Making electronic music

jordan282

jordan282

jordan282

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What programs do people like Skrillex, chase and status use to make their music? I am looking at making some drum n bass / dubstep because all you need is a computer to make some awesome music. Anybody done it them selves?
 
Macky said:
Fruity Loops is one of the more popular I think.
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Not particularly, it's often what people start out on.

Skrillex uses Ableton Live, but he also records his own samples, compresses them, fiddles with them, feeds them through a gazillion presets and processes and then pushes them into Ableton/Pro Tools and so on. Some producers uses Fruity Loops, but most do not.

Reason is another, but it's rather like Fruity Loops. People start out on it and then move into bigger things.

As a beginner, I would recommend you get Fruity Loops and Native Instruments Massive. But really, it's a minefield to get into and it's so goddamn confusing.

(Sources would be a lot of my friends are producers)
 
pretty sure chase & status use logic with a load of plugins (more than likely massive and possibly a few analogue modelling synths [for bass etc]).

i know logistics and nu:tone (as well as london elektricity) use reason.
 
FL studio is good for beginners, also lots of instrumentals for popular songs are done on FL studio, but they are mostly hip hop instrumentals.

If you have a mac there is Logic/Logic pro which is apparently very easy to use.

Cakewalk sonar is also an option.

Steinberg Cubase is also a good program.

I use Reason 5, it has the look and feel of a rack of synths and mixers, you can get some very warm and deep sounds however I haven't touched it in quite a while.

Also Reason 5 doesn't support VST's but you could take that as a positive or negative.

Ableton is used a lot these days, don't know much about the program.

Best thing to do is to try a demo, most demos are free.
 
Maccy said:
I use Ableton to create samples/sounds and then arrange in Logic.
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This basically, most top producers use Logic (with bundles of plugins) and/or Ableton.

Reason, Cubase etc were all once very popular but really have fallen by the wayside.
 
Fens said:
This basically, most top producers use Logic (with bundles of plugins) and/or Ableton.

Reason, Cubase etc were all once very popular but really have fallen by the wayside.
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No they haven't.

Well, I don't think Cubase has. Ableton (can) work in a completely different way to cubase, which is great for creating lots of little parts and then easily arranging them into a song, via Ableton Launchpad, for example.

I think Ableton is probably THE product to use, for your needs. There are loads of free VSTs out there, but the ones that seem to get used the most are NI's Massive, or whoever else makes Zebra2 or Cakewalk's Z3ta.

There's also Lennard Addink's Sylenth1 (www.lennardigital.com) - none of these are free, but they all can sound amazing.

Check out some 3rd party libraries - I suggest looking at Adam Szabo's soundsets for some of the above:
http://www.adamszabo.com/category/sounds/adam-van-baker-soundsets/
 
A few years back i was fairly heavily into Reaktor. Amazing what it can do. Reason is a good place to start demo wise, think you can pick up Rebirth for free these days. Midi controller is highly recommended if you want to invest in computer music
 
Reason is one of the bigger ones and cheap, Ableton, Protools, Fruityloops

Fens said:
Reason, Cubase etc were all once very popular but really have fallen by the wayside.
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Rubbish - just listen to most dance music and I'm sure Reason comes up at least equal to ProTools.

Difference with ProTools is the go-to for music creation and mastering where as Reason is 'limited' in the electronic music field.

I can't recall who at the moment but I recall a big band recently produced their album on Cubase. Can't say I'd pick it for electronic music though as I don't find it the must user friendly piece of software.
 
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cubase is still used by a helluva lot of producers, especially with reason plugged into it (as it has a better audio engine than reason). it's so widely used as it's dirt cheap and has a brilliant engine (still not as good as logics imo, but on par at least with ableton).

logic with a ****-ton of extra synths & plugins, decent audio interface and quality monitors and you're 1/2 way there really :) just need a mastering suite with valve compressors/eq's and you'll be making sweet noise :p
 
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