PC Softsynths and Studios for Spendthrift Amateurs

HadjiQuest

I'm a poor college student with a lot of free time and few friends. Recently, I've been interested in getting some sort of softsynth or full blown music suite to play around with and use to learn more about composition. There seem to be a lot of options, but most of them seem incredibly expensive and geared towards professionals.

For $200 or less (preferably $150 or less), I'm wondering if there's a specific program or suite that someone could recommend? I played with Jeskola Buzz for a little bit and liked it, although it was somewhat needlessly complicated and crashed often.

A dynamic soft-synth is the thing I'm most interested in, but if possible I'd also like to be able to plug a guitar or bass in as well to process and record. Anything that came bundled with lots of tutorials and lessons would be appreciated as well.

So, can anyone help?

Edit: I've been reading a little more into it, and know that I'll need a sequencer now as a base, and I will want one that has input recording from instruments.

Raern

http://www.reaper.fm
Cheap for a home user, and it's uncrippled shareware so you can try everything before buying.

HadjiQuest

I am going to bump this just one time to try and get some further opinions hopefully as people get off of work and come home for the day.

Count Funkula

A little more expensive, but most likely the last soft synth/virtual studio suite you will ever need to buy. (Until the next version comes out, but upgrades are always cheaper.)

http://www.propellerheads.se/products/reason/

Thirty-3

Seconding Reaper. Fully featured Digital Audio Workstation that's quite cheap for the home user.

Also, KVR is pretty much the go to place for softsynths. Search by 'free', try a few different things and have fun with it.

http://www.kvraudio.com/get.php

HadjiQuest

Uhh, I don't know if I can use Reaper because I don't own any midi keyboards or instruments yet. Is there someway to circumvent that? I know fruity loops and many other programs give you a wide range of options to create stuff without hardware inputs, but I can't find any useful tutorials on it for reaper.

Edit: Nevermind, found it.

Edit2: This stuff is pretty cool, but it's making me realize that I kind of need a soundcard beyond my builtin. Also, it's not quite as intuitive as I'd like, and the wiki they have is pretty terrible.

virgilsamms

I don't have any experience with it to be honest, but you might try LMMS, it's free. That and audacity for recording instruments will take you a long way towards creating music.

Typhoid Manny

reaper's really really good, but the piano roll is kind of awful since it's mostly geared towards recording real instruments. it's also free for all intents and purposes if you're stingy, or $40 if you want to support an awesome project, which you should.

as far as sequencing goes, you can get the baseline version of FL Studio for like a hundred bucks, which you can load as a VST in reaper, or export the loops from FL and import them to reaper as .wavs. the big advantage of FL over reason is that it can use VST plugins, of which there are roughly a metric fuckton, and some of them are really goddamned good.

you could even get away with using the demo version of FL if you're exporting your loops, but that's not advisable since you can't save in the demo version and it'd be a monumental pain in the ass, if not completely impossible, to exactly recreate a synth patch or drumloop after the fact if you decide you don't like something about it.

lastly, if you're recording real instruments, you'll want a USB soundcard (it doesn't need to be fancy) and possibly a small mixer to plug stuff into. all told you're looking at just around your budget.

edit: also, go here for some really interesting, unique instruments and effects

HadjiQuest

Typhoid Manny wrote: »

reaper's really really good, but the piano roll is kind of awful since it's mostly geared towards recording real instruments. it's also free for all intents and purposes if you're stingy, or $40 if you want to support an awesome project, which you should.

as far as sequencing goes, you can get the baseline version of FL Studio for like a hundred bucks, which you can load as a VST in reaper, or export the loops from FL and import them to reaper as .wavs. the big advantage of FL over reason is that it can use VST plugins, of which there are roughly a metric fuckton, and some of them are really goddamned good.

you could even get away with using the demo version of FL if you're exporting your loops, but that's not advisable since you can't save in the demo version and it'd be a monumental pain in the ass, if not completely impossible, to exactly recreate a synth patch or drumloop after the fact if you decide you don't like something about it.

lastly, if you're recording real instruments, you'll want a USB soundcard (it doesn't need to be fancy) and possibly a small mixer to plug stuff into. all told you're looking at just around your budget.

edit: also, go here for some really interesting, unique instruments and effects

Excellent. This is the type of information I've been looking for, particularly after playing around in reaper for the last couple hours. I'm going to try out a couple more freeware and shareware programs in the next couple days to see what's what, and I may have a couple more questions about this stuff tomorrow or Wednesday.

HadjiQuest

virgilsamms wrote: »

I don't have any experience with it to be honest, but you might try LMMS, it's free. That and audacity for recording instruments will take you a long way towards creating music.

LMMS is great, and it's been by far the most user friendly package of the bunch so far, but the Windows version crashes constantly.

Now that I've been throwing myself into these things a little, are there any good sources for compositional tutorials and the like?