, or if I’m putting a lesson together, or something.
This gets pointed to as evidence, somehow, of ProTools’ “superiority” to other DAWs, that it’s gotta be the best because all the pro studios use it. In reality, virtually all full-featured DAWs are excellent these days, so it comes down mostly to which DAW has the worflow you’re the most comfortable with, with as a secondary concern the stock plugins that get bundled along. I use Reaper not because I think it’s “better” or “more pro” than other options, but because I really respect their business model, they have excellent support both from the company and from an active user community, and because it’s extremely flexible so many of the things I didn’t initially like about how it performs I was able to reconfigure (for example, the default mouse scroll behavior is side to side, through time, whereas I wanted it up and down, through my tracks. Easy change).
I think the more interesting side of this question is where you want to invest in 3rd party plugins. I’ve lately been on a rack gear kick (I got the rack preamp/EQ bug in a BIG way within the last two years), but for a long time before that I’d been looking for ways to suppliment the stock Reaper plugins, which are (in my experience) generally pretty functional and efficient, but don’t offer a ton of color. Which is good sometimes - if you want to transparently compress something, or do some pretty neutral corrective EQ, well, ReaComp and ReaEQ are the first two things I reach for.
On a PC, these are pretty old now but the Antress stuff is free and really pretty decent - I used to get a lot of use out of their Lost Angel opto compressor, their Seventh Son take on a Distressor, and their Analoger. They’re not mac compatible, but if you’re on a PC they’re freeware so they’re worth checking out.
I’ve been pretty impressed with the Sonimus stuff, almost across the road - both the Satsun and the Britson channel strip/bus saturation plugs are cheap ($39, I think, each), and honestly I started using Satsun heavily in mixes less for the saturation effect (which is pretty subtle unless you slam it, but nice), and more because I found I just really liked the high pass on it. Their Burnley 73 take on a 1073 EQ is excellent, too - I only bothered to check it out after picking up a couple Neve 551s and falling in love with them, and I wish I’d discovered it years ago.
Waves is pretty ubiquitous and is generally extremely expensive, but they’re good about doing periodic sales. I got the CLA Compressor pack for $99 a couple years back, largely because after I switched to a Mac I no longer had a good opto compressor, and their LA-2A clone is pretty good (though unless you’re specifically into this, it REALLY helps in a busy miss to disable the 50/60-cycle hum emulation).
I think the biggest weakness in the stock Reaper plugins is the reverb, which I just never got on with. One of the two is an IR-based reverb, though, so I found I got much better results by using that and loading impulses from the (free) Samplicity Bricasti M7 pack. Adjusting some of the file transformation settings to stretch it out or add predelay or whatnot is a useful tip I picked up from the Reaper videos they periodically do.
Also, Blue Cat Audio does a great free chorus.
EDIT - though, I want to be clear; possibly excepting the reverb options (and even those are at least usable if you work with them a bit), all of the stock Reaper plugins, or at least the “core” ones, your compressor, EQ, delay, can’t remember if I’ve ever used their chorus… They’re all totally solid, effective, resource-efficient plugins, and I use them all frequently. I’ll turn to things like the CLA-2A or the Burnley 73 when I’m looking to add “color” to a sound, rather than just transparently transform it somehow. It’s certainly dangerous to get hung up in the “buy ALL the plugins!” trap, so if I was starting cold with Reaper and wasn’t already pretty familiar with mixing, I’d recommend maybe finding a good third party reverb, but otherwise using the stock plugins for a while until you got to know them pretty well, and only then starting to branch out into paid 3rd party offerings.
Ableton/Push is at the center of my studio space. Guitar Pro sees most use relative to other scoring tools, but for illustrative creation purposes, and not so much composition scoring per se. Far too many tools to list, but those, and a couple iOS tools NotateMe w/PhotoScore and Notion which I use to get things into the machines quickly.
Cubase 9.5, Universal Audio Apollo Quad Mk ii. I use a real amp (Carr Mercury V, Deluxe Reverb) mic’d with an SM57. I have some amp sims (UAD ‘55 Deluxe, Fuchs ODS) but have found they can’t beat the real thing. For bass, I run a P-Bass direct to interface with the UAD 1073 Pre in the unison slot. For drums I use Superior Drummer 2.
I’ve been using Cubase for many years. Usually the latest version, but currently I’m on 8.5, as I didn’t like 9.0/9.5 updates.
Several years ago I tried Logic 9 and then Logic X (I think I did ~100 arrangements in these two Logic versions), but then switched back to Cubase – somehow Logic wasn’t that fast and convenient for me workflow-wise. For instance, I do a lot of midi editing with mouse and computer keyboard (notes and controller data), and for me that was really painful in Logic in comparison with Cubase. Also, I didn’t like interface update in Logic X. I must say Logic 9 had nice factory library of sounds though. Haven’t really explored Logic X library.
All in all, I think any modern DAW will do, there’s not much difference, especially if you use third-party plugins, instruments and libraries.
It reminds me the time when the final product of my recordings was part of discovering the software. X)