Prove to me that software is both good and cheap

[madmarkmagee]

400 dollars to spend on vsti plugins. Not nooby to synths but to software. I know how to use a daw. Must include a drum machine. What do you guys suggest? Thanks for your help.

[CS_TBL]

Investigate freeware before you buy stuff.

Drum machine? What kind? Something with acoustic samples? Or yet another pack of the kazillion freeware 808, 909, 78, Linn samples - for which you only need a simple (and possibly freeware) sample player.

[madmarkmagee]

Thanks for your reply. I do have a small amount of freeware. Don't really know what is good in that department either. Just generally assumed that non-freeware is better. I'm not after anything particular ... just what is good. I Just hear all this stuff about how we should throw our digital gear out of the window, from software types, and want to evaluate their claims. Any suggestions welcome.

[CS_TBL]

If you can shell out a little bit more, you'll have Komplete for €499 *. That will contain about everything you'll need when you're just starting out with software, including the omnipotent FM8 - see my signature for examples.

edit:
* www.thomann.de has Komplete 8 for €479, www.bax-shop.nl has Komplete 8 for €468

[Stab Frenzy]

400 dollars to spend on vsti plugins. Not nooby to synths but to software. I know how to use a daw. Must include a drum machine. What do you guys suggest? Thanks for your help.

Just plugins or do you need to buy a DAW as well? Just instruments or effects as well?

If you need a DAW Ableton Live 8 is $450, you might be able to find it cheaper than that and they have sales from time to time. It includes a sampler, drum machine and heaps of effects, although the Analog instrument costs extra, as does the FM synth, sampler, physical modelling synth etc. I own the Live 8 Suite which includes all the plugins and have found that it's enough to produce whole tracks on without any other 3rd party plugins. The full Suite is over your budget though. A free trial can be had HERE so you can see if you like it.

If you're on a mac you can get Logic Pro for $200. Honestly there isn't a better value deal out there; it has fantastic sounding synths, samplers, drum machines and effects, it's basically a complete studio on your computer. The Logic workflow doesn't agree with me so I don't use it, but I know a lot of people who love it so it should be considered if you're on the apple platform. It could even be worth crossing over to a mac just to use Logic, second hand macs can be had quite cheaply and tend to hold their value after the initial depreciation hit quite well. It's available from the mac app store directly, I don't believe a demo is available.

Reason is $450 and is another studio in a box solution, to be honest I don't really like using Reason because IMO it manages to combine the worst ergonomics of hardware and software in one product, but I haven't used it since version 2 so maybe it's better now, from the looks of things it's changed a lot and includes a lot more stuff now. There is a demo available to try it out to see if you like it, download it HERE.

Reaktor would be a good choice regardless of whether or not you already own a DAW, it's basically a fully modular studio environment that you can customise as much or as little as you want. There are a heap of instruments made by other people available to download so you could just use it as a series of instruments to start off with and then get into customising them later if you want to. You can demo it by downloading the Reaktor player HERE. It's $400.

Other options would include a cheap or free DAW and a plugin bundle, freeware VSTis, etc. I personally don't use any freeware stuff any more as when I had a lot of freeware on my machine it would sometimes cause crashes due to incompatibilities with new DAW updates and I didn't end up using them all that much anyway. I believe it's better to pay for a good product that you know will work and is supported than to save money but lose time troubleshooting computer problems caused by free plugins. I want to make music on my computer, not find and remove bugs.

Hope that's useful information, there are other things out there that I haven't covered by that should at least be a start.

[madmarkmagee]

Will check those out, thanks for your help.