[Closed] Expert Knob Twiddlers , makers of music

Bandlab is free, easy and online. Its not the most powerful but worth it for starters.

GarageBand on iPad?

Garage and on iPad

Reaper on laptop

For dance/electronic based stuff either Ableton Live or Reason would be really good though. Both have 'lite' versions for a fairly modest outlay. I can probably sort you a copy of Live lite for free actually.

If you decided to go laptop with an external sound card and some headphones for monitoring, you'd get a copy of Live lite bundled with anything from focusrite.

I'm tempted to buy a mini-midi keyboard. The Novation Launchpad mini v3 gets great reviews and they're about £90 which is just about within the 'fun toy' price point.

Bandlab is free, easy and online. Its not the most powerful but worth it for starters.

I've used Bandlab both for large orchestral projects, and also for our small band demos - it works well and has a couple of nifty features - for example, you can record your part slowly and then put it up to tempo without changing the pitch.

Considering it's free, it's great.

Buy a midi keyboard as it will make your music making much easier.

The Novation Launchkey ones are excellent, come with a range of very useful knobs and sliders depending on the size.
They also come with a copy of Ableton Live Lite 10, which is excellent for electronic music production, but also has a really good 'normal' recording and production side to it as well.
You have the Session view and the Arrangement view.

Having both Logic and Ableton, I'd now actually choose Ableton as the better (for me anyway) recording and production software.

We got our 13 year old a Launchpad mini for Christmas. Fantastic bit of kit.
Ableton Live Lite - you can quickly pick up the basics and there are plenty of online tutorials. It's very easy to lose a couple of hours just tinkering

Cheers so far, really good responses. I've seen the launchpad on social media, and it comes with software that may be a great option.

I like Reaper on PC or laptop.

I've had a MacBook Pro for 12 years and I only opened up Garageband for the first time a few weeks ago. I was amazed at how easy it is to stick a quick tune together despite having zero previous experience. The iPad has a better drum machine style sequencer which annoyingly isn't on the desktop version. The desktop version does have an amazing automatic drummer.

I've already bought an iRig thing so I can plug the bass into it but haven't recorded anything yet. I've started looking at Midi keyboards as I imagine it'll be more intuitive to play melodies than clicking the notes on the on screen piano.

I always assumed you'd need a lot of hardware to make electronic music but most stuff is well emulated digitally. Good enough for educational and messing around purposes anyway.

Personally I love Live, I just find the workflow super intuitive. As for a midi controller literally anything second hand or cheap would do a job, but a Keystep 37 or Keystep Pro would make a great creative hub.

Ps check out my new album 🙂

https://myoptik.bandcamp.com/album/nebulous

Bottle of your favourite tipple, a notepad and pen and maybe a guitar..?

@iffoverload got three , what to make phat beats. Thanks though grandad. 😀

I use reason but it was a massive struggle to learn (still learning).

I haven't used it for years but Cakewalk is now free:

https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk

Edit: And mentioned above!

Live is great.

Big fan of Tracktion / Waveform too (but then I'm biased - many years and versions ago I was on the beta team so it's workflow is kind of ingrained in me).

Hi, this was the thread where I got all the advice https://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/home-music-studio-set-up-advice/

I ended up buying a refurbished but good laptop from Tier 1 (as recommended on here) and then someone kindly gave me an Ableton Lite code that they'd got with some kit they'd purchased. I already had a decent USB mic and a the basic keyboard we had came with a midi output. My daughter has ended up having lessons in how to use Ableton as she found it a bit frustrating to get going with. She's all about the keyboard and vocals though. Mark of this parish has been playing around with a variety of electronic instruments and using Garage Band. https://soundcloud.com/user-35548233/singletrack-sunrise-flood-remix?fbclid=IwAR1HQJRgo6Dj_v-59ePlPyxa6yulxzNG6T9J2oNFHylnjEyuPBAaCxTILTk

@stwhannah cheers for the info. Do you mind me asking what spec laptop you went for? My work one may be troublesome to install stuff on without an administrator...  was it pricey?

I don’t know what constitutes pricey really! But I paid £360 for an 8gb RAM i5 Dell with a 240 SSD in their ‘grade A’ category. Basically about the cheapest I could get with those specs and not weighing too much to be carried about.

I think I suggested Tier1, everyone I've suggested it to who has bought a refurbed laptop from them has been very happy.

Save even more money and go for B grade.
The one I got had a few case scratches, but nothing else. It's been rock solid as a music/gig machine for 3 years now.

I upgraded the RAM and SSD myself, it ended up being a bit cheaper, but obviously you need to be happy doing the job yourself.

Depending on what you're looking for there are some good Open Source applications available in this space.

I have used Ardour ( https://ardour.org/) quite a lot, although I do more live recording and mixing than MIDI arrangements (am guessing you want MIDI and soft synths mostly?).

Maybe worth a look!

This is one thing that I really regret not getting into when I was much younger. If there was some kind of music production school for adults in Sheffield I'd definitely pay to go.

Learning on your own is fine but it's like youtube roulette. It's much better having someone who knows what they're doing to demonstrate and answer questions.

ordered a launchkey min mk 3. so excited! just need to pick up an 1/8th and a few beers (joke) .let the creativity begin!

Thanks all, would love to hear some of peoples creations

Hmmm. This has maybe come at a good (or bad) time for me. I've got a guitar, an amp that plugs into a USB socket, an old laptop and I've so far managed to get 2 awful sounding parts of 16 bars each (a bass line and a rhythm track) into Audacity.
And a bit of spare time and a bit of spare cash are just around the corner...

have fun with the new kit!

these are some of the nicest (virtual) knobs to twiddle and have the advantage that its much harder to drop hotrocks onto them as well as staying in tune 🙂

V collection