I would love to know whether anyone has any experience using the Ableton Push 2 and has any views on it. And if anyone has used Ableton Live 9 or 10 - or any other DAW - and can share thoughts, that would be interesting too.
And, if you have no idea what this is, please feel free to move swiftly on..!
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I never liked Ableton, I found the wave editor really annoying.
If you can use one, then you'll pick up other fairly quickly. The only exception I found was fruity loops, could never get my head around that.
Additionally I have had issues with some external sound cards functioning with Windows 10. It would appear older models have pulled support.
Got Cubase and Reaper, using Reaper mainly for its simplicity, and excellent YouTube tutorials. Also most of my work is acoustic and I've integrated Reaper with Sibelius (scoring) which is a must for me. Reaper does have scoring option but nothing like Sibelius.
and for fun Korg Gadget on the iPad / iPhone. I totally love it. Although, drives my wife insane. Makes hour long journeys last minutes. Bit crap if you want to hook a guitar / your voice up to it.
i was given a copy of Ableton Live (the cheap version might be called Live lite) and it was easy to use probably easier than Cubase if you’re not used to Cubase. I get the impression Ableton Live is more ‘dance’ oriented. Never used Push.
It's pretty hard to say. Depends what sort of music you're into and whether or not you find a particular software easy to use. I mess about with electronic/dance stuff and found fruity loops pretty easy to pick up but struggled with Ableton and a few others I tried. Most have free trials/demo versions so you can see if you get on with them or not.
If you're into electronic music in any form I highly recommend looking into maschine. The software comes with it is specifically made for it so as a beginner you wouldn't need anything else for a while
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/maschine/production-systems/
I've settled on Reaper - I find it really simple for recording, manipulating and re-routing audio from my hardware instruments, so does the trick for me. It has a very generous trial policy.
Well it’s like anything where men get involved and for a few pounds more you can get a better and better set up. Before you know it you’ve spent a hypothetical £3k, so I had to rein things in a little. Most recently I bought a laptop so I can take it out and about and used a company that will build it to your spec rather than get something off the shelf or try to build it myself.
There’s also a whole Apple vs PC argument that rages on, no doubt someone will add it to this thread. Someone I know brought a top of the range Apple desktop off the shelf and it works fine running Cubase, although cost double what I paid. I always associated Apple with running Logic Pro/Notator (which I’ve never used) so have never gone down that route but there are people out there that snigger at you condescendingly if you’re not using a Mac. I’ve been using a PC since the 90s (and an Atari prior to this), I’m old enough to remember using Steinberg Pro24 prior to Cubase.
I’ve just dug out the confirmation email for the (17 inch) laptop I brought and this is the spec:
Intel Core i7 8750H "Coffee Lake", 16GB DDR4, 4GB NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti, SAMSUNG 250GB 970 EVO M.2 SSD, WD5000LPLX 2.5 SATA HDD.
And then you have to decide whether you want USB 3 / USB C / Thunderbolt – to be honest a lot of this is beyond me and I just took advice of others.
It cost about £1250 a year ago. It works fine running Cubase for what I want to do (which is to dickabout making obscure music to send to my weird friends) but I don’t play about with massive banks of samples, etc. Things move on very quickly and you can probably get a lot more for your money now. I probably could have spent less but as a mid-life crisis purchase it was cheaper than a Harley-Davidson.
The company I used are called Scan
https://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/custom/daw-digital-audio-workstation-pcs
There are probably other, cheaper, better options about (and obviously building it yourself would save even more money) but they came recommended to me and I’m happy with what I’ve got.
There are also a lot more informed people out there than me, on music production Forums, who could give you better advice and there's lots of advice freely available on the internet.
It also has numerous virtual instrument sounds that are decent quality and you can download extra ones. You can then play the particular instrument sound you want through the music keyboard. For the drums, the different keys of the keyboard will play different parts of the drum kit. So even if you can only play the keyboard with one finger you can quickly make yourself multiple layers of a track.
You can also record audio on top. So if you make a decent backing track and want to add a real instrument /voice to it then you can.
It's very easy to use.
You also need to consider where you put these screens because they can block the sound coming from your speakers. Although studio design is a whole different subject, which if you are interested in, I would recommend the opening chapters of this book:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mixing-Secrets-Small-Studio-Presents/dp/1138556378/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=music+studio&qid=1562943566&s=books&sr=1-1
I agree, I had an old PC with a moody version of Cubase, an old Emu sampler that you had to load up with three and a quarter inch discs, I remember spending hours moving a single dial on a novation bass-station to find the ‘perfect’ sound. Several keyboards daisy-chained through numerous midi-leads, which I’d have to unplug and move around to reduce latency. I can probably get better sounds out of my iPhone now.
It was a lot of fun in the good old days but I got nothing constructive done in my life – career wise, education, self-betterment for about two years because I was sat fannying about on Cubase thinking I was creating high-art.