T w e n t y S i d e d
About two and a half years ago I published Bad and Wrong Music Lessons, a series where I explained the few scraps of knowledge I’d shaken loose from the world of music. I followed that up with Project Button Masher, where I tried to push myself into doing new things by imitating various videogame soundtracks.
I haven’t really had much to say about music since then. One reason is basic anxiety.
If you’re new to a discipline, criticism doesn’t really sting. In the beginning, everyone is terrible. Your audience is tolerant of faults, and often encouraging. “You’re doing really well for a beginner!” But eventually you cross some sort of threshold and people start appraising your work more honestly. Eventually people expect you to git gud. You’re expected to produce something worthwhile. I feel like I’ve crossed that threshold. I’m no longer expecting a pat on the head for trying so hard, I’m expecting genuine criticism. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but sometimes the internet isn’t really good at constructive criticism.
On the other hand, I really enjoy composing. The up-front investment is lower. If a programming project runs into the ground, it usually means you’ve wasted weeks or even months of your life. But if an individual song goes bad, it’s not a big deal. You probably won’t sink more than a few hours into a composition before it’s clear it isn’t working. It’s easy to step back, realize you’ve hit a dead end, and hit the “New Project” button without saving your changes.
Also, it feels good to improve at something. I’ve been programming in one form or another since 1984 or so. It takes a lot of work to improve at this stage of the game. In fact, it takes a lot of effort just to keep up with the pace of changes. (Particularly now that it’s no longer my day job.) Meanwhile, I can get tangible improvement out of the hours I sink into music, and that knowledge isn’t going to go “stale” in the same way that programming knowledge will.
All of this means that I’ve been doing a lot of composing, and I’ve been throwing 98% of it away without posting it and without turning my lessons into blog posts. This is not an exaggeration; About 1 in 50 of my attempts ends up posted to my Soundcloud page, and the rest are either deleted or saved into the vast directory of failed experiments as junk1, junk2… junk50, junk51, etc. I’m not sure why I bother saving them. I almost never go back to anything that’s more than a week old.
Sometimes I’ll end up with a tune that just isn’t quite working. Maybe the basic chord progression and baseline work, but the rhythm is boring and the melody is too flat and/or repetitive. Rather than re-working the problem areas, it’s usually easier (or more fun) to start a whole new project.
DAW Blues
DAW stands for Digital Audio Workstation. It’s the software you use to make music. For the last two and a half years I’ve been using Magix Music Maker, and I’ve really grown to hate it.
- Window placement is driven by chaos theory and madness. Sometimes I’ll open a window to edit an instrument and it will be shoved off the top of the monitor. I’ve tried every windows shortcut and trick to bring the window back and nothing works. When this happens you have to close the entire program and re-start to get the window back. This is annoying because…
- The splash screen is system-modal. When the program starts up, there’s a splash screen to look at while all the crap is loaded. Fine. That’s normal. Except, some sadistic ninny made this window a fixed size, non-movable, and always on top. It sits right in the middle of my main monitor for thirty seconds, which means I can’t just switch to another window. I can’t use my computer while this program loads.
- No sidechain tools. Sidechain is where you link two totally different instruments together by linking the volume of one to the notes of another. The most common usage is to have an instrument “duck” its volume for a split second as the kick drum hits. It’s used all the time in electronic dance music and is one of the things that gives the genre its particular feel. It creates the “pumping” effect where an instrument will rise and fall in opposition to the beat. This is a fairly basic effect, and MMM can’t do it. There are general plugins for this, but they don’t seem to work right. If you close a project and re-open it later, the links between instruments will vanish, or even be reversed. I don’t know if I should blame the plugin or MMM for this, but it’s silly that something so simple should be so hard.
- A thousand interface irritations. The note editor zooms out by just a bit when you open the window. So if you’re switching between many instruments very quickly, the notes will get smaller and smaller and I have to keep stopping to correct this. Mixing requires you to have three different floating windows open at once. The play / pause / stop controls take up a huge chunk of screen space and can’t be resized. Normal windows shortcuts (like ALT-F to open File menu) don’t work. The automation tools (stuff that enables you to change volume, panning, cutoff frequency, etc) is so rudimentary it’s basically useless. There’s a button that I need all the time to switch between editing different note effects. This button is REALLY tiny. Worse, the button opens a drop-down box what will instantly re-close if the mouse button is down. So you have to hit this tiny button really FAST. It’s just… how did this pass testing? Why has this obvious problem persisted through the last 3 annual iterations of MMM? Amazing.
- Wait, where did my favorite instrument go? I’ve been buying the yearly versions of MMM. Each edition comes with a collection of new instruments and samples. I’ve had to re-install MMM several times over the last couple of years. I had to migrate hard drives a few times. Also, upgrading Windows always causes chaos with MMM that obliges me to re-install. No matter how many times I re-install MMM, I never get the same collection of instruments in the same order. Instruments vanish. Or end up duplicated. Or get tucked into odd sub-categories. Sometimes it will complain about licensing. In the end, I never know what I’m going to have available or where it will appear.
- The program is slow. Just scrolling horizontally through a project causes the machine to chug. I have no idea what’s going on or what it’s doing to my poor CPU, but this is ridiculous.
The Search for a better DAW…
Every few months Magic Music Maker will annoy me enough that I’ll go shopping for a new DAW, and I always run into the same rut. Either something is way too expensive, or it’s really focused on real musicians and not so much on hacks like me that “play” by arranging notes on a grid, or the workflow is confusing and incomprehensible. I hate MMM, but it seems to be the only DAW that can do what I want in my price range.
Most DAW’s cost $300 or more. That’s reasonable. This is specialty software for professionals. It’s complex software. It’s the kind of software that – assuming you’ve got the skills – you can use to earn a living. $300 or even $800 (not uncommon) is not too much to ask for that sort of thing.
But it is more than I’m willing to pay. Even if Bill Gates showed up at my door and said, “Shamus, I really enjoy your fresh jams that you make on the computer. Here is $800 for music software.” I doubt I could bring myself to spend it on a DAW. I’d probably buy a graphics card, some games, go to the movies with the family, and then come home and start complaining about Magix Music Maker again.
I am not going to earn a living with this. This is a hobby, and at my skill level I don’t need half of the available features. What I really want is something less than $100, although I might be willing to go for $200 if I found something that was really nice.
I’ve downloaded many demo versions of various DAWs. By far my favorite is Cubase. I was able to jump in and use Cubase without even reading any tutorials. Everything made sense and felt just right. However, Cubase has some obnoxious DRM that I just can’t stomach. You need to download some special licensing driver. Which… fine. That’s dumb, but fine. But you also need a USB dongle. Which you have to buy yourself. It’s like one of those old videogames that required a code book to run the game, expect the code book was sold separately.
No. Just… no. This is too stupid. I’m not going to pay for a USB deviceAlso, I’m out of USB ports. I’ve got this horrible nest of USB cables feeding into a daisy-chain of USB hubs, and the whole thing is so heavy it barely stays plugged in. I’m not eager to add more crap to that mess. Particularly not for such a stupid reason. so I can install a special driver so I can ask the USB device for permission to run my own damn software. I’ve made a lot of compromises regarding DRM over the years, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be willing to tolerate something that stupid.
STOP!
I was all set to list a few more DAWs and the frustrations of my search, but as I was researching this post I found a couple of new ones that I overlooked the last time I tried this. I should probably split this blog post so the navel-gazing at the start is in a different post than the DAW rant, but to be honest right now I just want to post this now and go download some DAWs.
I may not be getting better at music, but the music seems to be lowering the quality of my blog writing. That’s gotta count for something.
Footnotes:
[1] Also, I’m out of USB ports. I’ve got this horrible nest of USB cables feeding into a daisy-chain of USB hubs, and the whole thing is so heavy it barely stays plugged in. I’m not eager to add more crap to that mess. Particularly not for such a stupid reason.
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Have you tried Reaper yet? It is fully functional, used by professional studios, includes lots of free plugins, and only costs $60 for the non-commercial license. I have been using it for years in music creation, and have never needed anything more. Plus, it is relatively easy to use.
Thanks! I’ll add it to the list of candidates. (Also, their website is surprisingly witty.)
Reaper videos are here http://www.reaper.fm/videos.php
Should make evaluation (at a glance) easier.
Also you probably qualify for the discounted price of 60 bucks (rather than 225 bucks).
The demo also includes all features, and lasts two months.
I was just about to recommend Reaper too. I used it while following an online course, “Survey on Music Technology”, which you can find on Coursera (and which I recommend, too). The people behind the course recommend Reaper too, in particular because of the generous free evaluation period. For the course, I had to work on a simple project with a DAW and Reaper is really nice to work with.
Reaper is free, I believe, but magix music maker usually works pretty well. At least, I think that’s the DAWs you have.
If you’re looking into working with a new one, I would try Sonar X3. It’s $99, but the price is worth it and it has a good interface.
I was also thinking of asking if you’d tried Reaper yet. It’s the one I’ve used (though it’s been awhile), it has a hobbyist price, and it can do a lot of stuff and do it more smoothly than I remember Pro Tools doing it (…4 years ago). The only big worry is that it seems geared toward recording rather than composing.
Update: I just decided to try their new musical notation editor and, whether you’re using the piano roll / grid mode or the old-school musical notation mode, how to actually make a MIDI section from scratch is easy, but not obvious:
1. Track -> Insert virtual instrument on new track
2. Pick a VSTi (virtual instrument). I think it comes with a couple, but you can also find others online, which you may already know if MMM uses the same thing.
3. Ctrl+click and drag on the main timeline thing to make a section of MIDI that you can manually edit (as opposed to making it by recording input from a MIDI keyboard).
4. Double-click that new section you just made to bring up the MIDI editor.
5. Resize the window to taste, select your edit mode with the buttons at the top, and you’re good to go!
I’ll add my voice to those recommending Reaper. It’s what I’ve used in my own music experimentation.
I’m going to be “That Guy” here, and namedrop the open-source option: LMMS. It’s a multi-platform DAW that’s been around for a while, and is still being maintained. I didn’t get too far into it before discovering that I had no musical talent whatsoever, but I appreciated its modular design.
Another thing you might get a kick out of: Sonic Pi. It’s a “live-coding” environment, based on Ruby. The basic idea is that you write code that describes music, press “Run”, and get the music you wrote. Make some changes, hit “Run” again, and the music seamlessly switches to the new code. It’s a really fun mix of improv and coding, and one of the best uses for functional programming languages I’ve seen. I’d love to see what you would come up with.
I should probably try LMMS again, way back it crashed on me. (not unusual for multiplatform projects)
But hopefully it’s matured more now.
LMMS is one of the favoured options at my university. The modularity allows for some interesting cross-genre work. Plus it’s a bit more fluid than working with the composition software provided by the course, which tends to be score based (Sibelius, etc.).
I think Shamus has mentioned LMMS last time he was shopping around though, but I can’t remember what the issues were?
LMMS is SUPER groovy, powerful, useful, intuitive, and free. It’s my favorite so far, EXCEPT…
The piano roll is horrendous. The move / copy / select key modifiers are different from every other DAW I’ve ever used, which leads to chains of mistakes that are equal parts absurd, hilarious, and infuriating.
The vertical grid lines have nothing to do with the actual grid snap settings, which I find annoying and disorienting. There’s no way to tell it to automatically make notes the same size as the grid. If you change the grid to 1/16, you must also change the note size to 1/16 to match. So the program will snap notes to a grid you can’t see and which it doesn’t use. It’s like someone got halfway done with the feature and forgot to finish it.
The windows in LMMS are are children of the parent window, which means I can’t put the piano roll on my second monitor. So LMMS is a one-monitor program.
It’s everything I want, except the one window where I’ll spend 99% of my time is frustratingly designed / unfinished.
Well, you can always combine your interests and recompile it to meet your own specifications. ;P (I know this is not as easy as all that.)
I think the reason was how horrible the piano roll looked, but it seems to have changed for the better (just a simple black background with a grid now)
Ah, Sibelius. Wow, I spent way too much time patiently entering in scores note by note on that program. I loathed the students who had piano skills and could just play the score in on the midi keyboards in the music computer room, well until I found one who needed algebra tutoring and was willing to put my compositions in the program so I could hear ’em in exchange.
Yes, I was a music composition minor who had no idea what most of my music sounded like until I put it in a computer to play it for me. I can read music in terms of “Hey, middle C, a#, ect. in all 4 clefts (though the two moveable c ones require more thought)” but that doesn’t mean I have any clue what it sounds like. I could generally figure it out since I can sing all the common intervals on queue, but it was a longer and more difficult process than making the computer do it for me. Probably shouldn’t have started my musical education with a Bb clarinet, the transposition kinda screwed up my sense of pitch when looking at a score.
I use LMMS exclusively now for my music hacks. It works with VST instruments, of which there’s a huge number of free and cheap available options, as well as many of its own, including side chain compression.
Also, as open source software, you can play with programming up your own instruments.
The project is quite actively developed now, and I find that bugs are quickly squashed once they have been properly identified. I usually run the master git branch, which is usually quite stable.
Wow, a USB dongle? How very 1990s.
I’ve been running into a similar problem looking for desktop publishing software. The work I do a handful of times a year is pushing the absolute limits of what word processing software can do. I need something better. But “better” starts at $600, which is hard to justify for a handful of non-paying, hobbyist projects. Oh, and Adobe can go screw themselves, I am not renting software. (I regret not buying a cheap out-of-date-but-still-in-shrink copy of InDesign back when they were widely available.) The flagship open source offering (Scribus) is inexplicably awful. (I guess maybe if you don’t care about automatically generate tables of contents, or easily formatted tables, maybe it’s okay?)
I’m despite enough to take another run at LaTeX. Which isn’t pretty terrible, although with weird gaps in its mindset (balanced columns are surprisingly fiddly), and for a design that is theoretically about separating content from formatting, I found I spent a hell of a lot of time fretting about formatting.
Speaking as a professional in this field… here are some opinions that might or might not be useful.
The way I see it, your workable, quality option is to hoard all your projects into a single month, rent InDesign, export PDFs of your finished work, and stop renting InDesign. (If you need ongoing access to live files this won’t work.)
Your quality, but maybe not workable, alternative is Quark. It’s still stupid expensive and it’s going to feel like bloatware, but I believe you can still buy it, not rent it.
The workable, but not quality, alternative is Publisher (assuming you’re on Windows, which I am not, so bear with me here). Publisher is not good, but if you’re not a pro, it’ll probably get you where you need to go.
Seems like rental’s the way software is going. I can kind of see how it makes sense, since there’s always more features to add, bugs to fix, etc. Since nothing’s ever done, it’s going to need ongoing revenue to pay for the development. Arguably this is functionally equivalent to just buying a new version of the same software every year or two. So I guess the only thing that is ever “done” would be single-player games, and software that doesn’t need to change very often, like…tax software?
Tax software is yearly; even if tax law hasn’t changed in that interval (ha ha), the bugs from the previous attempt to interpret the tangled mess need to be fixed for serious legal and financial reasons. Barring Sim City taxes, that’s how it’s going to be.
SaaS (Software as a Service) makes perfect sense for businesses; tech support is usually included in the contract, and it’s much simpler to do that tech support as well as the administration because you don’t have half a dozen different versions depending on the date particular equipment was set up. It’s also nice and simple to add or revoke licenses depending on your employee count. For consumers, this is kind of overkill when you can work around any problems your software does have.
License dongles are ubiquitous in the science world. I think the primary reason is that academics are notorious for being cheap weasels. They’ll pontificate on research ethics, but when the IRB isn’t involved, they’ll cut corners and save a buck however they can.
Not that a license dongle is a surefire way to stop piracy, but it seems to be enough of a hurdle that people don’t casually cross that line.
Most of those scientific dongle software packages run in the neighbourhood of $10k, with yearly re-licensing costs around $1.5-$2k. That level of protection for that cost is a bit more understandable.
(Most of these programs also probably sell ~1000 copies globally, if that.)
Cubase is that frickin’ old–I remember my high school music teacher showing it to us (on an Atari ST!), and it was the first time I’d ever heard of a dongle. I’m kind of shocked it’s still around–I though ProTools had completely supplanted it as the industry top dog.
If you have an unused PCI-E x1 card slot, you could clean up some of those USB hubs by putting in one of these: http://a.co/1n6czqo (a 5-USB-port PCI-E card)
Alternately, if you’ve got an extra USB 3.0 mobo header (or one of the above cards with the right header on it) and an extra 5.25″ bay on the front of your desktop, you could put in one of these: http://a.co/51Yznjw (a 7-USB-port 5.25″ front panel)
I can’t help with music software, but daisy-chaining that many USB hubs just sounds painful.
Are you going to make another album collection? I ask because I will cheerfully download and listen to everything you release, but I prefer to take them in album form rather than individual tracks… if album form is in the cards. If you release something and it’s going to be a single forever, that’s OK, I’ll take it like that. ;)
I am planning on gathering up a bunch of this year’s tracks into an album. No timeframe yet, but I think I’ll call it when I’ve got ~3 more tracks.
Yay, thank you!
Don’t forget about Adobe Audition, it can handle VST instruments etc.
Hammer time?
Collaborate, listen?
Any plans to release a hip-hop album, Shamus? You could call yourself ’20 Sides’. No? Righto.
Straight outta Pittsburgh, canny blogger called Shamus Young
Pretty clear that English is his mother tongue
Gets a big kick, from a nitpick
Do they eat? Because if not they’re gonna get sick
But you know it’s not all about complaining
Head on over if you need something explaining
In broad terms, that’ll suit if you’re an amateur
With deep insight that you might find to be challenging yer
Has a pal called Mumbles, she likes the wrumbles
Careful or she’ll cook us in a pot like gumbo
Or maybe bake us in a cake? Why
My eyebrow is pointing right up at the sky
Who else? There’s Josh Viel
Tried to fix the faucet seal, but forced it
Now he can’t get a drink but can only make the sink clink
While Chris ‘Campster’ Franklin is dropping think links
He won’t play Cluedo or say ludo
Narrative dissonance for the fans
It’s not in his plans
Don’t make him act the literary hipster
Or you know that he’ll have to come and git yer
Talk you through it, calmly and sincerely
Until the YouTube commenters see clearly
Or Rutskarn forgets his A-B-C, see
I can’t see either ever happ’nin’, me
When he’s on the Diecast, it’s always fun
Except when you know that he’s prepping for a pun
If we’re angry Shamus’ll tame us; for it he’s famous
And we’ll feel like less of an ignoramus
It’s down to him they’re all together, hey
If down to me I would wish it lasts forever, yay!
This is one of the best comments I have ever read.
And I don’t even like rap music.
Why thankyou! *blushes* It’s pretty ropey rap if we’re honest – and I believe I may have developed some additional new insight into its complexities as an art form… – but it was a lot of fun to cobble together, and I’m glad someone else liked it! :D
This is stupendous, superb work.
Awww, thanks! :D
You know, that’s funny, because I’ve spent probably $600 on FL Studio over the last few years (base software and plugins), and while I really like the program and have done a lot (of experiments) with it…I’m in the same boat. I don’t use it nearly as much as I’d like for that price.
(Then again, I have a more-than-full-time traditional day job taking up most of my time and my “music time” is limited. Which is quite sad.)
Spending $40 on grain, hops, and yeast for a batch of homebrew has been adding up over the course of 10 years and hundreds of gallons, but the initial $300 I laid out buying gear and equipment from a friend getting out of the hobby has saved me hundreds in frustrations. Money carefully spent can make a hobby more enjoyable. You just need to remember that, unless the hobby is collecting, getting the stuff is less important than using it!
I’m sure it’s a well-known enough DAW that you’ve probably already encountered it, and its price point might be an issue if you’re not already sold on the idea of outright purchasing a replacement. But Propellerheads’ Reason has been my go-to program for over a decade after my first foray of – ahem – “free trials” of everything else. Prior to Reason, FL Studio was probably my favorite. And while I saw the benefits of all the other competition from Ableton, Cubase, and others, I found that it was their abstracted interfaces that was thwarting me creatively.
I think of myself as a rather technical-minded person, but I hated how editing any part of my instrument/effects so often required a separate pop-up or side-window that would either get buried by a dozen others or got de-emphasized by everything else up on the screen. Even something like FL, which I actually quite admire for its flexibility and general ease of use (I love its sequencer), inevitably throws up these roadblocks that put me off.
By comparison, Reason felt very intuitive out-of-the-box. It very effectively emulates the “hardware rack” experience you get from physical gear, complete with the ability to flip to its backside and manipulate Audio/CV wiring. That’s a huge boon if you’re somebody that can often easily visualize an arrangement or signal flow, but don’t have a lot of patience translating those ideas through a myriad of seemingly disconnected workspaces and hidden features. If you have a strong visual image of how an ensemble should work or how an audio source should course through a series of FX chains, you can probably easily implement it in Reason, at least before getting into something more intimidating in Reaktor Land.
There are some trade-offs; if there’s a VST library you’ve fallen in love with over time, you’re not going to be able to use those within Reason. You’re largely locked down to the current suite of synthesizes, samplers, and FX units it provides, and any Rack Extensions (their version of plugins) have to be purchased from Propellerheads’ absurdly-priced shop. But truth be told, I’ve never felt the urge to even look at it. If you’re clever enough, you can usually find a way to implement their features yourself with a Combinator patch. And for every premium Rack Extension that cost over a hundred dollars that I might be interested in (like classic drum machine emulators and such), I’ve found plenty of free ReFills that do the trick just fine.
The two primary upsides I can see to this are:
1) Reason has been wonderfully stable for all the time I’ve used it. It’s probably crashed on me once in the last ten years of using it, whereas I can think of plenty of times with other DAWs where my amazing (and admittedly overloaded) patchwork of VSTs would eventually cause it to shit the bed, often at really inopportune times.
2) Since you go in knowing that there are some hard limits on your (still fairly ample) toolset, it can definitely help you focus on getting straight to plopping in some “phat” sounds and working on composition. Don’t get me wrong; I still spend far too much time noodling about even with smaller palette of instruments. But it beats spending ages looking through my hundreds of plugins, wondering “GRRRRR SO MANY CHOICES, WHERE THE FUCK SHOULD I START”. It’s the old adage of being more creative when working within restrictions. And if you are bored and without ideas, it’s pretty easy to accidentally stumble into something cool if you just mess around.
I’ve lately been having some of my own issues with writer’s block, and I feel like I too have been sharing in the sentiments you described. I’m not sure if I would have actually purchased a license for it if I knew this is where I’d end up today, although I can’t say I regret my decision. If you don’t mind a bit of a paradigm shift in how a DAW is approached, I’d still recommend giving it a trial run. Unless, like me, you find yourself having little patience for learning something “new” all over again. :)
Additional Notes:
– If you take a little time, you can still slave Reason to another program and get a lot of the benefits from the host DAW that you still want. For a long time I would do most of my composing in Reason, but I’d do all the mixing and effect processing in FL (yay I can still use my VSTs!). And if I wanted to do some additional sequencing, I could do it right there instead of going back to Reason. My understanding is that a lot of producers use Reason this way, especially if they’re not big fans of the built-in sequencer.
– The Subtractor instrument is my favorite instrument of all time. Seriously, I don’t even really touch the other two “big hitters” that come with Reason (Maelstrom and Thor) outside of a few niche patches or as FX units. It has just the right amount of upfront accessibility and can produce an astonishingly powerful range of sounds with only a few knob/slider tweaks. Maybe it’s because I’m very familiar with it at this point, but it feels like there’s just less fussy bullshit involved if you just want to get a patch going and hit the track. And like everything else in Reason, there’s a back panel if you want to go deeper. It’s the instrument I use for everything, from bass, to pads, to leads, to little synthetic drum kits when I’m bored of samples. It’s the synth of my heart. <3
-I am not musically trained in any capacity, unlike some of my friends who have a good grasp of music theory. The idea of actually “writing a tune” bores the hell out of me, and I have a lot more fun just making sounds and sequences than I do trying to create a melody. Don’t get me wrong; I sometimes envy their ability to create songs that that wouldn’t be out of place on my radio. But I’m more the kinda guy that’s like “Check this! I took this single handclap sample and made it function as a standalone percussive track, then turned into a bass line, then stretched it into an ambient pad! Neat, huh?”. I know people more melodically-inclined than myself who don’t like using Reason’s sequencer versus others, so it’s a consideration to make.
-I keep coming back and editing in notes… Any way, DRM. Reason haz it. They used to require a dongle for some of the later versions (which you can still set up for offline use), but otherwise it requires an account login. I don’t like it, but I’ve decided I’ll suffer it. Seems like this is the way a lot of software will be going, and I’m tired of fighting against the tide.
I imagine trying to roll your own DAW is not quite the optimal solution, either.
Have you encountered Sunvox? I’m not sure it qualifies as a DAW exactly, but it’s a node-based tracker/synth, so it works pretty well for electronic stuff. I find it has a pretty impressive interface for freeware, though I’m on a Mac, so I can’t guarantee the Windows version is free of eldritch horror…
I will +1 for Sunvox. It’s a fantastic piece of kit that functions flawlessly on the Windows, Mac, Ubuntu and Android systems I have it installed on. It’s free, and self contained.
It does have a steep but short learning curve and is completely inappropriate for recording live instruments, but for electronic music I really don’t think it can be beaten. Side-chaining is simple and the workflow fits a programmer mentality perfectly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fB1Hh3NATw
I don’t listen to a lot of electronic music, but the stuff I do listen to is typically very ambient. similar to your music, but this ambience usually knits itself throughout the song. This song’s pretty good.
How do you feel about ModPlug, or OpenMPT? Does that fit the bill for what you’re trying to do? I don’t know about make ng music, but have a friend who uses it to make his stuff.
https://openmpt.org
Hey Shamus. It isn’t a DAW, but have you tried Famitracker? It’s free composing software that emulates the sounds of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Obviously, you won’t be making thumping club music like you seem to favour (though some people get close), but it’s cake to use. Additionally, I’ve found that the limitations it imposes on you can actually streamline your thinking and force you to be more creative. I’m a largely self-taught composer like yourself, and I swear by it.
So what you are saying is that magix music maker is the windows of audio software?
Technically,you are doing just that.Although,perversely,the worse the piece of software you get,the more content you can squeeze out of it,since you mostly write about it when it doesnt work than when it does.
Soundcloud links are dead for me. Using latest firefox version, no ad-/scriptblocker or anything active.
I’m going to listen to the tracks posted, and then write my critiques of them. Hopefully some of the feedback will be constructive.
Muh Spaceship:
Starts off really strong. It just “feels” like a spaceship (some of this may be influenced by my young viewing of Star Trek TOS). Around 1:30 you can almost feel the jump to warp and the transition into the science-y parts of the ship. At 3:00 we pass into engineering with engine hum in the background, which might drag on just a few seconds too long – by 3:30 it’s gotten kind of same-y. Then around 4:00 there’s a transition I would describe as passing through the hull and taking the view to space, and the song changes entirely. The last minute of the song sounds like a different song altogether, with a brief return to the original theme with the ship finally passing out of sight at the end.
Crossfade:
Good backbeat, slow build adding more parts. You start to lose the backbeat in the crowd around 1:30, but a new beat comes back up a few seconds later so you don’t have much time to miss it. A good low-key bridge, and the old beat comes back in around 2:35 like your friend at the club you briefly lost in the crowd. The glowsticks come out around 3:00 and we spend maybe ten seconds too long with them before the beat comes back again to close us out.
LED Shoes:
Our shoes start out tapping out a solid beat on the piano tiles, with some more elaborate dance moves coming in before the beat gets too tired. Nothing too busy; the shoes go out for a walk around 0:30, leaving downtown and passing into suburbia around 1:04, transitioning from there to full-blown nature at 1:32, where we get some birds and trees to enjoy for about thirty seconds before coming back to town. Time begins to accelerate at 2:18, and our shoes go on an adventure through town until the sun starts going down around 2:53, with lights twinkling on around town as our shoes continue their trek. The shoes reach their destination at 3:42, where the tapping beat start our their performance. The concert starts at 4:09, with shoes and company playing out a pleasant minute show before closing with a fade.
Have you tried Studio One from PreSonus?
They have a free version: https://shop.presonus.com/products/software/studio-one-prods/Studio-One-3-Digital-Downloads/Studio-One-3-Prime
I don’t know how much it’ll work for you, but I spent a little while playing with – a full version of it, a couple years ago and liked it, but I wasn’t really doing the same things you are.
Let me recommend another interesting one to the list: Renoise. It’s polished, not super expensive, and its scriptable via Lua.