DAW Recommendations + Keyboard & Plugin Recommendations?

Hi! You may recall that I have a cracked version of FL Studio...I'm working 35 hours a week total and might be able to squirrel away money over time to actually buy a program.

The question is...how are they different from FL? FL is "pattern-based", right? But I prefer to see everything laid out like a digital version of a conductor's score (obfuscation destroys me - for instance, I still can't pass Calc II to save my life). I suppose there's a way to lay it out like that in FL and I just haven't gotten to that point in the tutorials yet? I'd prefer to see everything just...go.

I'd also like recommendations for a keyboard. It doesn't need to be anything ~amazing~, but I'm finding that $300 for one on Amazon is a little steep for me (that is seriously like...a paycheck for one of the jobs I'm working). Right now I have a Yamaha PortaSound PCS-500, which is so old that Yamaha themselves don't even make cables for it anymore. As you can imagine...perfectly fine for my classes, impossible to produce with.

I'd also like to take suggestions for plugins, particularly good bass guitar and alto/soprano sax ones at the moment, and would like to know whether having a "good" soundfont or synth really matters that much...some of my producer friends have told me it's all about tweaking the stuff you have 'til it sounds good, but I must have a bad ear because everything I make sounds terrible! I'm discouraged before I even start translating the score in my head to the computer!

Finally...does ANY of this stuff get discounted, ever? November is coming up, would Cyber Monday or Black Friday be any good contenders for buying any of these? Does anyone offer student discounts to non-music majors attending a school that isn't known for its music (srsly, I'm in a school known for aviation and hockey. Please send help)?

These are probably well-worn questions, but I've been wanting to gather information from various circles. I've dropped two of my classes and might have some more free time on my hands now.

Stick with FL. It beats learning something that isn't FL. You can do cool things with FL. FL is good.

In the playlist window, you can right-click the pattern column and flatten the pattern loops you made to create one loooong pattern sequence. You can then select multiple patterns, right click, and merge them so you have all your patterns and sequences in one pattern block.

As for keyboards, I'd recommend avoiding anything Edirol. I had a 48(?) key Edirol and over time some keys stopped working to the point that I started breaking them off and was left with 17 random keys. I have an Axiom 25 now which works and is rather great, though i would like to upgrade to a 48~ key one some day.

Good bass guitar, I would want to recommend Trilogy as the sounds it has are nice. Unfortunately its rendering kinda sucks with FL and cause a 1/2second delay, so you have to render the bass separately, reload the sample back into the project and then render your project again. It's also rather limited in how you can tweak or customize the sounds they provide. Trilogy has since evolved into Trillian which I haven't used so I can't really comment on that. Kontakt 5 probably has a bass guitar library in it, as well as saxophone sounds, and a plethora of realistic and synthetic sounds. Give that a looksee.

Depending on your style of music, having a "good" synth does matter to achieve the sound and style you want. Weak synths aren't going to create that strong club sound very well, even if you load it with a bunch of effects. Weak synths may have a poor frequency range, limited amount of controllers on what you can tweak, and a similar/flat sound which can come off as incredibly boring.

Yes, this stuff does get discounted from time to time. Christmas sales, boxing day sales, random day sales, if there's a newer version coming out they'll mark down the older version to get rid of their inventory.

Since you're poor, just get FL and a used synth with a midi out port and the velocity sensitive keys. Get the procucer version tho. Pretty sure you can get both for under 300$

My 3 favourite DAWs are Reaper, Reason and FL.

The question is...how are they different from FL? FL is "pattern-based", right? But I prefer to see everything laid out like a digital version of a conductor's score (obfuscation destroys me - for instance, I still can't pass Calc II to save my life). I suppose there's a way to lay it out like that in FL and I just haven't gotten to that point in the tutorials yet? I'd prefer to see everything just...go.

Personally I find FL straightforward, so I think if you take the time to learn FL, it'll come easier than it may seem. I literally can write stuff in the piano roll that I wouldn't think of writing on sheet music, and that encourages me to write more complex music. Weird, but cool to be able to do. Instead of understanding note intervals as circles on a staff, you'd be understanding note separation in the piano roll as these note intervals. And the pattern-based stuff is just self-explanatory. Line up blocks that you can double click to zoom in and edit more, and it plays all layers indiscriminately, left to right, like in a movie editor or what would be called a 'timeline'.

I'd also like recommendations for a keyboard. It doesn't need to be anything ~amazing~, but I'm finding that $300 for one on Amazon is a little steep for me (that is seriously like...a paycheck for one of the jobs I'm working). Right now I have a Yamaha PortaSound PCS-500, which is so old that Yamaha themselves don't even make cables for it anymore. As you can imagine...perfectly fine for my classes, impossible to produce with.

I'd also like to take suggestions for plugins, particularly good bass guitar and alto/soprano sax ones at the moment, and would like to know whether having a "good" soundfont or synth really matters that much...some of my producer friends have told me it's all about tweaking the stuff you have 'til it sounds good, but I must have a bad ear because everything I make sounds terrible! I'm discouraged before I even start translating the score in my head to the computer!

As for sax, I would just direct you to collaboration. I don't know of any good sax libraries yet.

http://ocremix.org/workshop/skill/saxophone-soprano

http://ocremix.org/workshop/skill/saxophone-alto

But I prefer to see everything laid out like a digital version of a conductor's score (obfuscation destroys me - for instance, I still can't pass Calc II to save my life)

Mathematics is the least obfuscated field of study in STEM. Sheet music and conductor scores, on the other hand, are of the most obfuscated things in music history.

That being said, FL's great. It's as obfuscated as you make it, and you can make it not at all.

Haha.

Thank you all for the advice. I'll stick with it more...such a steep learning curve for these things. I think it'll become a lot easier if I get a proper keyboard instead of trying to key melodies on...my laptop keyboard. Most frustrating thing ever >:[

Mathematics is the least obfuscated field of study in STEM. Sheet music and conductor scores, on the other hand, are of the most obfuscated things in music history.

That being said, FL's great. It's as obfuscated as you make it, and you can make it not at all.

Calculus as it's taught here is pretty much "a function that looks like this is integrated this way just because, and by the way you better memorize this and a hundred different other ones before the test". It is SO obfuscated. Algebra? I LOVE algebra. Fitting the numerical pieces together (metaphorically) is SO satisfying. Binary math? Hex math? Base conversion? Love it. They all make perfect sense to me. Calculus? Can go die in a fire. A very vague, poorly-defined fire. Apparently it actually starts making sense at Calc 3, but given that you need to pass Calc 2 to get into Calc 3...

At least with music, I've been doing that since I was a kid! ;3 It all makes perfect sense to me!

You forgot Nuendo:

You can write entire songs in one pattern in FL if you don't like the abstraction of having a bunch of pattern loops cobbled together...

I've spent some time demoing other DAWs myself as of late so I have my own thoughts on them from the perspective of a long time FL user. FL11 made some frustrating changes like the piano roll auto zoom and brush muting and other issues mostly related to it's window based GUI have crept in over the years(FL12 will fix some of this), plus I prefer the approach other DAWs have of tying instruments to mixer tracks automatically...so I've been using Renoise a bit in the past couple years and looking at other DAWs, but what I've found is that FL still does some things far better for me than other DAWs. Skipping Renoise because if you thought FL was obfuscated you're probably not going to want to try a tracker, and since you're asking about MIDI keyboards, it's not a great paradigm to work within for recording MIDI controllers

I crashed Live within an hour of starting the demo. Have played with it very little since. I like how DAWs like Live, Bitwig, Renoise etc have an effect lane at the bottom where their native effects will load in a fixed position and everything stays in it's place. It's very easy to get overwhelmed by windows in FL. These also usually have simple knobs or sliders that show exact values at all times, where in FL you usually have to move a knob or slider to get the hint bar to display a value. The piano roll has a nice collapse function where you can hide unused notes, which makes programming anything that doesn't modulate much or borrow notes easier.

Bitwig had issues with my audio drivers and getting it to even make sound was frustrating. Actually Reaper stopped making sound until I uninstalled Bitwig too. Needless to say my impression is that it has some good ideas and may wind up having great workflow, but currently isn't reliable. Not surprising considering it's pretty much Ableton jr and I had the same experience with that

Reaper seemed like I'd have to spend weeks configuring the thing to work the way I want(though it does seems to have options to change most behaviors). It's also more optimized for recording where I primarily work with software. I may not be done looking at this, I've been evaluating it for nearly 1200 days apparently...it's probably not for me but I do have more positive to say about it than most, it's highly customizable and very stable

Reason seemed like the cable routing could easily become a nightmare and I wasn't going to leave behind my VSTs to buy into the closed system unless it completely blew me away(not rewiring, as I said the "everything is in different windows" effect FL already has going on was something I was looking for alternatives to). Also didn't like how selecting a device in the rack didn't allow me to play with it on my keyboard, have to select it in the sequencer(maybe there's a way to change this, didn't dig that deep because the other factors made it clear I wasn't going to wind up using this).

None of the DAWs I tried had a piano roll anywhere near as fluid and powerful as FL's, some were particularly bad but none were as good as FL's. I couldn't find an option in any of these DAWs to disable MIDI input velocity or even better, to modify it as you can do in FL. This is quite handy for MIDI controller keyboards as many have very poor velocity response. So yeah, FL isn't perfect but having spent the past couple years looking at other options, I'm still pretty happy with it. It starts fast, has a low memory footprint, never crashes...that already puts it ahead of some of the other most commonly recommended DAWs in my book, just the simple fact that it actually works as intended...a few DAWs I didn't even try because they have a reputation of being buggy and crash prone

---

No recommendations on keyboards. I currently have a novation launchkey 49 and it's nice when it works, but it will frequently stop sending data to the host. LEDs still work and it will start sending again after hitting all the keys a lot(to hosts that don't rescan MIDI devices) so I don't think it's the usb connection...

---

Sample quality does matter but you still need to play or sequence it well and know how to process things as well. Kontakt is pretty much the standard for sampled instruments, so that would be a good place to start. Komplete isn't too much more(considering what you get), so if you want a lot more samples and synths that's worth looking at

Calculus as it's taught here is pretty much "a function that looks like this is integrated this way just because, and by the way you better memorize this and a hundred different other ones before the test". It is SO obfuscated. Algebra? I LOVE algebra. Fitting the numerical pieces together (metaphorically) is SO satisfying. Binary math? Hex math? Base conversion? Love it. They all make perfect sense to me. Calculus? Can go die in a fire. A very vague, poorly-defined fire. Apparently it actually starts making sense at Calc 3, but given that you need to pass Calc 2 to get into Calc 3...

There's practically no memorization in Calc... just sounds like you have a bad teacher (or you're not attempting to learn). Calculus is just algebra with limits. :/ It's not obfuscated or poorly defined just because you don't understand it (Mathematics is rigidly defined, and you'd know this if you bothered looking up proofs and derivations for the things you apparently "memorize"), and you'll learn that same principle will apply to DAW's as well. You have to have the ability to independently learn, or none of these DAW's are going to help you and you're not going to understand any of them. There's nothing that "just goes" without sacrificing control. Music production tools take time to learn. There's no "easy mode", and nothing is designed for easy interpretation by your specific brain. It takes effort and thinking just like any non-trivial discipline out there.

There's practically no memorization in Calc... just sounds like you have a bad teacher (or you're not attempting to learn). Calculus is just algebra with limits. :/ It's not obfuscated or poorly defined just because you don't understand it (Mathematics is rigidly defined, and you'd know this if you bothered looking up proofs and derivations for the things you apparently "memorize"), and you'll learn that same principle will apply to DAW's as well. You have to have the ability to independently learn, or none of these DAW's are going to help you and you're not going to understand any of them. There's nothing that "just goes" without sacrificing control. Music production tools take time to learn. There's no "easy mode", and nothing is designed for easy interpretation by your specific brain. It takes effort and thinking just like any non-trivial discipline out there.

Oh man, our math department is so notoriously bad for anyone in the aerospace school (CompSci like me, Meteorology, etc) that people will take classes on the AFB like...half an hour away. They're usually fully booked, too.

I was just wondering. I know that my thought process/how I process things is different than most people, so I just wanted to put some feelers out.

Calculus is the best part of maths. Put some jazz and dive into it. You do have to learn a few tiny formulas, but after a series of exercices it should be just like learning A B C. Straightforward formulas where one takes you to another one, and you just follow the established rules. The only thing that's hard about calculus is finding the time to practice what you study IMO. But that applies to anything else, like learning a DAW... One must forge to become a blacksmith

Oh man, our math department is so notoriously bad for anyone in the aerospace school (CompSci like me, Meteorology, etc) that people will take classes on the AFB like...half an hour away. They're usually fully booked, too.

I was just wondering. I know that my thought process/how I process things is different than most people, so I just wanted to put some feelers out.

Seriously, look at my PM and let me explain stuff to you. I've tutored Calculus before.

Anyways, let's stop talking about Calculus now.

Seriously, look at my PM and let me explain stuff to you. I've tutored Calculus before.

Anyways, let's stop talking about Calculus now.

Calculus...is the ultimate metaphor to life. But I digress. Thanks for the advice. ^w^